Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

6:31 AM, Tuesday December 14th 2021

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10:09 AM, Tuesday December 14th 2021

Hello, and welcome to drawabox. I’ll be taking a look at your Lesson 1 submission today.

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking great. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, also. You’ll sometimes course-correct a little, near the end, but you’ll mostly keep them straight – keep that up.

The table of ellipses exercise looks mostly good. My main issue with it is that your marks have a habit of starting off a little stiff, and then stabilizing in their second rotation. This is not horrible, but it’s not great, either – the idea is that you should ghost until you’re comfortable, and then commit. Thus, I have 2 recommendations for you. The first one is to ghost more, and not an arbitrary amount of time, either – ghost until you’re comfortable with the built-up motion – and the second is to only rotate around your ellipses twice. Doing it 3 times sometimes hides your mistake – we’d like it to be front-and-center. The ellipses in planes have an entirely different issue: namely, that you’re too concerned with their accuracy; not enough with their confidence. Remember that our #1 goal isn’t for our ellipses to fit snuggly inside of their plane, hitting all 4 sides of it, but rather for them to be smooth, and rounded. Prioritize that, even at the expense of their accuracy. The funnels look good on all respects. They’ve been drawn through a little too much, sometimes, but they’re confident, snug, and properly cut in half.

The plotted perspective exercise looks good, though you should’ve used a ruler for its hatching lines, and lineweight. The lineweight, in particular, is really scratchy.

The rough perspective exercise, too, has a lot of it, and I’d probably call it automatic reinforcing, here, instead of lineweight, since you’ve not applied it with any degree of consistency. So, unless it’s especially necessary, I’ll say ‘stick to one line per line.’ The convergences look good, though – solid job there.

The rotated boxes exercise is a little tiny (we recommend drawing big, when you can, as it’s a great way to give your brain some proper room to think), but its boxes are snug, and properly rotating. From what I can tell (it really is so small!), their back sides do a good job of rotating, too, and their depth lines mostly converge, so nicely done on that respect, too.

I’m wondering if you plotted any start/end points for the lines in the organic perspective exercise – if not, that would explain the dip in quality. Remember that all lines need those, because all lines are drawn using the ghosting method. Outside of that, however, your boxes look solid, and flow well.

Next Steps:

I’ll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move on to the box challenge. GL!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:09 PM, Thursday December 16th 2021

thanks allot. your critique was wery helpful for me and for sure will take them in consideration in my next assignment. thank you for your time and effort

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