After I've become able to set aside 30 mins per day on DaB exercises, I decided to start from Lesson 1 all over again. Since the website said I should finish all the homework in a whole lesson before asking for feedback on it... Well, here I am!
Don't hold back with your criticism; if I did that badly, I'm more than willing to start over from Lesson 1 again.
Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. I'll start by saying I appreciate your enthusiam and the amount of work you put into this submission. Start your imposed lines are looking pretty good. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point on these and while you are having more significant wavering on longer lines and curves this is pretty much the norm and something you will improve at. Your ghosted lines and planes are a tad wobbly but I'm seeing a lot of improvement in your line quality in general by the time you get to your last few exercises like the organic perspective one. The wobble is probably happening because you are still thinking about accuracy while making your mark. This is one of the reasons we use the ghosting method. So we handle all of our thinking and planning before we actually draw and when we do go to make our mark we rely on the muscle memory we built up. Also try and make sure you are always drawing from your shoulder even on shorter lines. Using the wrist for anything besides details tends to give a bit of a wobbly result until you have much better hand dexterity.
Your table of ellipses is looking good. You are doing a nice job drawing through all of your ellipses. I appreciate the enthusiasm of trying to pack ellipses in everywhere but it probably isn't necessary and is making judging this a tad harder than it normally would be. You are probably better off just sticking with one size ellipse per sections for this exercise. You are having some issues with deformed ellipses here and there that you should probably be aware of. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed Like I was saying previously this typically happens because you start worrying about accuracy mid stroke. So just make sure you are ghosting everything before hand and trying to rely on the muscle memory of the motion that you have built up previously. Your ellipses in planes are much improved in this regard. You are doing a great job here of going for a overall smooth ellipse over accuracy. Accuracy is the ultimate goal but being able to nail a consistent smooth ellipse shape is your first priority and these are a step in the right direction. The ellipses in funnels look fine besides a few slight issues with deformed ellipses. One thing you can do with this exercise is keep narrower degree ellipses in the center and widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/step3 Your ellipses are off to a good start but there is plenty of room for improvement here so keep practicing them during your warmups.
Plotted perspective looks great nothing to mention here. The linework for your rough perspective boxes is a bit scratchy and wobbly. This might be happening for a few different reasons. One is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist. Always try and draw from your shoulder with confidence even on shorter lines like these. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only. Another is that you are either skipping the ghosting method or just not ghosting enough. Otherwise this looks pretty good and you did a nice job extending the lines back on your boxes. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were a bit off but that will get better with practice.
Nice job on the rotated box exercise. This is a tough one and while you didn't nail it you did a few things really well. You did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps consistent between your boxes. Your spatial thinking still isn't quite there yet and you didn't quite nail the rotations you needed to make. This is a good exercise to come back to after you finish the 250 box challenge to see how much your spatial thinking has improved. In some cases you weren't rotating your boxes at all and that's something you can look out for. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating Finally, your organic perspective exercise look decent. Your line quality is improving and it shows here. Keep using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder. Your accuracy and line quality will keep getting better and better the more you do that. Your box constructions can still use some work though and you will get a lot of practice with that during the 250 box challenge.
This was a good submission with a lot of work put into it. I think you are showing some nice improvements as well and you are understaning most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge.
Thank you very much for your critique! :> You were correct with your guesses as to why my lines sometimes look scratchy and such; while I'm better with ghosting consistency now, I sometimes unconsciously went back to non-ghosting.
I'll be sure to keep up with the warmups as you suggested. In fact, for a couple weeks now, I've had a regimen where every other day is a drill day, where I split my daily 30-40 mins between 3 exercises. If I really have done well enough on Lesson 1, then I'll alter the drill days so they spare at least 10 mins for the 250-Box Challenge.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
