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10:38 AM, Wednesday April 17th 2024
Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. I’m TA Benj, and I’ll be taking a look at it for you. Right off the bat, there’s quite a few pages missing here, so I’ll judge the ones that you have here as-is, and then request that you upload the rest, before I send you off to the box challenge. In the future, please confirm that everything is where it should be – we have a checklist for a reason, after all.
Starting from your superimposed lines, these are looking solid. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your ghosted lines look confident, too, as do your planes, but be careful that you’re not so conscious of your end points that your line ends up wobbling as it approaches it, or, worse, stops short of it, and then limps to the finish line. We want to become comfortable with our mistakes!
The table of ellipses exercise looks good. Your ellipses here are smooth, rounded, and showing a good variety of degrees/angles; however, they’re a little inconsistent in their rotations. Remember that you’re meant to be rotating around them 2-3 times, always, and ideally, this number should be decided on before-hand, rather than being a knee-jerk reaction to how the ellipse is turning out. Again, mistakes are perfectly fine! The ellipses in planes look fantastic. This is especially impressive considering how ambitious your planes are! The funnels, too, are well done (save for the rotations), but I suspect you’ve drawn these a little faster than you might need to, so be careful that you’re not confusing speed with confidence, right now. You don’t want to draw arbitrarily ‘fast’, you want to draw at a speed that is ideal for you. So, consider spending some time figuring out exactly how fast that is.
The plotted perspective exercise looks clean. The rough perspective exercise looks mostly good. Your convergences are strong, with minimal error, and your linework is confident. However, I notice a few instances where you’ll redraw a line that has come out wrong, so be mindful of that. Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks great. Your boxes here are well constructed, and they flow well as a result of their increase in size, and consistent, shallow foreshortening. Good work, all around!
Next Steps:
So, before I move you on, I’d like to see 1 page of superimposed lines, 1 page of rough perspective, and 1 rotated box.
3:10 PM, Sunday April 21st 2024
Hi Benj
Sincere apologies for not uploading the missing pages!
Please see the updated album with the missing exercises:
Thanks very much for your helpful critique.
Patrick
10:00 AM, Monday April 22nd 2024
No stress! The missing paged whose siblings I'd seen look good (though please try not to doodle in the pages (or whatever is happening in your superimposed lines page, I'm not sure :P)). As for the rotated boxes exercise, it's looking solid. You might think that you've messed up, what with the box not being fully round, but we're happy to see the student try different things with each quadrant - it shows that they're willing to be bold, and experiment, rather than stick to the safety of what they know. It is a bit of a shame that those quadrants are such that you're missing some boxes, but given how much space the ones there have taken, that's understandable. The rest of your boxes are snug, and rotate comfortably, so it seems you've absorbed what you need to from this exercise, anyway.
Next Steps:
Onto the box challenge, then! And good luck!
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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.