Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

8:36 AM, Sunday October 25th 2020

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i am trash

you can see that i was having a meltdown while doing this

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11:04 PM, Tuesday November 10th 2020

Hey Yama,

Welcome and don't be so harsh on yourself! Drawabox's exercises are more difficult than they may look so you need to give yourself the needed time to develop muscle memory and spatial reasoning skills. Now lets see what we have here:

1) Lines - your superimposed lines are nice, however on the ghosted lines and planes i can see that some lines are arced, sometimes twice, which means that your mind was trying to correct the trajectory and most likely you were drawing from the elbow, so be sure to watch out for that! I don't see wobbling so good job on prioritizing confident marks.

2) Ellipses - i can see that your confidence suffered a big hit here and i sympathize with you fully, as i had a mini-meltdown myself on the tables. The first table of ellipses is quite rough, but you improve significantly by the time you finish the second one and the ellipses in planes. On the funnels you could've made the middle ellipses more narrow, but this was optional anyway. More importantly, you drew them quite loose and most of them are spilling out of the funnel, which is a mistake. Also, some have an incline and are not cut quite in half due to the fact that the two arcs you drew on the side are not very symmetrical.

3) Boxes - your plotted perspective is very nice, you seem to understand the concept of a vanishing point. However, on the rough perspective i see the arcing i mentioned about the lines exercises again and a few other things that i want to point out:

  • the width lines should be parallel to the horizon and the height lines should be perpendicular to the horizon. Be sure to take the needed time to eyeball where to place the initial 4 dots correctly for the front face of the box

  • avoid repeating over the same lines to fix them, you should instead accept the mistake and move on

  • second page second frame i see a box with a few "???" - be sure to grab the red pen after you're done with the whole page and not when you notice something is going wrong. Remember that the red line doesn't necessarily need to hit the VP exactly, we're aiming to get as close as we can.

Rotated boxes exercise you struggled with the boxes on the corners, which is normal as they are the most difficult. Generally the boxes rotate and are close together, so thats fine.

On the organic perspective you should've made the boxes at the beginning a bit bigger so they can appear closer. Again, don't repeat lines even if they aren't very good and always focus on line confidence and smoothness.

Next Steps:

You can proceed to 250 Boxes challenge as I don't think grinding these exercises is needed. There you'll have plenty of lines to practice fixing the arcing, just make sure you're drawing from the shoulder. Also include some ellipses in your warm-up, so you keep improving on them as well.

Best of luck!

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
5:59 PM, Saturday November 21st 2020

thank u so much ?? I am drawing ellipses as a warmup every time befor 250 box challenge, trying to be more confindent with it

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