Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

11:43 PM, Sunday April 18th 2021

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Hello there!

Here is my lesson 1 homework ready to be critiqued! The exercises took 2 months to complete due to school and other things. I will admit that the exercises are rigorous, but I learned a lot on the way. I struggled a bit on the boxes section, especially the rotated boxes and organic perspective exercise. After all, failure is a part of learning.

So yeah, here is my homework. Time for the 250 box challenge!

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7:54 PM, Monday April 19th 2021

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/step3 These are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks fine although I do want to mention that all of your verticals here should be straight up and down which seems to be something you fixed in the last two exercises. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. Once again this is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. The other possibility is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist for some of these lines. Just something to keep an eye on. You should be drawing from your shoulder for basically every line you draw even shorter ones. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only. You are doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be straight up and down. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your 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 keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. One of the main reasons you are running into so many issues here is that you aren't rotating your boxes but are instead simply moving them 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. Your box constructions definitely need quite a bit of work so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Despite the struggles you had with the last two exercises this submission showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well and the 250 box challenge should help a lot with developing your box construction skills. 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.
11:22 PM, Monday April 19th 2021

Thank you for the critiques!

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