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Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

8:04 PM, Sunday October 4th 2020

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Apologies for the crookedness of the pages. I scanned them in using my work's copier and then realize they were a bit crooked until I opened it at home. Any feedback welcomed and appreciated!!

10:49 PM, Sunday October 4th 2020

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your homework today. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are mostly keeping a clearly defined starting point on these with a pretty minimal tapering overall except on curves which is pretty normal. Your ghosted lines and planes look confident although I do think you have a bit of a natural arc to your stroke which you will want to start compensating for. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/arc It's not severe but it's something I'm noticing with all of your longer lines. Other than that you are doing a good job with the ghosting method to get confident linework.

Your table of ellipses is looking pretty good. Your are doing a good job drawing through all of your ellipses although I think you should maybe try and limit your draw throughs to 2 - 3 times max. 4+ draw throughs tends to make things start looking a bit messy. You are doing really great at getting consistently smooth ellipse shapes which is good to see. This is carried over very nicely into your ellipse planes which came out very well. You are definitely having some issues with your ellipses tilting off the minor axis in some of your ellipses in funnels that you will want to keep an eye on. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned You are consistently getting nice smooth ellipse shapes for the most part so great job here.

Plotted perspective looks fine nothing to mention here. So starting with your rough perspective exercises and in all of the following exercise I'm seeing a bit of a problematic trend and that is the constantly redrawing your lines. One of the reasons we use the ghosting method is so that we can put down one confident stroke. By redrawing almost every line you put down you are destroying that confidence a bit and it's just making things look messier overall. So for assignments in future lessons I want you to try and just put down one line unless you REALLY need to add lineweight to move a line in front of something else. Don't add lineweight everywhere like you are doing now. Other than that 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 a bit off but that is something that will get better with practice.

Your rotated box exercise was a decent attempt. You are still having that redrawing lines problem I mentioned but you did a nice job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps fairly consistent. You are running into a pretty common student problem of not actually rotating some of your boxes but instead drawing them moving back into perspective. Please check the lesson notes here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating This is a good exercise to come back to after the 250 box challenge to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Finally, your organic perspective exercise came out pretty good. You are still hiding your confident linework with redrawn lines which is a habit you need to stop doing. Your box constructions are a bit wonky at times so this is something you are going to get a lot of practice with during the 250 box challenge.

Overall this was a pretty good submission. You definitely need to stop redrawing lines so much but I think you ellipses are looking pretty great and have a nice shape overall. I think you understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to teach pretty well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:55 PM, Monday October 5th 2020

Thank you so much for the feedback! I don't know why I redraw lines, I'm not even sure where I picked up that habit from. I definitely see where things get busy and I'll practice not redrawing my lines.

Thanks again!

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