Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
9:31 AM, Friday January 15th 2021
Please crush my spirit ^_^
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 with pretty minimal wavering throughout. Your ghosted lines and planes look pretty good. You were still getting a bit of wobble on your ghosted lines but I'm already seeing improvement with your ghosted planes particularly the second page. You are getting better at using the ghosting method to get consistently confident linework with a decent degree of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.
Your tables of ellipses are coming along well. Once again I'm noticing quite a bit of improvement as you worked through these pages. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses for the most part as I'm noticing a few spots here and there where you aren't and you seem to be focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes although you are still deforming your ellipses at times. Your ellipses in planes are starting to have more issues with deformed ellipses and I'm also noticing that you aren't always drawing through your elllipses now. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/11/drawingthrough I'm not going to have you redo any of these but this is just a reminder that you are supposed to be drawing through EVERY SINGLE ELLIPSE you draw for these lessons without exception. It doesn't matter if you feel like you got it right the first pass you still need to be drawing through. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed This is likely happening because you too worried about accuracy and are probably slowing down your stroke to compensate. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. Your ellipses in funnels are having the same issues and you are also tilting your ellipses off the minor axis at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned This is something you should always consider when drawing your ellipses. There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and accuracy so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.
The plotted perspective exercise looks good nothing to mention here. However, your rough perspective exercise was done incorrectly in two point perspective when it was supposed to be done in one point perspective so I'm going to need you to redo both of these pages. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/15/not1point Make sure you read the lessons and homework assignments a bit more carefully. I would take a look at this lesson and video again and make sure you extend your lines correctly when you do this one as you didn't do it at all with your two point ones. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/15/video
The rotated box exercise was clearly a bit of a struggle. 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 mostly keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating 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 although you are comprimising your confident linework at times by trying to add line weight but since this is all just practice anyways that's perfectly fine. Just make sure if you are going to add line weight try and treat it the same as every other line and ghost it multiple times and draw from your shoulder with confidence which you appear to be doing for the most part. Your box constructions are decent for the most part but there are some wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.
Overall this was a pretty good submission. Your ellipses still could use some work getting smoother overall and definitely make sure you pay a bit better attention to the homework assignments. Once you get those rough perspective revisions in I'll take a look and then mark this as complete and you can move on to the 250 box challenge.
Next Steps:
Two pages of Rough Perspective Exercises - https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/15/video Make sure you watch the video and look at the homework assignment carefully
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.