Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

3:51 AM, Saturday December 5th 2020

Draw A Box Lesson 1 Homework  - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/e0sLvvS

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Some days my hand and shoulder wanted to cooperate with me and other days they did not. My line quality varies a lot day to day. Sometimes it's good sometimes it's really bad. Might need to lay off coffee for a while.

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4:04 AM, Sunday December 6th 2020

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 pretty minimal wavering throughout. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to achieve confident linework with a decent amount of accuracy that will just get better and better with practice.

Your table of ellipses are coming along pretty well. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses you appear to be going for smooth ellipse shapes although you are getting distorted ellipses on occasion. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed I'm pretty much seeing the same thing with your ellipses in planes. The good thing is that you don't seem to be too hung up on accuracy at this point which is the right call. Your ellipses in funnels look fine I'm seeing any real issues. Your ellipses still need plenty of work but I think you're off to a good start and I don't see any bad habits forming. Keep practicing these during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective boxes look decent. I'm seeing a habit of redrawing lines on occasion that I would like you to stop doing. Try and put down a single line and stick with it even if it's a little off. You are getting some wavering and wobble in your lines likely because you're a little too preoccupied with accuracy and slowing down your stroke to compensate. One of the reasons we use the ghosting method is to build up the muscle memory of the stroke we are going to make beforehand. This way we can almost make our mark without thinking which tends to lead to a less accurate but smoother line. The accuracy gets better with mileage. You did 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 this will become more intuitive with practice.

Your rotated box exercise was a decent attempt. One thing I'm seeing here is very scratchy linework on your hatch mores and added lineweight. This is likely happening because you are reverting to drawing from your wrist. If you want to add hatching or lineweight treat it the same as every other line and ghost it multiple times and draw from your shoulder with confidence. You did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps fairly consistent. You're still struggling with understanding the proper rotations needed for this exercise which is understandable due to the difficulty. This is a good exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercise turned out okay. Your added lineweight is definitely a work in progress but you seem to be getting more comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from the shoulder for smooth lines for the most part. Your box constructions could definitely use some work still so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a pretty good submission. I think your ellipses are a good place and your line work is improving as well. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey pretty well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:00 AM, Monday December 21st 2020

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback! My box construction has improved as well as ghosting, but I am struggling with the line weight still.

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