Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
7:49 PM, Friday January 10th 2025
I hope the image quality is good enough. I am not quite sure what was asked of me for the rotated boxes and organic perspective excercise, but I tried my best regardless.
Hey there Attila, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!
Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. Great job including a varied array of line lengths and curves.
Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Accuracy is just a matter of mileage, so as you continue with this exercise in your warmups you'll find you can hit the mark more precisely, and more often, over time. Confidence will be your main focus whenever executing freehand lines, so don't worry as much about a mark being inaccurate as long as you put effort into making a bold mark. That said, you've reached a considerable degree of accuracy with these already.
Good job on your ghosted planes and ellipses in planes, it's clear that each stroke has been executed with confidence and care, and the ellipses have been drawn through and fit within the bounds of the plane.
Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. It does look like you're having some issues either with your pen not fully connecting to the page when you set out to make your stroke or with the pen touching while ghosting, so in the future I'd either allow the side of your hand to rest lightly on the page while drawing (if you're having the first issue) or raise your arm slightly while ghosting (if it's the second) to keep your ellipses tidy.
Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. For an extra challenge, in future iterations of this exercise you might try varying the degree of your ellipses to create the illusion of expansion as you move out from the center (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3).
Your plotted perspective exercise is also satisfactory. Each box traces back to its appropriate vanishing points, and the vertical edges are parallel and drawn to the appropriate corners.
Your rough perspective exercise is very clean, each front and rear plane is believably parallel in space and a good attempt was made to extend each back toward the vanishing point. I do see several redrawn lines, so keep in mind that we have a "one line, one attempt" rule in Drawabox: "Your job is to make a single smooth stroke. The second your pen touches the page, you need to accept that any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed, and all you can do is commit to the motion and push through." This rule forces us to be as deliberate as possible when working on these assignments, allows us to clearly evaluate our guesses when it comes time to check our work, and keeps the forms clean.
Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes; however, your exercise is missing the four corner boxes. These tricky boxes can be easy to miss, but worth adding in to complete the form and achieve that truly rounded shape. The purpose of this exercise is to get you thinking about how boxes change as they rotate, and how to align forms closely together while changing them bit by bit. This exercise is more of a brain teaser than anything.
For your organic perspective exercise, I see a great variety in Y shapes and sizes; this method of freeform drawing will serve you well in the box challenge. I also see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick. This exercise is all about learning how to employ the Y method to draw boxes in different shapes and orientations -- which you did quite well.
In all: great work! I'm very pleased to mark your Lesson 1 as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Congratulations!
Next Steps:
Proceed to the 250 Box Challenge.
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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