Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

10:50 PM, Saturday September 26th 2020

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Here is my Lesson 1 submission. Looking forward to your feedback. Have a great weekend. Having worked on the ellipses and boxes already is making it just a bit easier to rotate a reference to draw it a bit from a different angle.

Regards,

BenZenLines

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5:50 AM, Sunday September 27th 2020

Hey! Let’s see~

Your superimposed lines look good. They’re smooth and properly lined up at the start, but not always of a consistent trajectory, so be mindful of that. Your ghosted lines start off a little wobbly, but get better in the ghosted planes exercise. Just the same, I’ll remind you that it’s far more important for our lines to be confident, than it is for them to be accurate. More on this later.

Your table of ellipses exercise looks solid. The ellipses are confident, circular, and their rotations nice and snug. They’re of a consistent degree/angle in a frame, and you’ve tried out a bunch of them, too. They do lose a bit of their roundness in the ellipses in planes exercise, which is expected, but, just the same, incorrect. Be careful not to have your priorities backwards. A smooth, rounded ellipse that doesn’t quite touch all 4 sides of the plane is correct. One that does, but at the cost of its smoothness/roundness, is not. The reasoning for this is that what we’re after is marks that convey a feeling of solidity. Confident marks do this, and we can work around the inaccuracy. Wobbly marks do not, and their accuracy does them no favors at that point. Your funnels look good- the minor axis properly cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves, and the ellipses themselves look nice, too.

Nice job on the plotted perspective exercise- it looks clean. The rough perspective exercise is mostly good, the boxes being as big as they are, and their convergences being on-point, but line quality takes a bit of a hit here. In addition to the things I said in the first 2 paragraphs, I’ll also remind you that what you’re doing here, is no different from what you’re doing there. You’re still drawing lines, one at a time, from point A to point B. If they can be confident in your planes exercise, there’s no reason they can’t be confident here, too. That’s what we refer to as a unit of work. So try not to get too overwhelmed by the big picture, if you can. Solid attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. Though it doesn’t quite rotate, the boxes are nice and snug. You’ve seen it through to the end, which, really, is all we’re looking for, and even gone out of your way to add some hatching to it. Next time, see if you can make the boxes themselves a little bigger, to give your brain some more room to think, and spend a little longer thinking about why each box looks the way it does, and you’ll do much better- I promise. Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks great. The sheer number of boxes, their many overlaps, as well as the increase in size, and mooostly consistent, shallow foreshortening, do a lot to convey the illusion. There’s the occasional diverging line, sure, but we’ve got a whole challenge to take care of that. As your work here is solid, feel free to move on to it.

Next Steps:

250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:22 AM, Friday October 2nd 2020

Hey benj,

Thanks for the great feedback for Lesson 1. Even getting started with the 250 box challenge, I can see where lines get a bit wobbly or inked up, especially in hatching toward the end of the ghosted lines.

Also especially your reminder to stay focused on each line ahead, one at a time, is something I’ll definitely work with.

Thanks again.

Regards,

BenZenLines

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