Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

1:07 AM, Wednesday August 26th 2020

Drawabox lesson 1 HW submissions - Album on Imgur

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Thank you very much. I really appreciate you critique.

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4:09 PM, Wednesday August 26th 2020

Heyo, TA qzhans here!

First, superimposed lines. In general, you’ve kept fraying under control here, and I’m only seeing wobble on the super long lines. Although those are pretty challenging, try and draw those as straight as possible. Once you've began your stroke, that angle is law, and you have to follow it through, even if it means you careen way off into another line above or below.

Moving onto ghosted lines, these are pretty good too. I do wish you would've done some longer ones, just as a challenge, however, and in general the density here is pretty lacking. You can always take a look at Uncomfortable’s example for a good idea of the density and variety required.

Your ghosted planes are showing some nice confidence as well. I also like how you aren’t afraid of your mistakes; I don’t see any redrawing of lines that missed the mark.

Moving onto your ellipse tables, I like that you're keeping your ellipses tightly packed within the bounds that you've set, and you filled each space quite nicely. There's expected room for improvement in getting your ellipses to be tight and tidy, but drawing through with confidence is more important at this stage, which you are. The next step would be to improve your ghosting method even further so you can bring down the amount of times you need to draw through your ellipses.

Your ellipses in planes show an improvement in that aspect. I am seeing just a little bit of deformation of your ellipses to hit those bisection points in some of your ellipses though (mostly on the first page). Opt instead for a confident, smooth ellipse, caring only that it generally fits within the bounds.

Next, your funnels generally do a good job of aligning to the minor axis, but it seems like you’ve lost a bit of your confidence here. I’m seeing wobble and jagged edges on a lot of your ellipses, perhaps due to how hard you were trying to keep the ellipses in bounds. Remember to always draw with the requisite speed, not caring so much if you edge out of the lines a little bit.

No problems with plotted perspective!

For your rough perspective, I’m pleased to see that you are applying the error checking method correctly, extending your lines parallelly back to the horizon line instead of directly to the vanishing point. I do see a few issues with keeping the verticals perpendicular to the horizon line and the horizontals parallel to it, so watch out for that. The problem I do want to address is a little bit of degradation in your line work, and I’m seeing lots of reinforced/patched-up lines. Remember that all lines we put down are law, and laying down more lines to fix something will only create more contradictions and draw eyes to a mistake.

And now, the one you’ve been waiting for: rotated boxes. Before anything, I wanted to congratulate you on its completion; it's not something you're really supposed to be ready for. In general, I like how you’ve structured this exercise, keeping the gaps between boxes consistent and drawing through each box. As a result, the illusion of rotation is quite solid, especially on the center row and column. The only thing that seems to have tripped you up are the corner boxes. Each box has an axis that it rotates around as it shifts to a different direction. The lines parallel to this axis of rotation will not change vanishing points, but the others will. Thus, each box adjacent to a box will have one set of lines that share a vanishing point with a set from that initial box. But I wouldn’t worry if this stuff isn’t clicking for you yet, we have the box challenge for that.

Finally, onto organic perspective. In general, your boxes do a good job of shrinking and growing as they move through space. I'm pleased to see a little bit of overlapping here and there as well (although I do think you could've done a bit more). There's work to be done in getting those parallel lines to converge to their shared vanishing point, but again, you can iron that out with the box challenge.

Overall, this is a strong submission. The only reservation I have is your habit to reinforce lines that you deem as mistakes, rather than the lines that need line weight. You should resist this at all costs, especially in the 250 box challenge (having the habit will make you reinforce the inside lines of the boxes, which is not what we want to be doing there). With that being said, good luck on the rest of your journey!

Next Steps:

250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:11 PM, Thursday August 27th 2020

Thank you for your critique. I did lost confidence in a few of the exercises with the reinforced lines. Second guessing myself. I Will definitely take your advice to avoid that when going to the 250 box challenge. Thank you.

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