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11:02 AM, Friday March 1st 2024
Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on making it past Lesson 1. I’m birthday Benj, and I’ll be taking a look at your submission today.
Starting from your superimposed lines, these are well done. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your ghosted lines are quite confident, too, and I like this taper you have at the end of them! You seem to abandon that in your planes, however. Neither is incorrect, so no stress on your part, but the former does look quite a bit more dynamic, in my opinion. Besides that, however, your planes do a good job of maintaining their confidence, and I’m pleased to see that you’ve not forgotten to plot start/end points for their non-diagonal center lines – most students do!
Onto the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise is well done. You struggled with them a little in the first page, I notice, but they improve greatly by page 2 – well done! They are a little samey (I’m here referring to their degrees/angles), but what’s here is smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through, so you’re in a good place. The ellipses in planes do a good job of maintaining that same level of confidence, despite these more complicated frames. The funnels do struggle occasionally, but only with their smaller ellipses (which is normal; the smaller a mark, the harder it is to engage the shoulder for it). Besides that, however, their ellipses are snug, and properly cut in half, so all is well.
The plotted perspective exercise looks clean. With regards to the back line, we’d have much preferred that you simply estimated its location (such that it’s properly perpendicular to the horizon, as it should be), rather than respecting your points, which look like that because of an accumulation of small errors, but it’s not a huge issue, either way. The rough perspective exercise shows some great improvement throughout the set. (The very last frame is a little sloppy, but I suppose you were eager to finish? :P) By the end, your linework is confident, and your convergences nearly perfect – well done. Good attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. Not only have you seen it through to the end, but you’ve even taken the time to add some lineweight/hatching to it, really cleaning it up. I’m easily able to tell that your boxes here are snug, and rotate nicely, both up front and in the back. Finally, good work with the organic perspective exercise. Your boxes here are well constructed, and they flow well as a result of their size, and foreshortening. I’m not sure who told you to reinforce their corners, but I don’t think that was good advice. We want things to be as clean and as uniform as possible, ideally. They didn’t lose too much from the exercise though, so no stress.
Next Steps:
I’m happy to mark this lesson as complete, and send you off to the box challenge. Good luck!
The Art of Brom
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.