Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

7:18 AM, Saturday January 16th 2021

Drawabox Lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/DVFd4vN.jpg

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Thank you, Uncomfortable and Drawabox.

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12:20 AM, Monday January 18th 2021

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes look pretty good. You were still getting a bit of wobble on your ghosted lines but I'm already seeing improvement with your ghosted planes. You are getting better at using the ghosting method to get consistently confident linework with a decent degree of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along well. Once again I'm noticing quite a bit of improvement as you worked through these pages. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting a smooth shape. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing these during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspectives turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be straight up and down. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. You're not quite nailing your rotations and you also sort of just gave up on the corners which is perfectly fine given the difficulty of this exercise. This is a great one to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are decent for the most part but there are some wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a pretty solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:18 AM, Tuesday January 19th 2021
edited at 10:32 AM, Jan 19th 2021

Hi, Rob. Thank you for your congratulations, your encouragement and corrections! I reviewed my work and noticed the problems I was having that you mentioned, but also noticed my own growth which I didn't really realize until you pointed that out also, so I'm very grateful to you. I'll definitely keep in mind which exercises you said to incorporate in warm-ups and come back to later and which concepts I need to review and be more conscious of. Also, I'm excited to take on the Challenge now! Please could I just ask, this is my official critique, right? Pardon, I'm still a bit confused about the process. I see you've completed the whole course, which is awe-inspiring to me and definitely my goal, and worked on many assessments, and you upped my status. I certainly value and appreciate your wisdom, so just so I check "Submit for Official Critique," my review will always come from a teacher, is that right? Thank you very much again, good Rob!

edited at 10:32 AM, Jan 19th 2021
5:40 PM, Tuesday January 19th 2021

Yep, this is your official critique. For the first first few lessons you will probably be getting a critique from one of the teaching assistants such as myself but after that they're usually done directly by Uncomfortable.

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Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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