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10:02 PM, Monday June 1st 2020

Hey there james, good job finishing lesson 1. There are a lot of critiques in the stack, so let's get right to it.

Lines - Your superimposed lines are looking a little wobbly here. Remember that you should be focusing on using your shoulder to get confident sharp lines and focus on that more than accuracy. Shoulder action should be focused on then accuracy will come with time. Similarly with your ghosted lines, remember to be using your shoulder to get those confident, smooth lines.

Ellipses - As you progress through the ellipses your confidence improves. By the end you are doing a good job drawing them smoothly, confidently, and keeping your draw throughs tight. With your ellipses in tables, watch out for leaving room for the ellipses to float a round. This ambiguity is something we want to eliminate as constructional drawing is all about concrete connections between steps - solid contact with forms, snug fits...it'll make more sense in lesson 2. Your ellipses in planes are pretty good in terms of making contact with the edges so they are fit snugly with no room to float around. Your ellipses in funnels are really nice in terms of confidence, but your minor axies alignment is hit and miss so watch out for that and keep practicing.

Rough Perspective - As we move on to your boxes, your lines are looking shaky. Take as long as you need to for each box, each line. Yoru line orientation is pretty good - horizontals parallel t o the horizon and verticals perpendicular. Your lines however have a lot of redrawing going on. This goes against why we use ink - planning each line, drawing confidently, and working with the results. Additionally it causes a lot of visual clutter so break yourself of this redrawing habit now before it really comes back to bite you. Your converging lines are on track and as you practice drawing towards far off points your accuracy will improve.

Rotated Boxes - This is a difficult exercise and you ddi a good job pushing through to completion. The only goal for students here is to complete it as best as you can so that you see new types of spatial problems and ways to solve them. Your lines are still a little shaky but they are getting more confident. In terms of rotating your boxes, you could definitely push the rotation more so watch this gif and study how the rotation is caused by the motion of the vanishing points along the axis. In terms of using adjacent lines as perspective guides, you could have put your boxes closer together to better leverage this technique. Overall though you pushed through to completion and that is the success.

Organic Perspective - Your lines are getting better here and it seems that you are trying to apply line weight which is great. Your boxes are looking pretty solid; you are drawing your lines pretty parallel instead of converging to vanishing points but as you get more practice in the 250 box challenge it'll improve. In terms of 3d space you are doing great at conveying depth - your fore, mid, and background are all clearly defined by scaling your boxes appropriately. Additionally, you are overlapping forms which causes the brain to perceive them as occupying the same space. All of this combined causes the viewer to believe in the illusion of 3d space. Good job!

So now your lesson 1 is complete. Keep working on your line quality in warm ups, but I will be moving you on to the box challenge. Make sure to read all the instructions and keep up the good work.

Next Steps:

Move on to the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:31 PM, Tuesday June 2nd 2020
edited at 11:39 PM, Jun 2nd 2020

Thanks for the critique, Svendogee! Btw, cool TIE interceptor! It's nuts to me that for you it's a "quick sketch"!!

I'll keep working these exercises as warm ups, focusing on these points:


1. Reduce wobble

2. Draw from the shoulder

3. Ellipse contact with plane edges

4. Ellipse minor axis alignment

5. No line redraws (other than one extra to add weight)

6. Rotated boxes: more rotation and tighter spacing

7. Organic perspective: Better vanishing

Cheers ~

edited at 11:39 PM, Jun 2nd 2020
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