Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

3:09 AM, Thursday January 14th 2021

Drawabox Lesson #1 NiNo - Album on Imgur

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Here is all of my Lesson 1 homework assignments. It took me over 2 months to get all of this done due to school assignments and winter break. I now have more time to concentrate on Drawabox, therefore I won't rush as much with the other lessons. If I have to redo any or all of the assignments, I'd be glad to.

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9:13 PM, Thursday January 14th 2021

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point but I think you are focusing a little heavily on accuracy and it's causing your line to wobble quite a bit. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/8/wobbling You were still getting a bit of wobble on your ghosted lines but I'm already seeing improvement with your ghosted planes particularly the second page. You are getting better at using the ghosting method to get consistently confident linework with a decent degree of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses is coming along okay. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and I'm seeing noticeable improvement in terms of your ellipse shapes from the first to second page. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. You are still deforming your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed This is likely happening because you too worried about accuracy and are probably slowing down your stroke to compensate. 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. Your ellipses in funnels are fine for the most part although you are still a little too focused on accuracy and deforming them at times. Your ellipses are off to a nice start but you should definitely work on getting smoother ellipse shapes overall and worry a little less about accuracy. There's still plenty of room for improvement so keep practicing these during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspectives turned out pretty good. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. Once again 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. 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.

The rotated box exercise was clearly a bit of a struggle. 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 but this sort of fell apart on you because you didn't keep your gaps narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/guessing You are struggling quite a bit with the rotations on these which is perfectly fine given the difficulty of this exercise. You are also running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective which is very evident on the left side. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating 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 comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are decent for the most part but there are some wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a pretty good submission. I think your line confidence grew quite a bit with these pages but your ellipses could be a bit smoother so keep up your practice on those. Otherwise, I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey fairly well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:38 AM, Friday January 15th 2021

Thank you so much! I've been learing how to draw completely on my own for the past year, and I'm glad to be a part of a community like this one.

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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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