Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

3:05 PM, Tuesday October 13th 2020

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I really messed up "Rotated Boxes" so i drew it again (i know a did it the wrong way) I just wanted to know i would be able to do it.

Can i move on to lesson 2?

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8:54 PM, Saturday October 17th 2020

Hi Karling, I hope you enjoy your learning here. If you ever need a more immediate help or critique, you can always ask on discord, people tend to reply fast there.

Lines: The fraying on the longer lines is much more apparent than on the shorter ones. Overall, still good. The ghosted lines look clean and straight, one or two have a bit of a curve. They undershoot more often than overshoot, though, which can be problematic. As the exercise describes, it's better to go off forward than not closing the points.

This also shows on your ghosted planes. While the lines are overall good, it's easy to notice where you undershot, where the plane isn't properly closed.

Ellipses: On the tables, they look good overall, with a few frames where you didn't make good use of the available space. A few fail to touch both upper and lower boundaries, but they're not many. One thing to keep in mind when doing the second pass, aim for closing the opening point, so it really becomes a closed ellipse.

On the funnels, they look good, properly enclosed within both arcs and having the middle line properly going through their centers.

Within the ghosted planes, the ellipses are well contained in the majority of cases, touching all four edges or coming very close to it. Since they are larger here, it also shows that the second and third passes weren't as good. The ones on page 5 look better than on page 4, even bits of practice leads to better results.

Perspective: The plotted perspective looks good. On the rough perspective, some of your boxes' edges are slanted, inclined, which makes it look like you didn't have as much care with them as you did with the ghosted planes. The convergences don't always get close, but you understood the principle, which is the most important aspect here.

The first noticeable problem with your rotated boxes is that you drew over some lines and they end up looking scratched. That makes it hard, if not impossible, to tell how good your initial line was. In that regard, the first attempt was better than the second. As for the rotation itself, it looks more like a diamond than a sphere. Angles here are everything. For instance, you drew a rectangle instead of a trapeze for the box to the right of the center one. The two boxes above this one, the vertical edges look almost identical. On the left boxes, these vertical edges are more properly aligned to their implied rotation, but the horizontal ones are not.

  • Keep in mind, a lot of the stuff we're asked to do on DaB is beyond our skill on purpose. I think this is important to keep in mind, we're not expected to nail exercises, we're supposed to understand principles and take the first step into ingraining them in our minds.

On the organic perspective, it's visible in the two last frames of the first page that you shrank a box in the middle too much and had to grow the next one. There are some boxes that have an extra line and red marks over, what happened there? If I had to guess, you drew the black line there and later realized it wouldn't make a good box, was that it? Another thing that stands out here is that many boxes' edges have a second or even third line drawn over. If the pen was failing, it would be better to just get one that wasn't. If it was the case of "this line came out wrong", you're not supposed to fix it in these exercises.

My main recommendation, above all, is for you to stop drawing over "bad" lines to "fix" them.

Next Steps:

No lesson 2 yet, you can move on to 250 box challenge.

I also highly recommend you keep doing half a page of ghosted planes + ellipses as warmup everyday for at least 2 weeks, that should help you a lot with getting the lines on a single pass.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
2:03 PM, Thursday October 22nd 2020

Thank you so much, this really helped.

Almost forgot about the 250 box challenge, definitely will be doing that first.

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