Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
1:25 PM, Thursday November 17th 2022
When do I know that I can move on?
Hi Art101, congrats on completing lesson one! I will handle your critique here. My review will be divided in sections corresponding to each exercise.
Superimposed lines
You followed the instructions of the exercise and made each time many repeated superimposed lines. However, from the beginning we start to see a recurring problem with your lines: they look very wobbly and uncertain. I will expand more on this point in the section that involves the use of the ghosting method. This may be because you were a little bit too much concerned with keeping your lines parallel rather than placing a confident stroke and letting your muscle memory do the heavy lifting. Remember that the golden rule of this course is confidence over accuracy: for the purpose of this course, a confident but inaccurate line will always be preferred to an accurate line that lacks confidence.
Ghosted lines
In this exercise, with the introduction of the ghosting method, your confidence seems to have improved a little, but there are still many lines with noticeable wobbling, even if to a lesser degree compared with the previous exercise. This residual wobbling may be caused by two things:
Not drawing from your shoulder. You should always try to consciously use your shoulder as your main pivot, since it allows for maximum fluidity and freedom of movement. You may not like the result in the beginning, since this method makes it harder to have control on your line, especially in shorter marks. However, you will notice that greater control will come with practice. By contrast, drawing from the elbow or the wrist allow for easier control, but makes it very hard to draw long lines without breaking your flow.
Not applying the ghosting method correctly. The ghosting method is the fix that we will use here from now on to place our marks without sacrificing too much accuracy. I won't go over the details of the method, you probably already know it and the lesson notes explain it far better than I could (in case you wanted to go over the details again, I link back the instructions here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/ghostedlines). It is possible that the wobbling may result from the movements of your shoulder being still somewhat stiff. If that's the case, do not be afraid to spend more time carefully ghosting each line until you feel that your muscle memory has registered your desired movement. If you feel uncomfortable working in a certain direction, you could also turn the page to place your mark in a way you feel more comfortable.
For the rest, your lines are quite precise, with little deviation from your fixed points. There's some overshooting, but for now that is a secondary concern until we refine the more important aspects of the exercise. As a minor criticism, I'd say that you could have experimented with a wider variety of directions and lengths, instead of repeating similar lines.
Ghosted planes
Here, you lose some of you previously gained confidence, most likely because of the greater restraint coming from the task of having to build an actual solid polygon instead of simple floating lines. As a result, at the beginning of the exercise your lines look more wobbly. However, as the exercise goes on, the wobbling becomes increasingly reduced, and by the end of the exercise your lines end up looking quite confident and without wobbling. This shows that throughout the exercise you managed to better familiarize with the ghosting method and applied it more successfully.
Ghosted ellipses
Your previously gained confidence is quite reduced here, most likely because you are drawing an unfamiliar shape with the ghosting method. You manage to keep your ellipses closely packed and mostly within the bounds of each panel, but the ellipses themselves look wobbly and often asymmetric. My previous comments on ghosting applies here: if you feel unsure, take your time to ghost as much as you want before placing your mark with a fast and confident stroke. Note that this is also one of the reasons for why we draw through each ellipse 2 times: repeating the curve allows us not to worry about immediately breaking the line once we finished the loop, thus allowing greater confidence.
Ghosted planes
The same comments above apply here. The wobbling is somewhat improved, but it is still noticeable.
Funnels
The wobbling is still there, but I can see some further improvement. More specifically about this exercise, in many funnels the ellipses often end up being not correctly aligned with the funnel and appear slanted. In this exercise, the axis of the funnel should coincide with the minor axis of each ellipse, cutting it in symmetrical halves.
