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12:48 PM, Thursday April 23rd 2020
Hey there Torben, good job finishing lesson 1. I'll be going over your work today so let's get right to it.
Starting with your super imposed lines, I am seeing a lot of wobbling which indicates you are trying to steer your pen more than trusting your shoulder to give you confident, smooth lines. Remember, at this stage we are focusing on the flow of a line; accuracy will develop with time and practice. Your ghosted lines are looking more confident, but there are still some times where you have wobbling where you probably start thinking too much, or arcing which is coming from the elbow driving the motion instead of the shoulder. At this stage we are just introducing the exercises to you, so no worries just keep practicing in your warm ups.
Your ellipses are looking a lot more confident and drawn with the shoulder for the most part. There are no major areas of flatness or sharp corners and you drew through them appropriately. Your next step while you warm up with these is working on getting your draw throughs to be more tightly on the original ellipse. Your ellipses in planes are making good contact with the edges to maintain the ellipse within the bounds with no room to float around inside, and your ellipses in tables are hit-or-miss when it comes to packing them to leave no room for ambiguity. Some rows are neat and uniform while others are missing either the top or bottom usually, which is talked about more here. You did a pretty good job keeping your minor axes aligned to the funnel axes, but the added constraint caused some troubles with your ellipse quality as they are more shaky in this exercise, but you did a good job maintaining contact with the funnel boundaries.
Now let's take a look at your rough perspective boxes. You did a good job keeping them correctly oriented by making your horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and verticals perpendicular, and your converging lines are right on track as indicated by your correctly applied extension lines. There are a few times I'm seeing you redraw lines so I want to discourage that before it becomes a habit. Every line should be planned and ghosted and then executed when ready then we must live with the results. Redrawing lines only adds visual clutter and draws more attention to areas we'd rather not be noticed. Speaking of ghosting, some of your lines aren't looking very confident so keep practicing the method of plan>ghost>execute for confident, smooth lines.
Good job completing the rotated box exercise. Obviously this is a very hard exercise and students aren't meant nor expected to do this 100% correctly the first time, but rather finish it to the best of their abilities so they can see new types of spatial puzzles and solution methods. You did some things correctly and there are some things that could have improved, but you already accomplished the only goal of completing it to the best of your abilities. So I'm seeing some hints at the start of rotation on your boxes but you could definitely have pushed for more rotation. Watch this gif some more now that you have some context and study how the rotation is driven by the motion of the vanishing points. You also could have packed your boxes tighter together to leverage the adjacent lines as perspective guides. Read that section again to make sure you understand the principle of using adjacent lines and if you have any questions feel free to ask me. Overall you did a good job not redrawing many lines and keeping things neat. Some hatching and/or line weight would have helped to further clarify your forms, but this was a good start.
Finally let's look at your organic perspective. Your boxes here feel quite solid. You have some areas of nice perspective showing you are mindful of how parallel lines converge towards a shared vanishing point and your boxes indicate a nice level of planning before execution. Your compositions do a good job showing the illusion of depth and 3d space on your page through a combination of scaling boxes to recede into the background and overlapping your forms so they feel like they exist in the same space. Your line quality is also more confident here and I am happy to see the growth in your confidence throughout the lesson.
With this your lesson 1 will now be marked as complete. Your next stop is the 250 challenge. Keep up the good work.
Next Steps:
250 box challenge.
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Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.