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10:22 PM, Friday May 15th 2020

So! Looking through your work, you definitely put a lot of effort into absorbing the instructions and following them to the best of your ability, but there is one issue that you struggled with, that shows its way through the entire set. Specifically, it comes down to executing your lines with confidence.

Starting with your super imposed lines, you've got a good start. Your lines waver a little but you're mostly trying to commit to maintaining a consistent trajectory from the moment your pen touches the page. Your second page of this does hesitate a little more however, which tells me that you're prioritizing the accuracy of your stroke over the smooth flow of the line. Still not too bad, but this is a little bit of a red flag in terms of what you're treating as most important.

This issue hits its peak with the ghosted lines. The ghosting method is all about breaking the process of drawing into multiple steps, each with its own responsibilities and priorities. First we identify the nature of the line we want to make, the job it is meant to accomplish, and so on. We pin down where it starts and ends, find a comfortable angle of approach, and so on. This is planning. Then we move onto the preparation phase, going through the motion to take this specific task your brain is consciously focusing on, and start pushing those marching orders down into your muscle memory. We repeat it over and over so your arm can accomplish this without thinking, without steering the mark with your eyes. Finally, we execute the mark with confidence, and with absolutely no hesitation. From the moment our pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed, and all we can do is push through and move on. Mistakes happen, and it's important to accept that - to give in and execute the mark more slowly, steering it with your eyes, is to give up before you've even made the attempt.

I explain this concept of multiple phases with different responsibilities further here in an answer I gave another student. It may be worth reading through.

Now your ghosted planes do actually get a little better. There's still wobbling, so you are still hesitating as you execute the mark, but it's not as prevalent. Still a major thing to address.

Moving forward into your ellipses, the same thing applies here. Don't forget that the ghosting method is meant to apply to every single mark we draw - including our ellipses. Now, one thing that is intended to help students execute their marks with greater confidence is drawing through their ellipses. That's drawing the full elliptical shape two full times before lifting your pen. From what I can see, at best you're continuing around the shape one and a half times, sometimes only once. You need to take greater care to employ this technique and really lean into executing with confidence. This will keep your ellipses more evenly shaped, and it will help avoid the tendency to make them stiff and rigid. It may throw off your accuracy a little as well, but proper use of the ghosting method will help reinforce this aspect without sacrificing the evenness of your shape.

One last point about your ellipses, specifically the funnels exercise. It seems your ellipses are pretty consistently slanting a little relative to the minor axis - that is to say that they're slightly misaligned, but all in the same amounts. For this, you can try rotating your page a little differently before drawing the strokes to bring them back into proper alignment.

Jumping down to your rough perspective boxes, your use of the ghosting method is continuing to improve (your lines are definitely smoother in many areas), though it is notable that you've got some lines that are slanting relative to where they should be. Don't forget that in this exercise, our lines follow a very limited set of possible behaviours, as explained here. Your horizontal lines run parallel to the horizon, your verticals run perpendicular to the horizon, and the lines that recede into the distance will converge towards the vanishing point. The last one being off is normal and expected - but getting the first two right is mostly a matter of being aware of how they should behave in the first place.

One last point about this exercise - here and there you have a tendency to correct your marks, going back over ones you feel were incorrect. This piles ink on top of the problematic areas, which in turn draws more attention to them. It's best just to leave them be, and correcting them automatically like this is a bad habit to develop.

Skipping down to your rotated boxes, this exercise is meant to be difficult, and it really just serves as an introduction to the idea of how not every form will adhere to the same handful of vanishing points in a scene. You've made a valiant attempt, but like many before you, this didn't really go too well. There are two main reasons:

  1. Along your major axes, as shown here, your boxes are not rotating relative to one another (aside from the center one). They're converging towards the same vanishing points.

  2. You're maintaining consistent and narrow gaps between certain sections, but there are key places where your gaps become inconsistent. We can basically separate them into the major axes (the middle vertical column and horizontal row), and each corner quadrant. When you break from the major axes into any of the quadrants, your gaps rely much more on guesswork than simply watching the neighbouring edges as shown in the diagram for this step.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a good start. Like the rotated boxes, this one's an introduction to the idea of freely rotating boxes in space with no neighbours on which to base our line orientations. It's a hard one, and it's the sort of thing we'll continue to work on in the next step in order to get your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points.

Before we get to that though, I do want to address the hesitation in your execution. It's there throughout all of your ellipses, and while your straight lines definitely improve, there's definitely still room for improvement there. As such, I'll be asking you to do 2 pages of planes with ellipses. This'll give you the chance to really get more focused exercise in with both ghosting your straight lines and your ellipses, and executing both with a focus on a confident, hesitation-free stroke.

Next Steps:

Please submit 2 pages of planes with ellipses.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:56 AM, Saturday May 16th 2020

Whoa. This is an amazing critique. Thanks for the time and effort you took in reviewing this. It helps alot I can see why this resource is raved about so much.

Here is my assignment and I really tried to focus on your feedback of confident, hesitation-free stroke. Personally, I feel like my line work for the planes were more comfortable, however, the ellipses definately took an accuracy hit.

As requested:

ReworkAssignment

5:28 PM, Saturday May 16th 2020

That's certainly a move in the right direction, though with continued practice in your use of the ghosting method and being sure to draw from your shoulder, you should continue to see improvement. One other thing to keep in mind is that you did end up drawing your individual planes quite small, leaving a lot of room in between. Often times when students draw smaller, it interferes with their ability to think through spatial problems, and also gets in the way of them employing their whole arm while drawing. Drawing larger can help in both these areas, so in the future, be sure to take full advantage of the space available to you on the page.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.

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