Plotted perspective
The sides of the boxes correctly converge towards the 2 fixed vanishing points on the horizon line. However, your boxes seem to converge also in a third direction. This is not something that should happen in 2 point perspective, where we don't have a vertical vanishing point (you can also think that the vanishing point is still there, but it's infinitely far away). Note also that these aren't technically rectangular boxes in 3 point perspective: if that was so, since we see all of your boxes from below, the third vanishing point should be upwards, not downwards. The way you have drawn them, the lateral faces of your boxes are actually trapezoids. In this exercise (and in 2 point perspective in general), the lateral edges of each box should be vertical, i.e. perpendicular to the horizon line. To ensure this, you simply make sure that the edges of the lateral faces visible to the viewer are reasonably vertical (if you are using just a ruler with a graduation scale, you can try to align the marks with the horizon line to establish a vertical). Once you have done that, simply extend the intersections towards the VPs and then complete the hidden faces with the back edge by joining the new final intersections. You probably applied the very same method I described; in that case the source of error stems solely from the non vertical edges.
Rough perspective
You correctly applied the line extension method for convergence checks. Your boxes are roughly oriented towards the VPs, which is a good start. We are not aiming for perfect precision here, after all we are eyeballing the whole thing with a few additional steps, however I feel there's room for improvement at this stage. Some of your boxes tend to actually diverge, but it's mostly limited to one side, while the others broadly converge. More importantly, in my opinion, is that there's some improvement to do in how you apply 1 point perspective. Since we are working with 1 VP, each box should have 1 set of converging lines, while the remaining 2 sets remain vertical and horizontal. Again, since here we are not working with rulers things will be not very precise, but I notice that many of your boxes tend to have one or two lines belonging to the non converging sets noticeably more slanted than the rest. This appears me to be caused not by a misunderstanding in the rules of the exercise, as the other lines are broadly oriented correctly, but rather by placing the endpoints of your segments in a way that could benefit from more care. You could improve this for segments that are constrained in 2 fixed directions, instead of trying to place your point directly at the first try, by placing a "provisional" point by ghosting explicitly in one of the two directions and then checking your initial guess by ghosting in the other direction and seeing where the lines should actually intersect. On a different note, I think that it's worth mentioning that from this exercise on your lines look way more confident compared with the beginning of the lesson.
Rotated boxes
This and the next exercise are notoriously difficult for beginners, so it's very common to make mistakes here. The central cross has a quite wide range of rotation. The boxes in the corners however seem to follow the rotation only of the horizontal arm of the cross, resulting in an overall shape that looks more cylindrical than spherical and in boxes with faces that become less square the more you drift away from the cross. It may be worth to revisit this exercise later on during the course.
Organic perspective
The boxes correctly get bigger as they get closer to the viewer. You didn't shy away from making boxes overlap, which is good since overlapping shapes will play an important role later on. The boxes look rather wonky, but you shouldn't worry to much about it, you will have plenty of time to practice in the 250 box challenge.
Conlusion
I hope I didn't come off as harsh in my criticism. I feel that you made visible improvement during the course of your homework. Still, I think you may benefit from some additional practice before moving on to the 250 box challenge. For this reason, I will assign you some extra homework. Take all the time you need and when you are done, reply with your homework. Remember to always draw from the shoulder, ghost as long as you need and then place your mark fast and confidently. Good luck and good work!
Next Steps:
1 page of ellipses in planes
1 page of funnels
1 panel of forced perspective
2 panels of rough perspective (you can do all the 3 panels in the same page)
heres my revisions.
Good job! I see much improvement in your confidence, especially in the ellipses, who look much smoother than before. Now that your ellipses look confident try to focus gradually on other elements, such as symmetry and accuracy. In your planes the ellipses are broadly accurate in the sense that they come close to touching each side, but sometimes don't end up symmetrical. On the other hand, in the funnels the ellipses are fairly symmetrical, but going outwards they don't touch the sides of the funnels. You should try to reach a happy medium between these two situations. I also see improvement in your boxes. In the rough perspective some sides are still noticeably more slanted, but your precision has improved. The 250 box challenge will surely improve it even more. Overall, you did a good job and I feel you are ready to go on. Remember to stay motivated and revisit these exercises in your warmup routine. Good luck!
Next Steps:
Get your lesson badge (optional)
250 box challenge
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.