Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

8:41 PM, Thursday May 7th 2020

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/5Ka2OKO.jpg

accidentially deleted it from critiquing

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8:31 PM, Monday May 11th 2020

Hey there apok, good job finishing lesson 1. Unfortunately you linked to the first image of your submission instead of the album, so go ahead and change that link, let me know, and then I'll get to your critique.

Next Steps:

Update your submission link and let me know.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
10:30 PM, Monday May 11th 2020

https://m.imgur.com/a/uVMJXoS

thats so me... Thank you!

1:51 AM, Tuesday May 12th 2020

No problem haha. Let's get to it!

Lines - Your super imposed lines are looking confident but I'm seeing some arcing showing less shoulder and more elbow action so make sure that you are practicing engaging the shoulder. Your ghosted lines are also looking confident and much more from the shoulder. Your accuracy on them is good and you are doing a good job starting and stopping on the points.

Ellipses - Your ellipses are right on track. You are drawing with your shoulder and drawing through appropriately and they are fairly confident. There aren't any major flat portions or sharp corners so that is good. Your ellipses in planes are making pretty good contact with the planes for most of them, but there are some where you have gaps which leads to the ellipses floating around within the bounds instead of being snugly fit. Your ellipses in tables do a better job of keeping things snug with no room for ambiguity, but you lose some control here. No worries, repeated practice of these exercises in your warm ups will lead to steady improvement. With your ellipses in funnels you are doing a good job keeping the minor axes aligned to the funnel axes and keeping them in contact with the boundary edges.

Rough Perspective - Your lines here are hit-or-miss when it comes to confidence. Some lines are very crisp while others have a lot of wobbles. Make sure you are ghosting and preparing each line when drawing. For the most part your vertical lines are perpendicular to the horizon and your horizontals are parallel resulting in properly oriented boxes. Your converging lines are where we expect for students at this stage and your extensions lines were applied correctly. The big take away here is to make sure you are treating every line with equal care and confidence.

Rotated Boxes - You did a nice job here. The only goal for students is to finish this to the best of the their abilities so you can be exposed to new types of spatial puzzles and solution methods. One thing I am noticing is you are redrawing some lines which goes against why we use ink - that is, to respect lines and be forced to think carefully before we make every mark. Additionally, it adds visual clutter so it's best to snip that habit early before it takes root. In terms of the actual exercise, you were not rotating your boxes but rather shifting them over and skewing them so watch this gif again and study how the rotation is driven by the motion of the vanishing points along the axis. You did a good job ekeping your boxes packed together to let you allow you to leverage adjacent lines as perspective guides, but you neglected to fill in corner boxes on the top half and bottom left. Sometimes the boxes won't look how we would initially expect them to which is why we have to stick to those guide lines and just go with it. Overall though, not a bad first attempt and you pushed through. Other than those redrawn lines you did a good job keeping things clean and you drew nice and large to give your brain lots of space to work through things.

Organic Perspective - Your compositions are pretty good. You have a lot of movement but not a lot in terms of pushing the illusion of 3d space. Your boxes don't have a lot of scale variation to convey fore,mid, and background so everything feels kind of flat. Frame 2 on page 1 did the best job of that as you have some nice small boxes to make it feel as if things are trailing away. Your perspective is on the right track and will improve a lot in the next steps so nothing to worry about there. You are still redrawing some lines here and there so I'll reiterate not to do that.

So overall you are off to a good start and I'll be marking this lesson as complete. Your next stop is the 250 box challenge so make sure to take your time and be mindful of your line confidence. Keep up the good work.

Next Steps:

250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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