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11:29 PM, Wednesday August 14th 2024
Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. Let’s take this one exercise at a time shall we?
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are well done. It’s a little strange because I consider them to be better in page 1, but I suppose you probably just got tired of them by page 2. Generally, if that happens, the recommendation is simply to step away for a while, and come back when you’re feeling better. You don’t do yourself any favors by phoning work in. But anyway, in page 1 they’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Good variety of lengths, too. Your ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, too, and I’m pleased to see that you’ve not forgotten to plot start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of your planes. You’ve also missed these points fairly boldly, in pursuit of a confident, rather than accurate line, which is exactly what we want to see!
The table of ellipses exercise looks fantastic! Your ellipses are smooth, and nicely rounded. You’ve got a good variety of degrees/angles, too. They’re not always drawn through the whole way though, so be mindful of that. We’re aiming for a minimum of 2 rotations (that’s a full 2, not 1 and change), and no more than 3. Save for that, the ellipses in planes look great – they do a good job maintaining their prior smoothness/roundness, despite these more complicated frames. The funnels look great, also. Your ellipses here are not only confident, but also snug, and properly cut in equal, symmetrical halves by their axes. I do wonder if you’re not drawing your ellipses a little bit too fast, however. Experiment with some different speeds, and see if a slower one doesn’t lead to ellipses that are just as confident, but more accurate. You may be holding yourself back, still!
The plotted perspective exercise is well done, and I appreciate your application of lineweight here. Perfectly subtle, but effective! Regarding the back lines, that are not perpendicular to the horizon, the issue with them comes from an accumulation of small errors elsewhere in the box, so don’t stress about it for now. The rough perspective exercise shows some great improvement throughout the set. You may want to spend an extra second or two on your planning (I don’t see too many unused points on your page, so it’s clear that you’re sticking to a lot of your first guesses), but even like this, the outcome is solid. Great work on the rotated boxes exercise. It’s missing 4 boxes (the diagonal ones), but what’s here is big, snug, and properly rotating, both up front and in the back. You do start to run into some issues in the back (and you’ve forgotten to draw around 2 boxes), but this is more than expected, and something that we’ll address in the box challenge, anyway. Speaking of boxes, great work on your organic perspective exercise. Your boxes are well constructed, and flow well as a result of their consistent foreshortening, but the increase in size could have been a tiny bit more obvious. It’s normal to not have a full grasp of it now though, so hold out until… well, until right now!
Next Steps:
(Because I’m sending you to the box challenge next. Congrats, and good luck!)
Color and Light by James Gurney
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.