Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

7:39 PM, Tuesday November 29th 2022

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Hi! This is my work for lesson 1. I completed this earlier this year and submitted for community feedback which recommended me to move on to the 250 box challenge. I decided to go for official critique and so I'm resubmitting the same work as in the community critique.

As mentioned I'm currently doing the 250 box challenge (110 boxes complete, had a ~3 month long break). In addition to feedback on lesson 1 I'm interested in knowing how I should proceed with the 250 box challenge.

Many thanks for your time.

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10:57 PM, Tuesday November 29th 2022

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise was obviously a bit of a struggle. One thing that would have helped you here would have been to just draw this a bit bigger. Drawing bigger really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You did a good job drawing through your boxes but one of the reasons this exercise started to fall apart on you is because you didn't keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/guessing Keeping the gaps narrow and consistent really helps with inferring information about neighboring boxes rotation and proportion. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases(definitely happening on the top and bottom) but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/notrotating You are clearly struggling a bit with the rotations for this exercise which is perfectly fine given the difficulty. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are quite wonky throughout and you need to develop a better sense for how box lines converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work! My recommendation would be to just continue the 250 box challenge where you left off. No need to redraw the 110 boxes you've already done.

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:46 AM, Thursday December 1st 2022

Thank you Rob!

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No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.

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