Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
2:22 AM, Thursday October 21st 2021
New here. Gave this a shot.
Hi and welcome, Brodo!
The first thing I'm noticing is that your lines look like they lack confidence—your Superimposed Lines have some wobbling, and it looks like you were focusing too much on accuracy. You should try to make sure your lines follow an even trajectory, even if they fray at the ends! (e.g. https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/5bcda336.jpg )
In your ghosted lines, there's a little bit of wobbling and arching as well, particularly the longer ones in your Ghosted Planes. It's important that you trust in your ghosting and don't try to correct the line once your pen hits the paper, and make sure you're drawing with your shoulder.
Several of your ellipses are also wobbly or a bit mishapen. Imperfections are inevitable, but some of your Ellipses in Planes have ended up with an almost diamond shape, rather than being smooth and round. Again, confidence and trusting your ghosting is key!
With Funnels, some of your ellipses are misaligned (e.g. https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/58039837.jpg ). The minor axis line should go right through the center of each ellipse, cutting them into symmetrical halves.
The boxes in Plotted Perspective look good, but the extra line weight and hatching is messy. Specfically, the line weight doesn't follow a consistent pattern, it looks like you went over existing lines all the way to the VP a few times, and the crosshatching is quite uneven in places (you also accidentally covered half of the bottom of one box with hatching, instead of just the front facing plane).
For Rough Perspective, some of your corners are quite skewed away from the others. Something to keep in mind while planning your boxes is that everything but your depth lines should be either parellel or perpendicular to the horizon line. I would overall recommend you be a little more careful in the future. One of your boxes on the first page is missing a line, and some of your lines back to the horizon are either misaligned or missing entirely. You also went over some lines quite a few times, which is something you want to avoid, even if you make a mistake.
Something I notice is that you've mostly kept your boxes relatively close to the VP, leaving a lot of unused space on the page. I don't feel like this is a major problem, but I'd like to see a little more thought put into the placement of your initial rectangles to better use the space.
(As an aside, a color that's more distinct from the black ink would be better for plotting lines back to the horizon.)
In your Rotated Boxes, the boxes don't appear to rotate as they should (e.g. https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/d73eea49.jpg ), and the outermost boxes on the right side being wider than the row to the left of them amplifies this issue. Some of the boxes aren't very well aligned with their neighbors (e.g. at the bottom, the boxes to either side are quite a bit lower than the middle box). There's also a few places where there's a missing line or some missing hatching.
And finally, Organic Perspective. There's some pretty significant skewing in a lot of your boxes, but you'll get plenty more practice on boxes, and I'd say you did quite well with the sizing of your boxes overall!
I hope this feedback was helpful and doesn't come across as too harsh!
Next Steps:
I'd like to see the following before you move on:
1 page of Ellipses in Planes
1 page of Rough Perspective
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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