Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

10:56 PM, Saturday June 25th 2022

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I'm sorry the first half of these were smudged- I was using what was labelled as pen paper but clearly it wasn't the right material. I switched to regular printer paper around halfway through. Ghosted lines took me a bit to get the hang of until I thought of them as just sketching the line, but only actually drawing on the final stroke of the sketch. I'm still uncertain a lot of the time whether I'm drawing from my elbow or my shoulder. My paper also tends to get a bit crumpled on the edges by the end because I rotate it so much.

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9:06 AM, Friday July 1st 2022

Hey there, I'm Meta and I'll be your TA today, so let's get started.

Lines

Starting off with your superimposed lines, you were wobbling quite significantly to start with and this improved a little in your second page but you're clearly still focusing too much on accuracy here. There's a few less wobbles as you moved into the ghosted lines and planes however you may need to experiment a little more with the speed with which you're executing your lines - speed does not equal confidence but as a beginner, you may need to go a bit faster to override your brain's tendency to want to micromanage the movement of your arm.

Ellipses

Next, your tables of ellipses are off to a good start with a fair amount of variation in the size and shape of your ellipses and kept butted up against one another. I did notice you seemed to have the opposite problem here where you went too fast and lost control over your markmaking somewhat. This improves in your ellipses in planes however, where you've prioritised confidence over accuracy and made a clear attempt to hit the four sides of the plane. That said, make sure you're drawing through your ellipses a full 2-3 times as you often land short of the second go around. Finally, the alignment to the minor axis on your funnels is not bad, though you are once again getting quite loose with your ellipses and causing gaps between the ellipses.

Boxes

You've made a good attempt at keeping the horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line in your rough perspective exercise however you have not applied the error checking method at all as outlined in step 6. Make sure you're taking the time to read through the exercise instructions before you sit down to draw and check your homework against the examples. Your line confidence here is also not great - this is pretty normal as students often get a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of taking their lines and turning them into boxes so just remember to take your time to plan out each and every line of your box and execute confidently.

Next, on the back planes of your rotated boxes, you've done a pretty good job keeping the gaps tight and consistent, things get a little more haphazard on the front planes and because of this, it has resulted in a fair bit of guesswork, which has made it hard for you to rotate your boxes. That said, this exercise is intended as an introduction to certain concepts tackled further in the course.

Finally, you're getting a pretty good amount of variation in the size and rotation of your boxes in the organic perspective exercise which is starting to create a sense of depth in each frame. I particularly liked the instances where you overlapped the boxes, which pushed that sense of scale more.

Next Steps:

Please submit:

  • One more page of superimposed lines aiming for confidence and accepting the trajectory of your lines. Make sure to vary up the lengths of lines.

  • One more page of rough perspective, taking your time to execute each line with confidence and applying the error checking method as outlined in step 6.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:36 PM, Monday July 4th 2022

Here are my revisions. Definitely still having trouble with clean lines.

https://imgur.com/a/3hflhsN

8:15 PM, Thursday July 7th 2022

Sorry for the delay in getting back to your revisions, I've been flat out this week.

Definitely looking better here. Your superimposed lines are coming along well and you're doing a good job keeping the horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line in the rough perspective. Your estimation of perspective is not too far off the mark and where it does, it varies in exactly the ways we expect it to for beginners just starting out - less accurate the further the box is from the vanishing point.

With that, I'm marking this lesson as complete. Keep practicing these exercises in your warm-ups and I'm sure you'll see some good gains in line confidence by the end of the box challenge.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:25 PM, Thursday July 7th 2022

No worries, and thank you!

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