9:52 AM, Monday January 17th 2022
Hello, and welcome to drawabox. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t here back then, but I expect the thing you read about only needing to do the box challenge if you had trouble with boxes is a vestige from an earlier time (as you know, lessons get written and re-written constantly) – the box challenge is very much a requirement, now. Let me look through this first, however, and then we’ll talk about that!
Your superimposed lines look quite solid. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, also, though not so much at the start. 2 things could be going on here, and I subscribe to the second a little more. The first is that you’re spending so long lining up your pen to the correct starting point that you’re losing the previously built-up rhythm. The second is that you’re drawing faster than you need to, mistakenly equating speed with confidence. From the inconsistency in the stopping point of each line, I’d say that that’s likely, so consider experimenting a little to find your ideal speed.
The table of ellipses exercise looks good. Your ellipses are smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. You do have a habit of flicking your pen off the page at the end of your rotations, however. See if you can lift it off instead, like you did with your lines. The ellipses in planes are well done. They do a good job of maintaining their previous smoothness/roundness, despite these more complicated frames. The funnels, too, are nicely done, though not quite as round as we might expect, so they too could benefit from a longer time spent ghosting.
The plotted perspective exercise looks clean.
The rough perspective exercise is certainly a little lacking, but I’d say that the main issue with it is a lack of patience. If you’d taken a look at your points before committing to them you should’ve been able to tell that the resulting lines wouldn’t have been parallel/perpendicular to the horizon, as we (and, more importantly, 1-point perspective) want them to be, and yet here they are. Still, the convergences look fine, and save for the overshooting, and automatic reinforcing issues (both of which we’ll expect to be fixed in the box challenge, so don’t assume that they’ll simply right themselves, and make an effort to reel them back), the linework looks good, also.
The rotated boxes exercise looks fairly good. Your boxes are a little small, but they’re snug, and properly rotating as a result. Their far planes have a harder time at this, as do their depth lines of converging (sometimes they’ll diverge), but that’s perfectly fine, and something that we’ll get in to in the box challenge.
From the amount of overshooting, I’ll hazard a guess that you’ve not plotted start/end points for all of the lines in the organic perceptive exercise – please do. Other than that, and the occasionally dramatic foreshortening, the exercise looks good, and flows well. Be especially careful of automatic reinforcing, here, by the way. As it makes the box it is applied to pop to the front, you need to be careful not to apply it to any boxes in the back (or any boxes at all, really), as it’ll then contradict what their size is saying.
Next Steps:
I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, so you may head on over to the box challenge. Best of luck.