Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

3:46 AM, Wednesday May 13th 2020

Drawabox - Lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

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I did my best to follow the instructions. Please let me know if there's anything that's critically off.

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8:50 PM, Saturday May 16th 2020

You did your best to follow the instructions, and I cannot stress this enough: that's all that it comes down to. You've done an excellent job, and the fact that you poured so much effort into following the instructions exactly as they're written really, really shows.

You start out with some really solid work with the lines section - your super imposed lines exhibit a clear focus on maintaining smooth, consistent strokes that maintain the same trajectory throughout. You then go on to reinforce this with the additional planning and preparation phases from the ghosting method to achieve greater control. I'm actually very impressed with your ghosted planes, as you're able to avoid overshooting and undershooting really effectively.

Moving onto your ellipses, while these are sometimes a touch stiff (due to you focusing a lot on keeping them as accurate as possible), you're still executing them with a fair bit of confidence. Just don't forget that just like with our lines, flow and smoothness is our first priority, as it ensures that the ellipses remain evenly shaped. To this point, we're still employing the ghosting method, so as to separate the process of planning, preparing, and executing - so we can emphasize accuracy on the first two phases, and then execute confidently, with no hesitation every time. Sometimes this will throw off our accuracy, but a perfectly smooth, even shape is more important than having it fall in precisely the right place.

To that point, your ellipses in planes did have a tendency to warp themselves a little in order to fit more snugly in their awkward containers. Make sure you're always drawing them with full confidence first and foremost.

Skipping down to your rough perspective boxes, I do feel like these lines waver ever so slightly compared to the lines of your ghosted planes, but they're still very well done. Your horizontals are parallel to the horizon line, your verticals are perpendicular to it, and while the extension lines do identify some places where your estimation of perspective drifts, you've still done an excellent job. Just make sure that however you're approaching drawing your lines in the ghosted planes exercise is how you approach them everywhere, regardless of how complex the context may be. You can read more about this here.

You've done a great job of keeping the boxes in your rotated boxes tightly packed together, with nice narrow, consistent gaps so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork. When it comes to the actual rotation from box to box however, you ended up running into this issue where your boxes share vanishing points instead of having their vanishing points move in order to actually demonstrate rotation. It's a very common mistake, so be sure to keep in mind.

Lastly, you've got an excellent start with your organic perspective. This exercise is intended to serve as an introduction to a concept students aren't expected to have any real experience with - rotating boxes freely in 3D space. To that point, there is certainly room for improvement in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but this is totally expected and will be the focus of our next steps. As far as your linework is concerned however, everything's looking fantastic.

So! All in all, you've done a great job and really knocked it out of the park. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the great work.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:42 PM, Saturday May 16th 2020

Great, thanks for your critique Uncomfortable. I will keep what you mentioned in mind. :)

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