Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

5:42 PM, Tuesday March 16th 2021

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Well, this took a while. I didn't have the money to pledge at first to get things looked at, so I'm actually halfway done the 250 box challenge at this point. Looking back now, I'm rather displeased with some of the exercises (organic perspective particularly), but I'm overall quite happy. I think the rotated boxed exercise came out decent, though I still want to revisit it in the future since the backs of the boxes don't really look distinct. Maybe this is something I could fix with the right pattern of hatching...

I've been slacking on revisiting these exercises though... been focusing more on powering through boxes. I'll need to practice ellipses a lot more.

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6:09 PM, Tuesday March 16th 2021

That’s… not good. I’ll remind you of our rules regarding warmups, as well as the 50% rule, to be safe. It’s compounding interest, that’ll help you improve most of all. Anyway, let’s look through these.

The superimposed lines exercise looks good. Your lines are smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The ‘stop marks’ at the end are quite visible, so I’ll recommend lifting your pen off the page, instead of coming to a hard stop. Also, practice some bigger arcing lines. Small movements are difficult from the shoulder, so they’re not good to start off with. The ghosted lines/planes look great – a lot of confidence on display, here. If you have to choose, though, it’s better to overshoot a line, than stop short of it.

The ellipses are fairly smooth, and rounded, too, but a little loose. I’d spend a bit longer ghosting them, if at all possible. Here, too, see if you can lift your pen at the end – flicking it is giving your ellipses tails. The ellipses in planes look equally good, but here, too, some more ghosting would’ve helped tighten them up. If this is the best you can do, that’s fine, too; mileage will take care of it (provided you’re not neglecting your warmups, of course…) Finally, the funnels look nice. The occasional misalignment, and odd spacing issue is easily fixed by, you guessed it, ghosting a little more, not forgetting to rotate your page as necessary, but even like this, things look solid.

The plotted perspective exercise, of which there’s 2 pages of (out of the required 1), looks good, though you should’ve used a ruler for the hatching, too.

The rough perspective exercise shows some nice improvement throughout the set – the convergences in particular. It’s nice to see how much planning has gone into each one. Regarding the hatching, try to treat every line as if it’s a ghosted line. Not necessarily plotting start/end points for it, of course, but show as much care.

Though it’s missing its visual reminders, the boxes in the rotated boxes exercise, well, rotate. This is partly due to the careful plotting of its depth lines, having been kept snug, as per the instructions. There’s not much I have in regards to advice, save for drawing a little bigger next time, so as to give your brain a chance to think, and, using the knowledge you posses right now, perhaps even made some educated decisions that go against what the neighboring edges are suggesting.

Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks great. Your boxes follow the flow line, increasing in size, but maintaining a consistent, shallow foreshortening as they do. As a result, and especially because of their many overlaps, they convey the illusion of flow quite well.

Next Steps:

Solid work, all around. I’ll clear you for the box challenge, so feel free to submit it when you’ve got it.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:28 AM, Monday March 22nd 2021

Thanks for the critique!

Yeah, I largely slacked on warmups because I've often had

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A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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