View Full Submission View Parent Comment
0 users agree
7:55 PM, Friday May 15th 2020

Starting with your form intersections, these are coming along quite well. You're doing a good job of establishing each form such that they all feel consistent and cohesive within the same space, and when it comes to the actual intersections between them, you're doing a pretty good job of defining those complex spatial relationships, even the more difficult ones involving spheres and cylinders.

Over the course of your object drawings, you're definitely showing improvement overall. Where earlier on you're somewhat less willing to break things down as much as is necessary, towards the end you're a lot more fastidious and focused in doing so.

One of the issues that plagues you a fair bit comes down to the boxes that serve as your starting point. They're often somewhat lopsided, with parallel lines not quite converging correctly towards the same vanishing point (there's some allowable margin for error, but your game controller for instance is way outside of it). As mentioned above, you also try to get by with more approximation, where there are means to really break things down and subdivide your boxes to find more precise locations for certain features, you were more likely to eyeball things and just wing it. Ultimately this is something most students will go through, and like them, I'm confident to say that you saw the issues that resulted, and started laying down more and more scaffolding to support your features.

The weakest drawing of the lot was definitely the computer mouse. This is primarily because of steps that were skipped. Looking closely, I can see that you never actually established the kind of orthographic slices shown here (where the horizontal and vertical planes each had the profile of the object carved out along them). You jumped straight from simple flat planes into a complex object. Being so smooth and organic, it's really important that we find ways to establish relationships between those curves and the flat planes of our construction.

I think it's safe to say after the computer mouse your work really started to take a sharp upwards turn. Your soap bottle's linework was definitely somewhat sketchy, but it's clear that there was a lot more subdivision going on. The boxes were still not aligning too well (as you can see here with the line extensions).

For this construction, one thing I feel is missing here that would have been useful due to the prevalence of ellipses throughout the base and at the top, is actually drawing the center line through the object from top to bottom. This would have served as the minor axis and would have helped you align your ellipses more mindfully. You also did have a tendency to draw your ellipses somewhat stiffly, so remember to apply the ghosting method to your ellipses, and drawing them with confidence to ensure that they maintain a smooth, confident shape. You've done a better job with your ellipses in other constructions in this set.

All in all, you've clearly demonstrated considerable improvement across the lesson, and have learned for yourself the importance of subdividing things in order to find where specific marks should go, rather than guessing and eyeballing things. Drawabox is full of estimation, but as we move into the territory of hard-surface objects, it really becomes that much more important to be patient and thorough.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Remember that you are allowed (and encouraged) to use an ellipse guide for your work to help eliminate some of the complexity of freehanding ellipses (as this can take some of your focus away from the slew of challenges you'll be facing). Full ellipse guide sets can be quite pricey, but there are "master ellipse templates" that include a range of degrees at smaller sizes. While this does result in a more limited scale at which we can draw objects, it's decent enough to suit our purposes.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:43 PM, Saturday May 16th 2020

Thank you!

I agree with the points mentioned above, i'm going to start practicing on the next lesson.

Thank you again and have a wonderful day!

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.
Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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