Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
4:50 PM, Thursday August 5th 2021
Hello! Here is my Lesson 1 submission.
To explain my story, I already submitted this elsewhere for community review and got some advice (which was good and helpful, I do not want to offend the person who gave it to me). However, after having moved onto the 250 boxes challenge and the 2nd lesson, I was unable to get any critiques and when starting Lesson 3 I noticed that I was having a lot of difficulty with some of the skills taught in the earlier lessons. Thus, I'm now deciding to switch to the official critique route as I want to make sure that I am not moving from lesson to lesson without really mastering what is there and without correcting my mistakes. I really do apologize to whoever is grading this - I'm submitting my work on Lesson 1 from a few months ago and I know that it is not ideal to do that and that one should only move from lesson to lesson having gotten it reviewed. However, I decided not to redo this lesson (and instead submitted what I submitted initially a few months ago, except I replaced a few of the images with the ones that I redid as a request of the community member who asked me to do it) because I was worried that it might violate Uncomfortable's rule of no grinding. I'm not sure where to go after this lesson - if you tell me that I need to redo some things before moving on, I'd be happy to do that, but I'm not sure whether I should redo the 250 boxes one and Lesson 2 or only redo Lesson 2 or just resubmit what I did earlier for official critique. I was hoping whoever grades this could give me some advice on that topic.
Since when I did this lesson, I think I've gotten a bit better at the mechanics of drawing with your shoulder and with the idea of drawing confidently. However, I still struggle a lot with ghosting lines. I forget to do it sometimes, and even when I do ghost, it feels sometimes like I'm not actually focusing on practicing drawing the line in advance so much as I am just moving my hand back and forth as a force of habit. Also, while the concept made sense to me in the earlier exercises when you were drawing just a straight line from one dot to another or drawing an ellipse, when you get to the later lessons or even some of the later homeworks here like the rotated boxes, it confuses me how you're supposed to plan your lines out as they get a lot more complicated and abstract. Another issue I was having was with drawing with my shoulder- I understand how you're supposed to do that with bigger lines, but when I' m drawing smaller lines in exercises like organic perspective or in the texture exercises, how do I use my shoulder to draw? Additionally, I was struggling with ellipses a lot in this lesson and I still do. Somehow, ghosting them doesn't seem to help very much as when I actually draw the ellipse, my arm doesn't seem to have much control as I'd like and my ellipses end up being too big or too small.
Thank you in advance for reviewing my work! I really do apologize for what I mentioned earlier.