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11:30 AM, Thursday April 20th 2023
Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. I’ll be taking a look at it for you.
Starting off, your superimposed lines look solid! They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your arcing lines are quite confident, too. Your ghosted lines/planes are fairly smooth, too, but I note some hesitation as you approach your end points. Try not to be so conscious of them, if you can – especially if this is causing you to slow down as you approach them, and thus result in a line that’s wobbly, or changes trajectory. As with every other exercise in this course, our priority is always the confidence of our marks, not their accuracy.
The table of ellipses exercise struggles with this, too; you seem to be more concerned with your ellipses fitting snuggly inside of their frames, or matching their initial rotations, than them being smooth and rounded, which should be our priority. Everything else about them looks fine – you’ve got a good variety of them, and they’re all properly drawn through – but this is important to get right sooner rather than later, so it doesn’t stick as a habit, so keep that in mind. The ellipses in planes look a little better in that respect; continue pushing in that same direction! The funnels are mostly well done. There’s the occasional misalignment, for which I’d recommend another second or two on the ghosting stage, and here, too, there’s some stiffness, but I suspect that that’s partly due to the size of your ellipses, so consider drawing fewer funnels, that are bigger, next time.
The plotted perspective exercise is well done. You’ve gone a little hard on the lineweight (you always need a little less than you think), but it’s not a huge issue. The rough perspective exercise shows a good start, but it’s not quite there yet, unfortunately. With regards to its convergences, I wonder if you’re sticking to your first guesses here, rather than doing what we encourage you to, which is to continuously check, and alter your points until they’re perfect. As for the linework, the way to improve that is as simple as ditching your automatic reinforcing habit. Each line is drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out, so resist the urge to add more ink to a mistake. The rotated boxes exercise is well done! It’s big, its boxes are snug, and they do a good job of rotating. This is even the case in the back (!), and you’ve even been mindful of their depth lines, so you’re in a good place, moving into the box challenge. Speaking of boxes, nice work with your organic perspective exercise. I notice that you’ve drawn through some of your boxes here. This is not necessary for this exercise, but it has served you well. Though your boxes are a little same-y, they flow well as per the attention given to their size, and foreshortening, and your compositions look quite nice, also. Well done!
Next Steps:
I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, and sending you off to the box challenge. GL!
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.