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7:01 PM, Saturday October 1st 2022
Hello, and welcome to drawabox. I’ll be taking a look at your Lesson 1 submission today.
Starting with your superimposed lines, these look quite good. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The ghosted lines/planes look quite solid, too, and I’m pleased to see how boldly you’re missing some of your end points. That said, make sure that said end points are, you know, points, not short lines.
Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise is nicely done. Your ellipses are smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through; there’s a great deal of variety to their degrees/angles, too, which is great to see. The ellipses in planes, too, do a great job of maintaining their prior smoothness/roundness, despite their more complicated frames. As for the funnels, their confidence dips a little, but I’ll attribute this to the size of your ellipses, exclusively. As you know, the smaller a mark, the harder it is to engage one’s shoulder for it; as such, we always encourage our students to draw big.
The plotted perspective exercise looks clean.
The rough perspective exercise starts off strong, and shows some nice improvement throughout the set. I’m especially pleased to see how effortlessly you’re plotting your convergences in your second page, as compared to your first.
The rotated boxes exercise looks great! It’s big (huge positive, as mentioned earlier!), and its boxes are snug, and though their rotation is a little slight, the attempt is there, which is all that matters. We’ll get a little bit more into how to fight against our brain (and its resistance to rotation) in the box challenge, so hold out until then, to see some further improvement here.
Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks fantastic. You’ve got some interesting compositions, here, and your boxes, too, are very well constructed. That, in addition to their size, and foreshortening, make it so that they flow quite well.
Next Steps:
You’ll forgive the bare-bones critique, but given the high quality of this submission, there wasn’t a lot for me to say… So, I’ll simply mark this lesson as complete, and move you on to the box challenge. Good luck!
Sakura Pigma Microns
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.