Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
9:55 PM, Tuesday May 4th 2021
This is really challenging but I'm definitely learning a lot. Thanks for creating this course.
Hello; welcome to drawabox! I’m Benj, one of the TAs here, and I’ll be taking a look at this submission. Let’s take it one exercise at a time.
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking great. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. One (minor) thing I notice is that they’ll sometimes hook a little at the end. This indicates to me that you’re pulling your pen back to the starting point before it’s fully off the page, so try to be a little more conscious of what you’re doing and when from now on, if you can. Your ghosted lines look fantastic; they’re confident all the way through. They are a little similar in length, however, so some more variety might be better next time. Similar to the instructions in the previous exercise, start small, then build up to half a page width/a full page width. The ghosted planes look equally good, though, skipping ahead to some of the later exercises, I notice that the overshooting issue present here doesn’t improve by much. This is fine for now, but see if you can get that under control by the end of the box challenge.
Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise looks really good. Your ellipses are smooth, and rounded, though not always drawn through the correct number of times. Recall that we recommend going around them a minimum of 2 times, and no more than 3. Recall, also, that ellipses inside of a frame share a degree/angle, and need to strive to touch all sides of it. This last part is particularly important, as it’s one of the more important goals of our ellipses. To give an example of this not being followed here, take a look at your page 2, row 3, column 2, top-left half. Your ellipses in planes look fantastic. They maintain their prior smoothness and roundness, and do a great job of fitting within these new, more complicated frames. Their rotations don’t do as good a job of matching up, here, but this is entirely expected, and something that improves over time. The funnels look mostly good. They’re confident and circular, as I’ve come to expect from you by now, but they’re all a tiny bit misaligned. Be sure to ghost them until comfortable, not forgetting to rotate your paper as you do so. I find that rotating it such that the angle of my forearm is parallel to the minor axis is best, but you do you.
Concluding with the box section, the plotted perspective exercise looks solid.
The rough perspective exercise has a number of issues; let’s go over them one at a time. Starting with the linework, this is confident throughout, though, as mentioned, there’s a little bit of overshooting. The real issue here are the convergences – these show very little improvement throughout the set, suggesting to me that your brain is still fighting against the constraints of this exercise. It’s important to realize that because we’re working in 1-point perspective, the boxes here should look a little off to us. So, rather than drawing from memory – trying to construct a box that has 3 sets of 4 parallel lines – it becomes important to rely on our points, which we’ve checked and re-checked before committing to them. I’ll also give you a bonus tip. One good way to check the accuracy of your marks before committing to them, is to look at the shapes of your planes. Because of the rules of 1-point perspective, the far plane of your box (the back face) is identical in shape to the near one (the front one); just smaller. If your points suggest otherwise, then they’re incorrect, so see about reconsidering them. One example of this: page 2, frame 2, top-right-most box.
The rotated boxes exercise is mostly good. Your boxes do a good job of rotating, but you haven’t been quite as careful about them being snug, and their neighboring edges being aligned to each other; especially in the back. This is expected, however, as this is an overwhelming exercise. Next time, however, remind yourself that all it is is a bunch of lines, and take it a little slower. Speaking of their back sides, they’re a little flat as compared to their front – all the more reason to take things slow, and carefully consider how each line should be behaving. Be careful, also, of the automatic reinforcing habit you seem to give in to here. Remember that each line is drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. Adding more ink to a mistake doesn’t fix it; it just draws the viewer’s attention to it.
Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks great, save for one tiny thing: it doesn’t seem like you’re plotting start/end points for your lines here. Please do. Other than that, the (somewhat inconsistent, but mostly correct) increase in size of your boxes, and their shallow, consistent foreshortening, do a good job of communicating their flow.
Next Steps:
Solid work on this submission. I’m marking it as complete, so head on over to the box challenge. GL!
Thanks, Benj! This is all extremely helpful and motovating. You explained really well, so I feel confident moving forward and working on thise areas that need improvement.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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