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12:37 AM, Saturday May 16th 2020

Starting off with your super imposed lines, you're doing a pretty decent job of sticking to a consistent trajectory and not getting too caught up in accuracy (which can result in wobbles as you draw the marks across the page). You are however showing a bit of this issue, which arises from not taking the time to line up the pen correctly at the starting point before drawing the mark. Make sure you approach your mark making with a little more forethought before pushing through with a confident stroke.

Moving onto your ghosted lines, these are pretty well done, but as you get into the planes I think you start running into the issue describe here. Basically, some students will put a certain amount of effort into drawing a single line - but when they have to draw something consisting of several lines, they'll put less time and focus into each individual stroke. This obviously doesn't make any sense - a line is a line no matter what, and it should always be given the amount of attention it requires in order to be drawn to the best of your ability. Still, psychologically we can forget this obvious fact, and get a little too caught up in trying to get things done quickly, or in a way that feels more organic and instinctual.

Of course, what we're doing here throughout the entirety of this course is training our instincts so when we draw outside of the scope of these lessons, we can rely more on our instincts and actually have things turn out well. If you try and use your instincts whilst developing your instincts, you're going to just end up with a mess.

Long story short, take more time with every mark you put down, and don't fool yourself into thinking that you don't need to.

Moving onto your ellipses, you're drawing these confidently but you're definitely not employing the ghosting method to these in a consistent manner. Studying your lines suggests that you're drawing the ellipses somewhat rapid-fire one after the other, instead of working through them one at a time, planning and preparing before each one. If you're unsure of how this should be approached, you can check out ScyllaStew's video recording of this exercise. She's got videos for everything up to halfway through Lesson 2, so it can help to determine when you might be rushing or expecting yourself to move through things way faster than you actually should.

This basically holds true through the whole ellipses section - you're moving through more quickly than you should, and aren't committing enough time to each individual ellipse to execute them to the best of your current ability. Ultimately all that is required of students is that they show us their current best. That doesn't mean perfect work, or even good work - but by showing us what you can do when investing as much time as you require, we can assess what you truly do and don't understand.

Moving down to your rough perspective boxes, aside from the linework again being somewhat more rushed, these are fairly well done. If you struggle with undershooting or overshooting your lines, one thing that can help is to get used to lifting your pen when you hit the end point, instead of trying to slow to a stop. Lifting your pen is a much more reliable action that can be performed more quickly.

As far as this exercise goes, you've done a good job of keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon line and your verticals perpendicular to it (for the most part), which suggests that you're thinking about the specific behaviour of each mark before you draw it.

You are however doing the line extensions incorrectly. As explained here, in bold, we aren't plotting the lines back to the vanishing point. We are extending the lines to see where they'd intersect with the horizon line. This shows us how far off we were from the vanishing point, and allows us to see a more concrete representation of our mistake. We can use this information to determine how we need to adjust our approach during our next attempt.

Your rotated boxes are, again, kind of sloppy. The linework is definitely rushed, and you're not drawing through all of your boxes. You are however keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, and you're covering the full range of rotation on each major axis. Aside from also missing the boxes in all four furthest corners, had you put more time into this, you actually would have done an excellent job.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a good start. The lines vary from reasonably well drawn to a little sloppy here and there, but all in all you're doing a good job of tackling this introduction to the challenge of rotating boxes freely in 3D space. There is room for growth in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but this is entirely expected. It's essentially what we focus on in the next step.

Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I am going to be assigning a number of additional pages for you to demonstrate that you can in fact take your time with each and every one of your marks.

Next Steps:

I'd like you to submit the following:

  • 1 page of the tables of ellipses exercise

  • 1 page of ghosted planes + ellipses in planes

  • 1 page of rough perspective boxes

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
7:58 PM, Saturday May 23rd 2020

Alright I have those additional assignments done. You're right, I was going way too fast through some of those. I'm hoping that these show improvement as I genuinely used the ghosting method with every mark. I've noticed with the rough perspective boxes that I really need to work on hitting my target without deviating. Beyond that, I'm working on the 250 box assignment right now, struggling; as the perspective and trying to get each line to reflect accurately melts my brain but I'm hoping to get better as I progress.

https://imgur.com/a/dF8Uajn

8:17 PM, Saturday May 23rd 2020

Your rough perspective boxes are looking much better. You're showing a considerably stronger use of the ghosting method, and your lines are a lot straighter for it.

Your ellipses are a little better, but I'm still seeing a lot of impatience there. As you can see here, I've pointed out a lot of gaps in your work (and there are many others as well). Each ellipse you draw is going to have a specific space allotted to it (usually some kind of boundary on 3 of the 4 possible sides). While not quite fitting your ellipses within those spaces is totally normal, yours suggest that you're less aware of this as a particular goal for this exercise. I explain this a little further in these notes.

I'd like you to try one more page of the tables of ellipses exercise. Take your time with each individual ellipse, identifying exactly the nature of the ellipse you need to draw as your first step, then ghosting through it and executing the mark.

Next Steps:

I'd like one more page of the tables of ellipses exercise.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
12:58 AM, Thursday May 28th 2020

I hope these look better. I apologize for my quick and sloppy tendencies. After going back and re-reading that page, it reminded me that the overarching goal of the exercise is to envelope a selected space with the elipse. My first page on this had some more unfavorable outcomes than I would feel comfortable submitting, so I utilized that as a warm-up page and worked on a second one afterward. If you still see these as anything than successful, please let me know and I will do it again. I just thank you for looking at them and providing valuable feedback, though I do not wish to take up too much of your time.

https://imgur.com/a/UI8vgkZ

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