Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

7:29 PM, Friday August 13th 2021

Lesson 1 hw: updated - Album on Imgur

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Hi uncomfortable,

I want to highlight the difficulties and struggle I've had trying to do your course. Over the span of 5 or 6 years I have started then stopped the program. While I have finished lesson 1, I did so with the help of being back on medication for ADHD. Why I chose to include my disability is that it affected my ability to commit to this program (like many) and that I'm excited to share that I've taken a big step ahead.

The exercises that posed the most challenge to me were the rotated boxes, the organic perspective, and understanding implied vanishing points via 250 box. However, I'm fully confident you can point out where I went wrong and help me in the future.

Thank you for this program.

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8:16 PM, Saturday August 14th 2021

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 well. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on a consistent smooth ellipse shape. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes although you are deforming some of your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed This is likely happening because you are too worried about accuracy and are probably slowing down your stroke to compensate. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. Your ellipses in funnels are having the same issues and you are also tilting your ellipses off the minor axis at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned This is something you should always consider when drawing your ellipses. There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and accuracy so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also 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 was clearly a bit of a struggle. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes but this started to fall apart for you because you didn't keep your gaps narrow and consistent particularly towards the corners. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/guessing You're struggling with the rotations required for this exercise which is perfectly fine given the difficulty. The important part is that you gave it your best shot and 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 a mixed bag of solid constructions and wonky ones so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely but keep practicing those ellipses during your warmups. Otherwise, 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.
2:00 PM, Wednesday August 18th 2021

Thank you so much! This has been a challenging endeavor but I'll be more aware of the things you've mentioned here. This was incredibly helpful. Thank you, again.

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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

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