Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
4:38 PM, Tuesday March 3rd 2026
My pen's ink was getting weaker around the Rough Perspective exercise, sorry if is rough to see the lines.
Lines: In the ghosted lines and ghosted planes exercises, your execution improves but there's still some wobbling and curving. The curving may be due to the pivot of the elbow, which means a) you have to make sure to draw from the shoulder and b) consciously curve in the other direction to compensate. Additionally, make sure you focus on making deliberate, confident marks over hitting the target, since jerking at the last second can also cause curving.
Ellipses: your ellipses in the table of ellipses are a little wobbly or "dented" I think if you make sure to ghost multiple times until you reach a certain level of confidence with the path of the line, that will make the ellipses more confident. Making sure to draw from the shoulder and not from the wrist or elbow, including for smaller ellipses, may also help. Other than that, you're going over each ellipse twice and aiming for a snug spacing, which is good.
Perspective: In the rough perspective exercise, make sure the back face is rectangular. Ghosting the verticals and horizontals to while figuring out the back face may help you align those points. Overall you seem to be understand the principles of perspective correctly. Nice job with consistent spacing on the rotated boxes exercise.
Overall, you improved a lot with mark making and you understand perspective well. I think it'd be good to revise the ghosted lines exercise to confirm that you understand the mark making principles (ghosting, drawing from the shoulder, confident lines). Also I think it'd be good to revise the table of ellipses. Make sure to ghost and use your shoulder even on the smaller ellipses.
Next Steps:
Revise the ghosted lines exercise, and one page of table of ellipses
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.
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