9:30 AM, Saturday July 10th 2021
Hi hi! Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing lesson 1. I’ll be taking a look at it for you.
Your superimposed lines look very good. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, also. Occasionally, you’ll change their trajectory at the very end, when you notice that you’re about to miss the end point (something we discourage), but it’s only occasionally, so that’s okay.
The table of ellipses exercise looks mostly good. Your ellipses have a habit of starting off a little stiff, before stabilizing in their next rotation; we’d rather them be confident from the start. To that end, ghost until you’re ready, then commit. Speaking of rotations, you’re aiming for a minimum of 2 (i.e., not 1 and change). The ellipses in planes suffer from similar issues, but they look good. Hopefully you’ve grown somewhat comfortable with them from these 2 pages, and can now aim for all of them to touch all sides of the plane, rather than run on the diagonal. The ellipses in funnels are at times a little pointy. More often than not, this is an indication of a lesser pivot (elbow/wrist) coming into play, to better handle those sharp turns, so always check back to make sure that your marks are originating from your shoulder.
The plotted perspective exercise looks clean.
The rough perspective exercise shows some nice improvement throughout the set, far as its convergences are concerned; I liked seeing so many unused points on the page – they’re evidence of proper planning. Line quality is a bit of an issue, though. You’re correct that the planning is 90% of the exercise, but that’s not an excuse to rush the linework. There’s no reason for these lines to be lesser than earlier ones. On that same note, automatic reinforcing (drawing a line a second time, if the first one is wrong) is a no-no.
Solid attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. It’s a little small (drawing big is something we heavily encourage, as it gives your brain a lot of room to think), the boxes don’t quite rotate, and they’re not particularly snug on that last layer, but all of this, and the fact that their far planes are a little flat, and their depth lines diverging is entirely expected. What’s important is to give this your best shot, so that you may become aware of your mistakes, and then, in the box challenge, we’ll start to tackle them one by one. The only thing I’d recommend you fix now is the lineweight; a single superimposed line is usually enough to communicate what you want to communicate, so don’t be so overt, if you can help it.
For the organic perspective exercise, it seems like you’ve not plotted start/end points for all of your lines. It’s important to. Outside of that, the sheer number of boxes, their overlaps, their size, and foreshortening do a good job of communicating the illusion we’re after, so nice job on that respect.
Next Steps:
I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Onto the box challenge.