Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
9:48 PM, Saturday February 15th 2020
Let's try this again! Lesson 1 full homework for critique. Thanks!
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
0 users agree
11:19 AM, Tuesday February 18th 2020
Hey, TA Meta here to look over your work, so let's get started.
Beginning with your superimposed lines, I'll admit that when I see lines grouped so closely together, I make sure to zoom in to see if the student is being a bit of a perfectionist in laying them over one another but these look really straight and confident. Your ghosted lines and planes follow the same trend, I did notice a couple of little wobbles in the top corner of your ghosted lines, but I imagine this is either due to not rotating the page enough or just ending up stuck with the crappy edge of the paper.
Next up, your tables of ellipses are looking confident for the most part. You've packed them in there nice and tightly, as well as drawing through each 2-3 times, which is good to see. I did notice a few wobbles and oddly shaped ellipses here and there, so make sure you're ghosting through these enough and in the case of the smaller ones, not driving this motion from the wrist or elbow.
Your work on the ellipses in planes is much better in terms of confidence and I feel like you did better with the last two ellipse exercises with more strongly defined bounds on them. It's great to see that you've prioritised confidence over accuracy on this exercise however.
Finally, to the funnels and there are a few that are slightly skewed off here and there but you're doing a pretty good job for the most part. One thing I did note is that you didn't push the ellipses up as tightly as you could, so make sure you get those ellipses cuddling - they love it.
Onto your rough perspective now and you've made clear efforts to keep your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line, both on the front and rear planes, which is great to see. I did notice a little drop in confidence here, so make sure you take the time to plan out each of the lines of your boxes. Your estimation of perspective here is pretty good, with most of your converging lines landing in a little circle around the vanishing point. Where they miss the mark, it tends to be the ones further from the vanishing point, which is pretty normal at this stage.
Next your rotated boxes and if I had to describe them in a word, I'd call them pretty. That said, we're not here to make pretty pictures and this will become an important mindset to shake in the later lessons where we focus on construction. Make sure if you're applying line weight, you do so with the same 0.5 fineliner as in the superimposed lines exercise - it will be messy and ugly at first, but it gets better with mileage. Anyway, you've done a good job keeping the gaps between your boxes consistent and you managed quite a good amount of rotation on the inner set of boxes, however on the outer set, you tend to have followed the previous box's vanishing point, or in the case of the top boxes, done all your rotating on that outer box. All that said, these last two exercises are an intro to some new concepts that they can explore in the 250 box challenge and we don't expect them to nail it straight up.
Finally, your organic perspective compositions are looking really solid. You've varied up the size of your boxes nicely which conveys a lot of depth in the scene, as well as being unafraid to overlap boxes which has contributed to this as well. There's some little divergence issues with your boxes but as I said before, you'll be able to identify the mistakes you make with your boxes in the challenge.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
The Art of Brom
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.