Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
6:25 PM, Saturday April 23rd 2022
Thank you for the help!
Great job on finishing lesson one! Your superimposed lines are looking great. They clearly start at the same point, and them spreading out at the end is to be expected. When it comes to the ghosted lines, they start and end very close to where they are supposed to, which is good, but I would pay attention to your confidence, as they are a bit wobbly. Don't slow down and make the line in one fluid movement. You may lose some of the accuracy and overshoot your endpoint, but it's always better to favor confidence over accuracy. I can see that you made this trade-off in your first page of ghosted planes. The lines are looking much less wobbly and much more confident, although they overshooting a bit at the corners and edges. Later you go back to wobbly lines without overshoot. I would say to not worry about the overshoot too much. Focus on confidence, and try to stop your lines at the right endpoint, but don't worry too much about it if you don't. This comes with practice.
Your ellipses for the most part fit snugly against each other and the sides of the boxes, without overlapping too much. Looking great! Sometimes I see a line in the middle of them, as if you finished an ellipse, lifted up your pen, but then bounced back on the paper for a second. Here it could help to draw fewer ellipses (you don't have to fill up the empty spaces with smaller ones!), so you can really focus on every individual one. Pay attention to how your arm is moving and ghost before putting your pen on the paper. It could also help to get ready to draw, but then first look at your arm to see in what position it actually is. It's possible that you're angling your wrist in a way that makes it hard to control what your hands does exactly. On how to move your hand, you can refer to this page: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/2
Finally, your plotted perspective is looking good. You drew through the boxes and overlapped some of them. You could try to be a little more focused when hatching (once again confidence + focus > accuracy/fixing overshoot). For your free hand boxes, make sure to not go over lines multiple times, unless you want to add line weight. If a line is off, don't worry about it. You don't have to correct it or it will end up looking messy.
Organic perspective is looking great with many different sizes. You could push the rotation a bit more, however. Your rotated boxes are also looking very good. You got all of them and you can clearly see that they are rotating. One thing I would keep in mind, though, is to not hatch places that are behind other boxes. This way you could show their hierarchy better.
All in all, great first lesson! Next step is a 250 box challenge. Just keep in mind your line confidence and don't worry too much about inaccuracies. Try to push perspective and rotations as well in the challenge!
Next Steps:
Next up, draw 250 boxes!
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
On the flipside, they tend to be on the cheaper side of things, so if you're just getting started (beginners tend to have poor pressure control), you're probably going to destroy a few pens - going cheaper in that case is not a bad idea.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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