Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

6:06 PM, Friday November 27th 2020

DrawABox Lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/ZSgpSZ9.jpg

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

I am a absolute beginner to drawing. I aim to do digital art, and I want to be able to draw without making broken lines.

I did these digitally without undoing/erase and had the smoothing off in Photoshop, drawing from my shoulder on a screen tablet.

I'm not sure if you're supposed to lock your elbow when moving the should but I found that and exhaling (since I was pretty anxious) worked best for me. I drew these at 50% zoom.

I feel like for the superimposed lines I would slow down at turns, is this normal and ok?

I noticed I overshoot points a bit with ghosted lines and sometimes catch against the surface like as if it skids, but I found it was easier when looking at the point I was drawing to. Is it okay to rotate the canvas? I didn't in this case but found it easier at certain angles.

When I did the ghosted planes, the X seemed as simple as the ghosted lines but the cross between them seemed harder to understand for me. Any idea how to best think of this?

I think the hardest for me was the ellipses on planes, since I felt like the ghosting and actual line ended up different but had a few successful attempts without going around multiple times. I felt like I didn't want to ruin the plane I did (since I refused to use undo) so I lifted too fast sometimes I think.

Of what I did, I quite like my rotated boxes despite getting lost in the lines, and liked the effect of the organic perspective. I did draw the tiniest boxes with my wrist in the second page, I felt like this yielded better results, hope that it is ok to do the tiny things with wrist or elbow.

Any other critique for anything I'm missing would be nice too. It was a unique experience, thanks!

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Cottonwood Arts Sketchbooks

Cottonwood Arts Sketchbooks

These are my favourite sketchbooks, hands down. Move aside Moleskine, you overpriced gimmick. These sketchbooks are made by entertainment industry professionals down in Los Angeles, with concept artists in mind. They have a wide variety of sketchbooks, such as toned sketchbooks that let you work both towards light and towards dark values, as well as books where every second sheet is a semitransparent vellum.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.