Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
8:39 PM, Tuesday March 24th 2020
Hi! This is kind of my first time drawing. I wanted to try something new, so my sister recommended me this site!
Well you have come to the right place, Toasted. I'm Sven, one of the TAs and I'll be going over your work today so let's get started.
Starting with your super imposed lines, you are definitely attacking this in a very confident manner which is what we like to see. Your lines are drawn from the shoulder with no signs of hesitation. While you do have a significant amount of fraying in your grouping that you will eventually want to tighten up, for now you are off to the right start. The same goes for your ghosted lines; they are drawn confidently, but I am seeing a significant amount of arcing indicating more elbow use than shoulder so keep practicing using the shoulder to draw. Additionally you are overshooting by a fairly consistent margin so as you practice these in your warm ups I suggest lifting the pen when you want your line to stop instead of trying to stop your arm. For various reasons I find it easier and so do a lot of other people.
Overall your ellipses are on the right track. There is some understandable unsteadiness in these but that is ok since learning to draw an ellipse from the shoulder is a difficult task for everyone. Your ellipses in planes are pretty good. For the most part you are hitting or coming close to contacting the correct points on the edges of the planes causing the ellipses to sit snugly in a space you've defined rather than floating arbitrarily. Your tables exercise is showing consistency in your ellipses, and unfortunately a consistent point on top of them hehe. As you practice and get more comfortable this will go away, don't worry. Finally, in your funnels, while the ellipses are definitely suffering from trying to balance so many things simultaneously, your alignment of minor axis to funnel axis is pretty good on these.
Moving on to your rough perspective, your line quality overall is ok. There is some shakiness but nothing too terrible. I am more concerned about the re-drawing of several lines. Remember that each line should be prepared and drawn with care and only executed after proper ghosting. Re-drawing lines will only serve to bring more attention to mistakes that otherwise would most likely be overlooked, so it's a bad habit to start and I try to break it from students early and often. Your lines are properly oriented - horizontal parallel to horizon, vertical perpendicular, and your converging lines are on the right track. As you continue practicing things like accuracy to distant points will get better.
I want to commend you on finishing the rotated boxes. It is one of the hardest things we ask of new students and all we ask is for a complete attempt to the best of your abilities, and that is what you have brought. The goal here isn't for any good drawing, it's purely to show students how many different types of problems there are to solve when drawing and a few ways to start tackling them. Your boxes have the start of rotation, but for the most part you are skewing them instead, as explained more here so give this gif some time to just look and absorb what's going on, specifically with the motion of the VPs driving the rotation of the boxes. Additionally you could be packing your boxes a lot tighter together to leverage adjacent lines as perspective guides to help you more. Overall though, be proud of pushing through this wall, as it stops many hopeful artists!
Finally, let's take a look at your organic perspective. Your compositions are lively and full of boxes which means full of mileage and that's what I love to see. Your perspective still needs work, understandably so as you're a beginner. Right now you're drawing boxes in such a way that the near planes end up smaller than the far ones, which is opposite of reality where lines converge (that is, get closer together) as they travel away from the viewer. You are doing a good job starting to learn to sell the illusion of depth on a flat sheet of paper - your boxes get smaller indicating they are going away from the viewer, and overlapping boxes tell the viewer's eye and brain that these boxes all exist in a single unified space. Good job.
Next Steps:
And with that, your lesson 1 is complete! Your next step is the 250 box challenge. Make sure you are taking time out to draw things not for improvement as outlined in lesson 0 and be sure to read all the instructions and resources regarding the box challenge. Keep up the good work and see you next time.
Hi! Thanks so much for the feedback. It is really helpful. It says "When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions." Does that mean doing the 250 box challenge, or actually re-doing the homework sets that could be improved on as mentioned in the critique?
Oh I'm sorry, I just hit the wrong button. Your lesson 1 is complete so go on ahead to the 250 box challenge
Next Steps:
Go forth and conquer boxes!
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When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
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