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1:44 AM, Friday March 20th 2020

Let's start off with your superimposed lines. You're doing a good job lining your pen up with the starting point in order to reduce fraying. One thing that is quite evident here though is that you're focusing quite a bit on accuracy and as a result, drawing more slowly and allowing your brain to control the movement. When we draw lines confidently, this doesn't necessarily mean we draw them fast (though this can be useful for beginners), we're telling our muscles what we want them to do and letting them take control.

Next, your ghosted lines are showing some signs of arcing but are generally more confident than your superimposed lines. However, you seem to have lost some of this confidence in your planes, instead beginning to wobble throughout the line, or more often, wobbling as you get to the end of the line. This indicates to me that you're still prioritising accuracy here, and allowing your brain to take control as you approach your endpoint. The purpose of ghosting is to familiarise your muscles with the movement that you make, so that when you do it for real, you can do so without really thinking about it. It's gonna be inaccurate at first but this gets better as you do more of it and build the muscle memory you need.

I can see a similar thing occurring with your tables ellipses and this is hardly surprising. It feels really weird to try and draw ellipses for the first time, so make sure you're ghosting out the motion and executing with confidence. That said, your ellipses in planes are a definite improvement in terms of the confidence and shape of your ellipses. I can see you've aimed to hit the four sides of the plane even if you didn't always quite make it and instead of allowing your brain to course correct this, you've kept going, resulting in a far more confident line.

Your funnels fall a bit back into the line work we saw in the tables of ellipses and I suspect with the smaller ellipses you're either letting yourself fall back to drawing from the wrist or drawing far more slowly than you do with those larger ellipses. Whichever the case, your alignment here is okay in some places but very loose and misaligned in others. It is worthwhile practicing funnels in your warm-ups as being able to align an ellipse to a minor axis is particularly important for drawing organic forms and cylinders and this crops up again as early as lesson 2.

A quick note on your plotted perspective - this exercise is to be done with a ruler so you had the option of using that for your hatching lines. Failing that, if you were just looking to get some mileage, make sure that you're taking the time and planning out each one as this will give you a fair cleaner and confident result.

Next, your rough perspective is showing good signs of keeping your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line. Your line confidence again suffered here, which is something we see a lot when students first encounter the box exercises - we recommend you take the time to plan and confidently execute each and every line as though they were their own individual exercise. Feel free to lay down non-committal dots in order to work out where your lines should go. Similarly, when applying line weight, this should be executed with confidence - remember that even if it is inaccurate, it will still do its job of clarifying overlaps and you'll get the added bonus of clean, confident linework. Overall though, your estimation of perspective on this exercise is quite good!

You've done a good job keeping the gaps fairly consistent on your rotated boxes. The weight of your lines and the hatching here is pretty overwhelming, so try to be subtle with these when you tackle them in the 250 box challenge. You've managed to cover a fair degree of rotation on the boxes, which is awesome since we assign this exercise to students to introduce them to a new kind of spatial problem rather than expecting students to achieve any amount of rotation.

Finally, you're off to a good start with your organic perspective. I would've liked to have seen a few more boxes in the frames and a bit more variation in size to convey a greater sense of depth in the scenes. Again, line confidence is a real problem here and it feels like you need to take a step back and remember what the ghosted lines exercise taught you. You have achieved a wide range of novel rotations and shapes of your boxes however which is good to see and will put you in good stead for the box challenge.

Next Steps:

I would like to see:

  • One more page of funnels, concentrating on getting confident ellipses and trying to align these to the minor axis (see these notes)

  • One more page of rough perspective, focusing on getting your lines confident, not automatically correcting mistakes, and if applying line weight, doing so subtly and with confidence.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
2:17 AM, Saturday March 21st 2020

I have tried to focus on the things you brought to my attention. Thank you for taking the time to review my work. I found that having a lighter touch with the pen has helped it to maintain a more confident stroke. Really trying to focus on proper execution and letting the accuracy come. Here is the link to my revisions.

https://imgur.com/gallery/PvftMRs

Thanks again.

12:00 AM, Sunday March 22nd 2020

Your warmups here are looking good, particularly towards the bottom of the page where you've started to find the right pace to execute straight confident lines. Your ellipses here are quite good too.

Your funnels are still significantly skewed off the minor axis, though there are a few places where you've nailed it down, these are few and far between. I've found that I tend to skew my funnels a lot of I'm not approaching them with my page angled a certain way or if I'm tilting my head while looking at them (a remnant of having had whiplash). So try experimenting with the angles that you're doing these at in your warmups to see if you can get a more consistent result. Try not to leave the gaps between them though, as this is actually noted as one of the "common mistakes" on the funnels page.

Finally, your rough perspective page is coming along, with the underlying lines being generally more confident than they were. The line weight you've applied is not always confident however. Remember that line weight can still do its job without being completely accurate.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge but keep working at nailing down your confidence.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.

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