Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

2:41 PM, Thursday July 18th 2024

Lesson 1 homework - Album on Imgur

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11:07 PM, Friday July 19th 2024

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are having a few issues I'd like to discuss that is affecting your ellipses in planes as well. The main issue is that you are getting wobbly linework and deforming your ellipse shape at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/deformed You are compromising your overall ellipse shape by adjusting for accuracy midstroke. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. While I admire that you are really drawing through every ellipse you are perhaps going overkill here try and draw through 2 - 3 times max not 5+ times like I'm seeing here as it just makes things a bit messier and harder to read. Your ellipses in funnels are having the same issues and you are also tilting your ellipses off the minor axis at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/notaligned This is something you should always consider when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a good start but there is room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and smoothness so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/wobblinglines This is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced. The other possibility is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist for some of these lines. Just something to keep an eye on. You should be drawing from your shoulder for basically every line you draw, even shorter ones. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only. You are doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. The rotations on this second one turned out quite well although I am still noticing slight line wobble throughout this exercise so keep an eye on that. I can see that you were a bit perplexed by the corners but please don't just leave something blank if you don't understand it as you will be assigned revisions in the future for doing so. A big part of learning how to draw is getting used to working outside of your comfort zone so at least attempt to put something down even if you don't fully understand it. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting more comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great and is a substantial improvement over your previous box exercises. Nice work! While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence improved quite a bit as you worked through box exercsies. Keep practicing those ellipses during your warmups as they were definitely the weaker area of this submission. Otherwise, I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
1:25 AM, Saturday July 20th 2024

Thanks for the critique and observations. I

appreciate the feedback!

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