Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
11:00 PM, Wednesday September 15th 2021
Thanks for looking at my homework. :)
Welcome to drawabox. Let’s take this one exercise at a time.
Starting off, your superimposed lines are looking good. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your ghosted lines look fairly confident, though I notice 2 issues. First, you seem to have a habit of making contact with the page as you ghost. This isn’t necessarily a problem, since it’s an accident, but it’s something to avoid, if you can. A more serious issue is that you seem to hesitate a little at the start of your line, only to regain your confidence shortly after. Likely, you’re spending more time than you need lining your pen up to the correct starting point, and losing the built-up rhythm as a result of that. This aspect of them looks a little bit better in the planes, though it’s still not quite there, so keep at it.
The ellipses in the table of ellipses exercise have a number of issues, though they all stem from the same thing: you’re stiff. Prioritize their smoothness and roundness, not their accuracy. As a result of you doing the latter, your ellipses start off too rough, and you tend to switch to your elbow/wrist to handle their sharp turns, resulting in them coming out a little pointy. I also suspect that you’re drawing a little too fast. Don’t worry about any of that. Simply ghost, and draw an ellipse that’s smooth, and rounded, regardless of how accurate it is. The planes look a little bit better, but try to hit a full 2 rotations, and lift your pen off the page at the end of them, rather than flicking it. As for the funnels, spend a little bit longer aligning your ellipses to their respective axes – that’s the entire point of the exercise.
The plotted perspective exercise looks clean.
The rough perspective exercise is not quite there, unfortunately. Your linework is solid, but your lines don’t seem to make too much of an effort to converge. What’s likely happening is that you’re letting your brain take charge, thus drawing a box as you think it should look (a shape that consists of 3 sets of parallel lines), rather than how it should, in fact, look. This is why we rely on our points, for this exercise. And not our first guesses, either. After you’ve placed a point down, check it, by ghosting it to the horizon. If it’s in any way unsatisfactory, redraw it.
Solid attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. Its rotation is a little slight, particularly in the back, but that’s perfectly fine – all that we’re looking for, here, is an exercise that has been seen through to the end, to the best of the students’ ability. After all, this is simply meant to introduce you to concepts, that we’ll then explore more in depth in the box challenge. Anyway, the rotation makes an effort, and the boxes are indeed snug, so all looks good.
The organic perspective is well done, also. The solid increase in size, and consistent, shallow foreshortening of your boxes do a good job of conveying the illusion we’re after, though I’d definitely recommend resisting the urge to correct an incorrect line. Applying more ink to a mistake is a bad idea in general, but especially here, where we’re trying to maintain a delicate hierarchy, ink tends to disrupt that by making darker things pop up to the front.
Next Steps:
Before I have you move on to the box challenge, I’d like to see 1 frame of rough perspective. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to show some improvement, and you’ll be good to go.
Here's your frame of rough perspective: https://imgur.com/a/fmUu5UB
Thanks for the great critique. x)
Yup! - much better by that last frame! (And, speaking of which, what you've done is 1 page (one that has 3 frames...) That's okay though.)
Next Steps:
Onto the box challenge!
When it comes to technical drawing, there's no one better than Scott Robertson. I regularly use this book as a reference when eyeballing my perspective just won't cut it anymore. Need to figure out exactly how to rotate an object in 3D space? How to project a shape in perspective? Look no further.
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