Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

10:48 PM, Thursday March 28th 2024

Draw a Box - Google Photos

Draw a Box - Google Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/vRr1UEoRUsdRXcAQ7

Rough Perspectives 1 of 2 - Put an * on the few that I didn't realize I was still standing on my wobble board at my standing desk

Rotated Boxes - I drew some of the outer boxes wrong but you can see I figured it out eventually. I was going to redo it byt the instructions said not to. Still not sure if I'm totally getting how to draw the boxes on the edge or if it's more of a feel or judgement call.

Organic Perspective 1 of 2 - I don't feel like I was giving these boxes as much depth. I tried to made the edges converge a little tighter on page 2. Not sure if my lingo is correct here.

Thanks!

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10:54 PM, Friday March 29th 2024

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. One thing you could have done a bit more with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks good although a few of the vertical legs on your boxes are slanting a bit. It's important to realize in a two point perspective drawing that all of your vertical box legs should be perpendicular(straight up and down) to the horizon line. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/wobblinglines This is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced. You are doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out decently. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You did a good job drawing through your boxes but one of the reasons this exercise started to fall apart on the outer rows is because you didn't keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/21/guessing Keeping the gaps narrow and consistent really helps with inferring information about neighboring boxes rotation and proportion. I can see that you were a bit perplexed by the corners but please don't just leave something blank if you don't understand it as you will be assigned revisions in the future for doing so. A big part of learning how to draw is getting used to working outside of your comfort zone so at least attempt to put something down even if you don't fully understand it. While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are fairly solid for the most part and I can see you are developing a sense for how box lines converge to vps. There are still some wonky convergences here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:44 PM, Monday April 1st 2024

Thanks for the thorough critique!

Regarding the back vertical edge on my plotted perspectives not being perfectly vertical, I thought this was because I was supposed to connect the corners, or Xs, where the converging lines meet. I thought this was more important than having the back edge be vertical, so I was focusing my efforts on having those back corners try to line up on top of each other, but was confused, and still am, on how to improve this. I re-read the instructions and I'm inferring that I should have done it this way. It felt odd to know that I'm drawing them slanted but I guess a vertical line is still probably better then an accurate corner, visually speaking.

3:12 PM, Monday April 1st 2024

I wouldn't worry about it too much. You aren't likely going to be doing many drawings with rulers and exact measurements in two point perspective. It's more of a way to think about verticals when drawing something in two point perspective.

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