Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
8:43 PM, Sunday April 12th 2020
Just finished Lesson 1, looking for feedback, critiques, and tips to improve! Thanks :)
Hello! I'll looking over your work and give you some critique to help you.
For superimposed lines, there's one or two lines with some slight fraying on the starting point. Take your time and be patient to place your pen on the starting point to avoid fraying on both sides, some to the point where its hard to tell where the lines started and where it ends. Remember, don't rush through.
Getting it out of the way, have you been utilizing drawing from the shoulder? Many of your lines completely fell short of the mark where you're supposed to be, with most of your planes and boxes have double or even triple lines drawn or superimposed on them. Avoid drawing over them and move on if you've made a mistake. Besides that, take your time to line up the pen onto the starting point before making a mark on the paper. Accuracy of hitting the end points comes later, the important thing first is creating a consistent, confident straight line.
Ellipses are fine, some are obviously wobbly and went out of the tables and overlap with each other but you're not expected to get it nicely done in one go. Just make sure you don't overlap with each other or make space them out so much, you need to make them fit within the table and each other. The ones on planes definitely have some wobble and distorted lines in them as if you either changed your mind halfway through or hesitated in the middle of drawing lines. Make sure you utilize ghosting before making a mark, because you will need to do a lot of ghosting for the next lessons. Funnels have a similar problem, keep them snug and fit with each other and don't space it out between them.
Boxes have the same problem with the lines as I mentioned, DO NOT hide your wobbly lines or marks by drawing over them, you're creating a fuzzy-like texture to them, something that I discourage you from doing it in the future to hide your mistakes. Draw the lines through ONCE and make sure you properly ghost before placing a line. Besides that, you did a decent job with understanding where the lines should be placed, but there's too much superimposed lines which is telling you're not confident about it in the first place.
For organic perspective, create more overlaps between the boxes, the difference is too minimal to make it convincing to the viewer that the boxes are moving through the 3D space. Start with the big boxes and go smaller as you move across the line to the end. Also to add, you should be doing 3 frames of this exercise as shown in the example homework. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/organicperspective Don't worry too muc about the perspective of the boxes, that can be improved during the 250 box challenge.
Overall, you did a decent job but much of your lines shown a lack of confidence from how much it was superimposed in an attempt to hide your mistakes, and that's really stopping you from moving on.
Next Steps:
I want you to fill 1 page entirely with ghosted planes, leaving little to no room of space left within the page and 1 page of organic perspective, this time with three frames as shown in the example homework. To reiterate, ghosting is one of the most important things to do along with drawing from the shoulder and you will have to do these two all the time in the coming 250 box challenge
Hi! Thanks for your critique! ... and sorry for the late response. I had forgotten to check back for this.
Today I followed your instructions and made a revision of the ghosted planes and organic perspective execices. Here's the link: https://imgur.com/a/glFLZGK
There's a couple things I am not really happy about. In the organic perspective exercice, I've tried adding line weight to the boxes closest to the viewer to make the lines less confusing... It didn't turn out too great.
As for drawing for the shoulder: Yes, when I initially did lesson one, there is times where I didn't draw from the shoulder. Since then, I've worked toward fixing this bad habit and I am much more mindful of my markmaking. (For the last weeks, I've actually started the 250 boxes challenges, and I've gotten better at it through that.)
Though, I still have trouble ghosting lines & drawing from the shoulder... Everytime I sit down to do DAB, I feel like I've forgotten how to do it! This led me to a lot of frustrations but I think I'm slowly getting the hang of it now. One thing I still have problem with is ghosting very small lines. I think you'll see what I'm talking about when looking at my revision.
Hello! Sorry for being late myself, I checked your revisions and I think there's still plenty of work that needs to be done but overall you did a good job despite that there's still some wobble here and there. Remember that confidence from drawing or ghosting straight lines comes first, don't be afraid if you're overshooting, you'll get more accurate over time. The organic perspective is fine, if it gets a little bit confusing to follow at times. Still you did a good job with it, and keeping sure the parallel lines at consistent. You did a great job with the revisions in total.
Next Steps:
Keep doing the 250 boxes challenge. Best of luck!
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.