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9:47 AM, Monday February 3rd 2020
Hey there, Mara - TA Meta here, let's get started with your submission, beginning with your superimposed lines. These are looking quite smooth and confident, which is great to see. You've limited your fraying to one end of the line which shows that you're taking the time to line up your pen.
Next, your ghosted lines and planes exhibit a good amount of confidence and while there's some minor arcing in your ghosted lines, you've mostly ironed this out in your ghosted planes and I'm sure you will continue to tighten that linework up with time and mileage.
Next up are your tables of ellipses and these are looking quite confident! There's a few instances where you've lost control over the shape of your ellipses, which might mean that you need to slow up your pace just a little bit to gain a little more control, but not so much that you start wobbling. You'll need to experiment with this to find what works for you.
Your ellipses in planes are also looking quite confident though I do see one or two where you're clearly preoccupied with accuracy at the expense of the confidence and shape of your ellipses. We almost always want to prioritise confidence and flow over accuracy, so try not to get too caught up with whether your lines will hit the mark exactly.
Finally, your funnels are again showing the same kind of lack of control that was occasionally present in your tables of ellipses, however to a greater degree. Some of these are exhibiting poor spacing between the ellipses and many of the ellipses are misaligned from the minor axis. The funnel at the top in the middle is one of your strongest here. Make sure you incorporate this exercise into your warm-up routines as being able to align an ellipse to a minor axis is a key skill in drawing believable cylinders and organic forms.
Onto your rough perspective now and you seem to have struggled a bit keeping your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line, particularly on the rear planes of your boxes. Your confidence has also wavered somewhat here and the heaviness of your marks indicates you may have been pressing harder on your pen. It's important to tackle one line at a time when we draw boxes, with the appropriate planning and confident execution we would give our ghosted lines exercise.
Next your rotated boxes started off quite strongly, with keeping the gaps between your boxes consistent however things got a little chaotic as you drew the second layer of boxes and lost the hints that the tight gaps gave you. As a result, you haven't managed the full degree of rotation here and your outer cardinal boxes particularly are just slightly elongated versions of the ones before them. All that said, these last two exercises are designed to introduce you to a new kind of spatial problem you may not have thought of and prime you for the kinds of problems you'll face in the 250 box challenge.
Finally, your organic perspective is not showing a lot of variation in the scale of your boxes. The variation in the size of the boxes creates the illusion that we are looking deeper than our page and that the boxes go back in space. Your boxes are showing quite a lot of issues with divergence and distortion, however again, this exercise is there to introduce you to a new idea and it's not expected that you'll be able to nail it down first go.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge, ensuring to plan out and confidently execute each of the lines of your boxes.
Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.