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9:43 PM, Monday October 10th 2022
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 with all of your wavering at the opposite end. I'm noticing that you are getting quite a bit of wobble in your ghosted lines and planes. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling This is also quite present in some of the later exercises although I am seeing improvement with your final exercise but I still want to mention this advice here so you can understand what the problem likely is.
This is the important part we need to be focusing on and the real problem I'm seeing:
You're hesitating as you execute the line, rather than drawing with a confident motion. Finally committing to a mark can definitely be quite daunting, but it's integral that you get used to accepting that mistakes do happen. Things go wrong - you can prepare as much as possible (and you should) but the moment your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has already passed. Now you must commit yourself, push through with confidence, and execute your line. It's also worth remembering: we can still work with a line that is smooth and even, but there's not much that can be done with a wobbly one.
What's most likely happening is that you are worrying about accuracy too much while making your mark and it's causing you to slow down your stroke to compensate which is giving you quite a bit of wobble in your lines. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced.
Your ellipses are largely suffering from the exact same issue which really just goes to show that once you fix this problem it will improve every aspect of your drawing and that improvement is evident with your organic perspective boxes and the line confidence I see there. Your tables of ellipses is coming along okay. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and while you seem to be focused on consistent ellipse shape you are getting quite a bit of line wobble trying to be accurate. This is carried over into your ellipses in planes and you are still deforming your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed This is likely happening because you are 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 having the same issues. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and wobbly linework so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.
The plotted perspective looks good but I do want to discuss your added hatching very briefly. If you want to add hatch marks to the plane of a box that's fine but you need to be treating it the same as every other line you would draw for these lessons. You never want to be scribbling in lines thoughtlessly like you did here. Every mark you make should be through through and planned. I'm also seeing some wobbly lines here when you were supposed to used a ruler for the entire exercise so I'm not exactly sure what happened here. Another issue is that you have slanting back legs on some of your boxes which should all be perpendicular to the horizon line(straight up and down). Your rough perspective exercises turned out decently. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling 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. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.
Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. Your linework is starting to look much more confident with this exercise. Nice work. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes but one of the reasons this starting falling apart on you a bit is because you didn't keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/guessing While you struggled with the rotations here I'm very pleased that you completed the entire exercise and gave it your best shot. A big part of learning how to draw is getting used to working outside of your comfort zone. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle.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 definitely pretty wonky throughout and you need to develop a better sense for how box lines converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.
Overall this was a really good submission that showed quite a lot of growth when it comes to line confidence and quality. I think you still need to get there with your ellipses but the last two box exercises were showing massive improvement in terms of confident linework. Keep practicing those ellipses during your warmups. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge!
Next Steps:
The 250 Box Challenge
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