Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

9:40 AM, Wednesday September 1st 2021

Homework - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/iuaWDy9.jpg

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Over the last 4 years I've been trying to learn to draw manga. The problem I realized once I found this website was that I started building the house from the roof. I was all alone and even though I had the internet to find information to help me learn some fundamentals and random other art skills, I always found myself ending up canceling projects because I am not happy with my work. Everyone has a goal they want to achieve and with me IN ART I want to achieve a certain skill level. I am hopeful that the fundamentals are a huge problem in what I lack to achieve my goal and so I am now tackling it with everything I've got. Thank you for this opportunity!

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3:18 PM, Thursday September 2nd 2021

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 pages are a bit puzzling to me. You seem like you did the exercise correctly for a few lines but then just filled the rest of your page with lines that you didn't superimpose. Your pages should look like the example page here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/example I'd actually recommend reading this section again and then I'd like you to redo these two pages and this time make sure you actually superimpose all of the lines you put down. 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 slight issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/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 when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises are basically unfinished and will need to be redone. The biggest issue here is that you didn't draw through your boxes. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/step5 Since you didn't draw through all of your boxes you also didn't extend all of your depth lines back on your boxes to check your work. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/step6 Please make sure you check the homework assignments a bit more carefully as you will be assigned revisions in future lessons for not doing so. So I'd like you to look over the rough perspective lesson again and give these exercises another shot.

Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. While you didn't nail all of the rotations perfectly this was a good effort overall. 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 a mixed bag of decent constructions and some wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a pretty good submission. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along very well. I think you simply misunderstood the directions for the Superimposed Lines exercise as well as the Rough Perspective Boxes Exercise so I'd like you to review the lessons materials for both of these again and give these exercises another shot. Otherwise I think you are understanding most of the materials quite well. Once you get those revisions submitted I'll take a look and you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

Two Pages Superimposed Lines Exercise - Reread this material and try this exercise again.

Two Pages Rough Perspective Exercise - Reread this material and try this exercise again. Make sure you draw through all of your boxes and extend all of your depth lines back to check your work.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
7:53 PM, Tuesday November 2nd 2021

Sorry for the long wait but I am back and corrected the mistakes i made last time. Please review and let me know what you think I should keep improving on. Also I've noted about the funnels and will keep that in mind. Thank you!

https://imgur.com/a/ijhSy9m

9:56 PM, Tuesday November 2nd 2021

Okay, These are both looking a lot better. Your rough perspective exercises turned out well. 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.

These were both huge improvements and I think you are understanding most of the concepts in lesson one quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and you can move on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:07 PM, Tuesday November 2nd 2021

Thank you i'll get on it right away!

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