Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

7:42 PM, Monday March 27th 2023

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Reason for submitting during a Promptathon:

I had no idea what a Promptathon was before reading this form, sorry! It's been a while since I last opened the homepage (I usually bookmark the section from where I left), so I didn't see the announcement...I understand the staff needs a break, so feel free to take your time, I'm not in a hurry and I have 250 boxes to draw in the meantime lol

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8:01 AM, Saturday April 1st 2023

I should mention that the idea is to wait until you’ve received a critique on one submission before moving onto the next one. Besides, the whole idea behind the promptathon is to spend some time drawing for fun, but anyway. Let’s take this one exercise at a time.

To start, the superimposed lines look good. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. I’d have liked to see some arcing lines, too, but that’s alright. The ghosted lines/planes look fairly confident, also, and I’m happy to see that you’ve not forgotten to plot start/end points for their non-diagonal center lines.

Continuing on, the table of ellipses exercise shows a good start. It does feel like it’s mostly the same 3 degrees over and over, but what’s here is good. Your ellipses are smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. Occasionally, there’ll be a pointy one – for which I’d recommend double checking that a lesser pivot isn’t getting involved, during those harsh turns – but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. The ellipses in planes look good, also, but you’re dangerously close to prioritizing accuracy over confidence, here, so be mindful of that. It’s more important that the ellipse is smooth, and rounded, than it is for it to be snug against the plane, or its own rotations. The funnels, too, seem to have their priorities mixed up, so be super duper careful. And remind yourself that a smooth mark is able to convey an illusion of solidity, and its accuracy issues are ones we can make up for. A wobbly mark, however, is not, and all the accuracy in the world won’t save it then.

Finally, in the box section, the plotted perspective exercise looks clean. The organic perspective exercise shows some nice improvement throughout the set. By the end, its convergences are on point, but you’ll sometimes confuse how the lines connect to each other, so spend a little bit more time there. You might also want to pay some attention to the shapes of your planes. Since we’re dealing with 1-point perspective, we know that the near plane and far plane need to be of an identical shape for our box to be correct. If they’re not, give it another look! The rotated boxes exercise is well done, though you seem to have forgotten about the reminder boxes. Perhaps understandably, then, rotation is a little subtle. Nonetheless, your boxes are nice and snug. You’ll occasionally forget about a line or two, so I’m wondering how exactly you’re going about drawing these (one at a time, or all of the front faces, and then all of the back lines?), but I suppose the box challenge will clarify that in a second, anyway. The organic perspective exercise looks alright. Consistent lineweight was not a good call for it, however. The boxes are meant to be at different distances from us, so if you had to add lineweight to them, it should have been focused around the boxes in the front; the ones in the back fading into the background. Right now, what their size says, and what their lines say, are different things. That’s not a huge issue, however, so no stress. These are nicely constructed, and their foreshortening is solid, so they flow well enough.

Next Steps:

Consider this lesson complete, and move on to the box challenge. GL!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:22 PM, Sunday April 2nd 2023

Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback! I'll practice more my ellipses as a warmup and I'll take this feedback in consideration when drawing my boxes :)

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