Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

12:25 AM, Sunday July 23rd 2023

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I have already completed the 250 box challenge. I will submit that in 2 weeks for official critique.

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2:42 PM, Monday July 24th 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. I've noticed that you aren't always drawing through your ellipses. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/drawingthrough So this is just a reminder that you need to draw through EVERY single ellipse you draw 2 - 3 times for all of these lessons. Even if you think you got it right the first time. You are doing a good job 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 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 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. I am noticing that you are redrawing lines on occasion 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. 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 turned out pretty well. 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 a bit towards the corners is because you didn't keep the gaps between your boxes 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. 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. While you have mostly confident linework here I want to talk about your linework a bit as I think you are a bit too focused on accuracy and it's reintroducing some slight wobble into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/wobbling 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. I also 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. Your box constructions are fairly wonky throughout this exercise and you need to develop a better sense for how box lines converge to vps 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. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey fairly well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge(even though it's already done). Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:09 PM, Monday July 24th 2023

Thank you so much for the critique! When doing exercises, how do I know which one to do for the day?

6:54 PM, Monday July 24th 2023

As explained here in Lesson 0, you basically make a "pool" of the exercises from lessons you've completed and pick 2 or 3 at random to do for 10-15 minutes. Think of it like pulling names out of a hat.

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