Hello! I'm Jeanne and I'll be critiquing your lesson 1 homework. Good job on finishing lesson 1! This is a good start!
Lines
a. Fraying at the initial point is very very minimal (I barely can see it!). This means that you really did take time in positioning your pen correctly at the start point. (Fraying on the end point is normal since you're just starting to get used to drawing from the shoulder)
b. Wobbly lines and curvy (arched) lines are present. This is evident especially on the ghosted lines part. However, after the ghosted planes exercise, your lines improved - wobbly lines are fewer.
c.No repeated lines in the ghosted lines and planes exercise. Great job on this! For sure it is very tempting to repeat the line because it is off. But students should never repeat it and must keep the line as it if were correct and move on.
Why the Lines Came Wobbly and Arched, and How to Avoid Them
Wobbly lines are the result of being slow and hesistant in execution. To avoid this, we must always strive for confident and smooth lines over accurate ones.
First, don't worry about the lines overshooting and not hitting the end point. With enough practice, your accuracy will get better eventually.
Second, to avoid being slow and hesitant, we can increase the speed while executing lines. Experiment with the speed to find out the sweet spot for getting the lines confident. And then after knowing that you can now make most of your lines confident, you can experiment with the speed again to make sure lines don't overshoot.
For S curves: Since you're getting used to draw from shoulder, your elbow will sometimes interfere resulting in an s-curve line. Always remind yourself to draw from your shoulder.
For arched lines: Arching lines might happen if you are not using the shoulder pivot. However, if it still happens when you're using your shoulder, try to arch consciously to the opposite direction. This will straighten out the line.
Ellipses
a. A lot of ellipses are wobbly and uneven.
b. Several ellipses don't gently touch the box's lines and some ellipses overlap with other ellipses.
c. On the table of ellipses, angle and degree of ellipses in several rows are not consistent.
d. On funnels, some ellipses aren't cut in half by the minor axis(middle line). Ellipses that don't touch the curves of the funnel are very minimal. Some ellipses don't align to the central minor axis line.
I noticed that you tried to get the degree of your ellipses increase as it move outwards from the center. This is optional but I'm glad that you also tried this to some funnels!
How Can You Improve Your Ellipses?
a. As always, you must prioritize confidence over accuracy. It's worth revisiting this to refreshen your mind about drawing ellipses.
b. Continue in using ghosting method, drawing from your shoulder, and using your arm to get the best flow as possible. Always plan where an ellipse will go while ghosting. Also, feel free to rotate the page to find the comfortable position when drawing specific angles of an ellipse.
c. The thing that you need to avoid is drawing ellipses without concrete goal. It looks like some of the ellipses are just squeezed in each row just to fill up the spaces. Remember, for every ellipse we make, there must be a goal. Those ellipses must follow the trajectory/angle and degree of the ellipses of each row. Meaning that in each row, we must strive to make the ellipses have the same degree and angle(trajectory or tilt).
d. To make sure that the funnels are symmetrical, the number of ellipses on each side of the minor axis must be the same.
Just like on the table of ellipses, the ellipses here must also gently touch both curves of the funnel (See letter b here for tips).
For the funnels ellipses that aren't aligned: make sure that while ghosting the ellipses, the ellipse must align with the minor axis(middle short line).
Boxes
a. Issue with the lines are still present here(i.e., wobbly and arched)
b. For rough perspective, you struggled in keeping the height lines perpendicular and the width lines parallel to the horizon line. In 1 point-perspective, when you put down the dots, think of the front plane as a rectangle and its opposite plane as a smaller version of it. Also the lines don't look as confident in your boxes here.
c. there are many repeated lines in the rough perspective and organic perspective exercises. No matter how off a line is, we should never repeat it. Just think of it as a reminder on what to improve on next time in your drawing session. Embrace the mistakes!
d. great job on completing the rotated boxes. It's the most difficult part of the lesson 1 exercises. Your work here is very solid! Perspective is slightly off in the outer-most boxes of the rotated box. But don't worry about this, your spatial ability will improve after completing 250 box challenge.
e. for organic boxes, repeated lines are present and the perspective of boxes are off but again don't worry, you will eventually improve on this while doing the 250 box challenge.
SUMMARY:
Overall, this is a good submission. However, the only thing I need for you to revise is the rough perspective exercise. The reason is the repeated lines there are present in both pages. But worry not, I will not ask for a full page of rough perspective. I just need one frame of it. (Full page of rough perspective means that you have 3 frames in a paper)
I was also about to ask for a revision of organic perspective but decided not to since I observed that the repeated lines are very minimal on page 2 and on the last frames of page 1.
Lastly,
Make sure that you consider above mentioned points and must prioritize confident lines over accurate ones. Also, make sure to provide at least 5 min warmup during the beginning of your drawing sessions. Even if you don't feel like doing the warmups, convince yourself that you just only need 2 mins for warm up. Warm up is an essential requirement for artists at any skill level! Furthermore, even it's just a warm up, make sure that you still work on your errors.
Push yourself even if you don't feel like doing it (The initial steps are always the hardest part). Don't be afraid of making mistakes. Remember, you are still learning so you will not get it correctly for the first few times. Don't also be afraid of rewatching or rereading the lessons.And most importantly, DON'T RUSH AND DO NOT GRIND through this course.
I hope that my feedback is helpful. Thank you!
Next Steps:
Every now and then I'll get someone asking me about which ruler I use in my videos. It's this Wescott grid ruler that I picked up ages ago. While having a transparent grid is useful for figuring out spacing and perpendicularity, it ultimately not something that you can't achieve with any old ruler (or a piece of paper you've folded into a hard edge). Might require a little more attention, a little more focus, but you don't need a fancy tool for this.
But hey, if you want one, who am I to stop you?
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