Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
4:55 PM, Monday September 13th 2021
Sorry about the lighting and my camera's poor quality. I did these at the very beginning of summer, and only just now submitted them. Thanks for the help
Hello, and welcome to drawabox. Let’s take this one exercise at a time, shall we?
Starting with your superimposed lines, these looks solid – they’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, also, though you’ll sometimes alter their trajectory. Most often, this happens at the end of them, so what’s likely happening is that you’re being a little too conscious of the end point, and course-correcting to meet it – try not to.
The table of ellipses exercise looks fantastic. Your ellipses are smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through (sometimes a few too many times, but that’s alright). The ellipses in planes exercise looks solid, too. Despite these new, more complicated frames, the ellipses maintain their prior smoothness/roundness. In the funnels exercise, there’s 2 instances (I’m guessing you’ll be able to point them out), where you’ve completely ignored the minor axis. This is, of course, not something you should do – in fact, lining ellipses up to it is the main point of this exercise; otherwise, it’s just a slightly altered table of ellipses exercise.
The plotted perspective exercise looks solid. Small tip, the back line needs to be perpendicular to the horizon. Minor errors will make its start/end points suggest that it’s not, but in those cases you’ll need to compensate, and draw it correctly, even if this involves ignoring those points.
The rough perspective exercise is a little mixed. The convergences look solid – they start off strong, and improve throughout the set. The linework, unfortunately, is not the same. Remind yourself that there’s no difference between these lines, and ones you drew in previous exercises. Regardless of the big picture, what you’re doing hasn’t changed – so try not to get overwhelmed; it’s just lines.
Solid attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. Regardless of how it came out, what matters is that you’ve seen it through to the end. Let’s talk about how it came out, though. The boxes do a good job of rotating, at first, but start to lose their way at the diagonals. This is about the point where you stop being as mindful of their neighboring edges, and using them as guides on what further lines should do, also. Of course, the two are connected. This is not necessarily wrong, mind you. As you get better at drawing boxes, you’ll start having to make certain informed decisions that perhaps conflict with what your neighboring edges are telling you. Until then, however, it’s best to stick to the instructions.
The organic perspective exercise looks quite good. There’s the occasional box that’s a little too foreshortened (too dramatic), but the majority of them consistently shallow. This, and their increase in size, do a solid job of conveying the illusion we’re after – nicely done.
Next Steps:
Solid work on this lesson. I’ll mark it as complete, so head on over to the box challenge.
Oh thanks a lot! I only have one question on what you mean by the rotated diagonal boxes are "touching." I didnt quite understand
I can't actually find where I said that, but I suppose explaining the diagonal boxes issue once more will clarify it. On the exercise, we mention how paying attention to how neighboring edges of a line behave is important, since that'll ultimately give us some hints as to how our current lines should behave. This part. It's important, to be able to do this, that our edges are close to each other. You'll see in this example that not all of them are - the red one, in particular, is way off. I hope this makes sense.
Okay, gotcha I have a better grip on it now thanks!
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.
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