Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

6:42 AM, Monday December 28th 2020

lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/1XaWrfY.jpg

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

HI, I want to say that I'm really enjoyed your lesson even its very challenging for me. I find myself struggled a lot drawing a box free hand, as you can clearly see that my Rotated Box exercise looks terrible. I also took your instruction that I should not fuss over it. So I'm looking forward to improved it during my 250 box challenge instead!

Anyway, thank you for the critique. I'm going to keep continue this lesson until the end, so please bear with me!

0 users agree
5:44 PM, Monday December 28th 2020

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point and while your fraying is a bit wild your lines are coming out pretty smooth. This confidence is being carried over into your ghosted lines and planes pretty well although I do have one observation that I think goes for a lot of the work I'm seeing here. I think you are perhaps rushing a bit. Looking at most of your lines in relation to your dots you aren't being very careful with where you place your pen initially. The most control you have in the entire drawing process is where you start your line. If you put down two points and you're not starting correctly at one of them that probably means you are going a bit too fast.

Your tables of ellipses looks pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through all of your ellipses and focusing on getting smooth ellipse shapes but once again it feels a bit rushed to me. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/11/step2 I think you could do a bit of a better job trying to keep your ellipses a bit more tangent particularly in those sections towards the bottom of the pages with the curved lines. Your confidence is carried over very well into your ellipses in planes. I'm also seeing improvements in regards to your accuracy which will get better and better with consistent practice. Your ellipses in funnels seem fine I'm not seeing any real issues here. Your ellipses are off to a good start and I like that you are focusing on getting a smooth shape. These definitely need work in terms of accuracy though so keep practicing these during your warmups.

The plotted persepctive looks good although I would mention with your hatching don't have the lines floating in the middle of the plane. Make sure they touching the edges. Your rough perspective boxes turned out okay. I would have liked to see a bit more improvement in terms of getting the perspective on your boxes a bit more correct. I can see that you did extend your lines correctly so you can at least see how off you are on most of these and hopefully that will make you understand your mistakes a bit better. Your linework is nice and confident here which is good to see. One thing I think you can consider a bit more when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon lines while all of your vertical lines should be straight up and down. This can really help a lot with avoiding a lot of the slanting lines you are getting in your constructions here.

Your rotated box exercise was clearly a bit of a struggle. That said I like that you drew this nice and big as that tends to help when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did well with drawing through all of your boxes. You started to run into problems because you weren't keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/guessing You are also having a hard time thinking in terms of 3d space which is perfectly fine especially if you are new to drawing and is really one of the things an exercise like this is meant to demonstrate. That's really what this entire course is trying to get you to be able to do. Your organic perspective exercise also feels a bit rushed to me. You are keeping up with the confident linework which is great but an issue I'm seeing again is that you don't always seem to be starting your lines where you should be starting them. I'm seeing floating lines here and there that aren't connecting to either point you laid down. Your box constructions definitely need improvement as well so the 250 box challenge will be a good next step for you.

Overall this a pretty decent submission. I do feel like some of it was a bit rushed and I would like you to take your time a bit more on future lessons. That said you did follow the directions correctly for the most part which is good and you are consistently getting confident linework which is important. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey fairly well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:52 AM, Thursday December 31st 2020

I will try going slower next exercise, thanks for the advice!

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Ellipse Master Template

Ellipse Master Template

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.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.