Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

4:07 AM, Monday May 8th 2023

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Are there any pens known for having long lifespans? I'm currently using some Micron 05's but they've only lasted for a few days or so. I'm more familiar with digital so I'm not sure if this issue only applies to Microns or just pens in general. Thanks!

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2:42 PM, Monday May 8th 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 looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. 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 well but there are supposed to be two completed pages of this exercise and I'm only seeing one in this album. I'll need to see the other page before I can mark this as complete. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling 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. 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. 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 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. As mentioned previously when adding line weight try and only go over the line one additional time and make it more subtle than what you are doing here. 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 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 missing page submitted and I take a look you can move on to the 250 box challenge. The microns tend to be cheapest fineliners available and while they draw well they seem to have the least amount of ink in them. That being said I didn't find any other brands that I used to be significantly better in this regard as they cost more and the ink didn't last that much longer. Copic used to sell a fineliner that you could purchase new ink cartridges for but I'm not sure if that is still available. The pens available through the drawabox website were the best deal I found when I was working through the course and I was able to get through the entire course using about half the pack. https://drawabox.com/shop/pens?front Another thing you want to make sure isn't happening is that you aren't applying pressure while drawing as sometimes fineliners can be ruined by damaging the nib instead of just running out of ink.

Next Steps:

Missing one page of the rough perspective exercises

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
2:36 AM, Wednesday May 10th 2023

Sorry for the delay, here's the second page of the rough perspective: https://imgur.com/a/KHijRYn

11:14 PM, Wednesday May 10th 2023

Okay, this looks fine don't have anything to add that wasn't in the original critique. 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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