Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
8:56 AM, Friday November 4th 2022
Thank you!
Welcome to drawabox, and a big congrats on completing Lesson 1. Let’s take a look at it, shall we?
Starting off, your superimposed lines are well done. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Minor thing, but the 2 figure that you’ve drawn, its bottom-most line should’ve been a different stroke. Consider this. Your ghosted lines/planes are equally confident, and I’m pleased to see that you’ve not forgotten to plot start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of your planes. Do be careful, however, that you’re not so conscious of them. Those lines tend to be a little wobbly at their starts/ends, likely because you’re taking too long lining up your pen to the correct starting point, and slowing down as you approach the end point in an effort to not overshoot, respectively. Try to stress a little less and you’ll see your lines become a lot more confident, with it.
Moving on to the ellipse section, your ellipses are well done: they’re smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. They’ll, sometimes, come out a little pointy, however, so be careful that you’re not switching to a lesser pivot without meaning to, at any point (very simply, by checking!) The ellipses in planes are well done; despite their more complicated frames, they do a good job of maintaining their prior smoothness/roundness. The funnels, too, look good – if drawn through a little much. Now that you’ve gotten your feet wet with these simple ones, however, see if you can’t increase their degrees, as they move away from the center.
The plotted perspective exercise is well done, but you should’ve used a ruler for your hatching lines, too.
I’d call automatic reinforcing, but it seems like your pen is dying, in the rough perspective exercise, so I suppose it could be that, too. Ignoring it, the exercise is well done! The lines (what there is of them) are confidently drawn, and the convergences correctly plotted. I’ll especially praise the time spent planing, here – keep up the good work.
The rotated boxes exercise is a little small (drawing big is something we encourage students to do, because it’s really effective in giving their brain some much-needed room to think), but beyond that, it’s well done; both up front, and in the back, its boxes are snug, and they rotate quite comfortably, too.
In the organic perspective exercise, on the other hand, I can call out automatic reinforcing, because of the instances where you’ve redrawn a line that has come out wrong. I’ll remind you that one attempt at each line is all you get. This is not to say you need to get it perfect the first time no matter what – simply, that if you get it wrong, you should leave it be. Adding more ink to a line doesn’t fix it, anyway. Here, especially, it being bold makes it read as being closer to us, which is not something you want because then the thickness of the line is contradicting what the size of the box is saying. But I digress. This is well done beyond that so, no worries!
Next Steps:
I’ll be marking this lesson as complete. Off to the box challenge with you!
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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