Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

12:20 AM, Thursday June 15th 2023

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My lesson 1. I took a break of about a month or so because I couldn't find the time or motivation to continue for a bit, but once I found a good and engaging 50% rule project, I came back. There are two pages of Rough Perspective that I didn't include here to make up for the gap and get back into the swing of things, and I had to restart Rotated Boxes a couple times before getting to a place where it seemed to make sense to me. Thanks!

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2:20 PM, Friday June 16th 2023

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 having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your 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 great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises have a couple issues that I want to discuss. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. I am noticing on one page that you are redrawing lines quite often and this is a habit you should try and get out of. Try and stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read. If you were intending to add line weight then I do have some notes regarding added line weight I'd like to share. If you want to add line weight make sure you don't revert back to using your wrist and are drawing from your shoulder with confidence. Also added line weight should be subtle so try and only go over a line one additional time instead of multiple times. The main issue I'd like to discuss though is that for one page you stopped following directions and didn't draw through your boxes for some reason. For these homework assignments please follow all of the directions fully or you will be assigned revisions. So as a revision I'd like you to draw through your boxes like you did on the other page. 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 pretty well. 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 and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. 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 wonky throughout this exercise but I can see you developing a sense for how box lines converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you to keep working on this.

Overall this was a really 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. Once you get that revision submitted I'll take a look and you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

One page of the rough perspective boxes - Draw through your boxes on the page were you skipped this step and make sure to extend those depth lines back to the horizon as well

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:51 AM, Saturday June 17th 2023

Thanks for the feedback - here's my revised Rough Perspective.

3:40 PM, Saturday June 17th 2023

Okay, this looks fine. I'm going to mark this as complete and you can move on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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