Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

7:37 PM, Monday November 7th 2022

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Thank you for taking a look at my work. It definitely wasn't easy!

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3:05 PM, Tuesday November 8th 2022

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 a few issues. Some are tilting off the minor axis at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. The other main issue is that your spacing here could have been a bit better which really means that could have gotten more ellipse practice in. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/spacing Another 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/1/14/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 although some of your vertical back legs on your boxes are slanting pretty severely. In a two point perspective like this all of your vertical legs should be perpendicular to the horizon line(straight up and down). 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 turned out decently. 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. Obviously you are struggling a bit with the rotations for this exercise which is perfectly fine given the difficulty. 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 pretty solid for the most part but you are relying somewhat heavily on parallel lines for your box constructions which is leading to divergences in some cases. The 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you in order to develop a better understanding of how box lines need to converge to vp's.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice 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. 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.
9:30 PM, Tuesday November 8th 2022

Rob,

Thanks for the critique. I think my biggest fear was the ellipses because it feels like after ghosting through them when I put my pen down its really hard to acurately "see" where the mark needs to go. I've just kept practicing though.

Could you elaborate just a bit on the relying heavily on parallel lines for box construction? I thought that the main intent was to use them to make sure the boxes stay boxy. I did find myself getting lost when I tried to make the REALLY BIG boxes that start on the edge of the page.

Appreciate it and have a good one!

10:54 PM, Tuesday November 8th 2022

In real life any box you look at will never have completely parallel lines because that would mean it's growing in size as it moves back in space. Lines will always converge even just by a slight amount. If you rely on parallel lines for your constructions you will sometimes make boxes with diverging lines which makes them look like they are growing in size as they move back in space as I mentioned previously. The 250 box challenge will go into a deeper explanation of these concepts.

9:47 PM, Wednesday November 9th 2022

Ah ok, thanks! Going to start on that one now. Looks like a real challenge!

Have a good week!

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