Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

5:56 PM, Friday July 17th 2020

Drawabox lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

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Hi, thanks in advance for the critique. I've been trying to learn to draw better for a couple of years and keep having issues with 3D drawing specifically, so this resource is awesome. I think I've already seen a difference in my sketchbook, even if it's just because I'm drawing more consistently, so thanks!

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4:20 PM, Saturday July 18th 2020

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. Starting with your superimposed lines these are looking great. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point on these and on getting more significant tapering on really longer lines and curves which is normal. Even with this one page I can already see your previous drawing experience coming into play here. Good job. Moving onto your ghosted lines and planes these are great. You are doing a great job with the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder. Your line work is smooth and highly accurate for the most part. I am noticing a little bit of wobble and arcing and that might be because you are going back to drawing from your wrist instead of your shoulder which is something you will want to keep an eye on.

Your table of ellipse exercise is off to a great start. You are doing a great job drawing through all of your ellipses while maintaining a solid ellipse shape. Your accuracy on these is quite good as well. Looking at your ellipses in planes there are a some slight issues with deforming ellipses that you might want to be careful of. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed This is a bit of a nitpick because you are focusing on maintaing a smooth ellipse shape for the most part but this is just another thing to think about. The ellipses in funnels exercise looks great outside of that same small issue that you are having with your ellipses in planes where there are times when you might be a little too focused on accuracy and hit's hurting the overall smooth shape you are going for. These ellipses are looking quite promising in general though so keep up the good work on these.

Plotted perspective looks fine nothing to say here. Your rough perspective boxes look very nice. Your linework is mostly smooth and confident. I am noticing a few spots where you are redrawing lines and this is something you want to avoid for these lessons. You are better off sticking one slightly misdrawn line rather than adding another line to the image which just tends to make things look more cluttered and confusing. Learning to work with the mistakes you make is one of the big parts of learning how to draw in general. You did a great job extending your lines back to check your work here as well. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but this will get better with practice.

Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. You did a great job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. Your linework here is also looking very nice. You are running into a common mistake though and that is that you aren't actually rotating your boxes but simply moving them back in perspective. Please check the lesson notes here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating Like I said this is a pretty common issue and you might want to revisit this exercise after you have finished the box challenge to see how much better your spatial thinking has gotten. Great job with the organic box exercises. Your linework is largely very good on these although there are a few redrawn lines here and there. You are still having some issues with box convergences which is pretty normal at this stage and something you will get a lot of practice on during the 250 box challenge.

Overall this was an excellent submission. You did a great job following all of the instructions and understanding most of what the lessons were trying to teach. I'm seeing plenty of growth throughout these pages particularly with your linework. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the great work!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:19 PM, Tuesday July 21st 2020

Thank you so much Rob! That is all really helpful. I will try to work on ellipses during warm ups more, and go back to the rotated box exercise after the 250 box challenge. I will admit that I don't know how I would fix it at this point, but yeah, hopefully that will come. Thanks for calling out the redrawing too, that is a deeply ingrained habit, but it's good to hear that correction. Thanks for the encouragement!

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Ellipse Master Template

Ellipse Master Template

This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.

I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.

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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