Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

8:37 AM, Monday March 30th 2020

Lesson 1 - Google Drive

Lesson 1 - Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1VnhlV7bgPVTjiuBZQuVHLhs1a_qqcTle

Hopefully the Google Drive link works. There are separate PDF files for each part of lesson 1. If you have any problems viewing the files or just have questions please contact me.

Thank you for you feedback.

Jakob

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10:09 AM, Wednesday April 1st 2020

Starting with your superimposed lines, you've clearly taken the time to line your pen up with the starting point, which has limited fraying to one end of the line. I did notice in some places you have a tendency to bring your lines back to the guideline rather than accepting their original trajectory - we want a nice confident line regardless of whether it's going to land where it's intended.

Next your ghosted lines and planes are looking confident for the most part. I'm seeing a few signs of arcing which you can try counteracting by consciously arcing slightly in the opposite direction to that which your arm naturally does. There are a few instances in your ghosted planes as well where you've slowed down as you've approached your end point, resulting in little wobbles in your lines. This is indicative of a focus on accuracy, which is not a priority at this stage, as this will come with time and practice.

Onto your tables of ellipses and it's good to see you've packed as many in there as you can. You've done a good job getting the edges of them to touch. These look fairly confident at first glance but there are signs of wobbly present once I zoomed in. Make sure you're ghosting these and executing them confidently - it can feel a bit odd to draw ellipses at first, but it will feel more natural with practice and not allowing yourself to stiffen up. There is one thing I will bring up here and that's that it appears you've used the black and white setting on your scanner, which seems like the logical choice, but it actually does some odd things to the quality of your lines and makes it slightly harder to critique as it's less obvious where you're making mistakes. You're better off using the colour or photo option on your scanner.

Next up are your ellipses in planes. You've done a good job getting them to hit the four sides of the plane however you've done this at the expense of confident linework. As previously mentioned, accuracy is certainly something we should strive for however it should never come at the cost of confidence as a confident, inaccurate line is far more workable than an accurate, wobbly one.

Finally, your funnels are off to a good start, you've done a good job of aligning your ellipses to the minor axis for the most part and where they begin to skew off, they do at the wider ends of the funnel. This is pretty normal, as it's a lot harder to align an ellipse without the outer guides of the funnel there to help us, so just continue to work on these in your warm-ups (and particular focus on getting your ellipses consistently confident as previously mentioned).

Onto your rough perspective now and you've done a reasonable job keeping your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line. The biggest thing I noticed here was a tendency to automatically correct your lines - which we strongly discourage - as well as applying line weight with a slow, laborious stroke. Much like the superimposed lines, line weight should be applied with a confident stroke and even if it slightly misses the mark then it can still do its job effectively. Overall your estimation of convergences is pretty good and where it strays, it does so in the usual ways where the boxes further from the vanishing point are less accurate.

You've done a good job keeping the gaps between your boxes consistent on the rotated boxes. This has given you the best chance at placing your next box, which you've definitely leveraged quite well. You haven't quite managed the full degree of rotation as, particularly on the outer boxes on the cardinal points, you've tended to follow the vanishing point of the inner boxes rather than sliding the vanishing point along the horizon line. That said, this and the organic perspective exercises are designed to introduce students to a new kind of spatial problem rather than any expectation of mastery.

Finally, your organic perspective compositions are off to a good start. You've created some pretty dynamic scenes here that convey a good amount of 3D depth with your variation in the size of your boxes and good use of overlapping. I did notice you corrected a few of your lines here and again, I have to discourage you from doing this. This relates to the thing I said before about a confident line being more workable - your mistakes are rarely as bad as you think and working with them becomes particularly important as you begin tackling construction as undermining your original lines can cause your drawings to lose all sense of solidity.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge. Prioritise confidence over accuracy and don't neglect your ellipses in your warm-ups.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:47 AM, Saturday April 4th 2020

Thank you Meta for the feedback. I'll keep the things you pointed out in mind when moving on to the 250 box challenge.

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