Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

3:15 AM, Friday August 28th 2020

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3:26 PM, Friday August 28th 2020

Howdy, TA qzhans here!

First, superimposed lines. You’ve in general kept a good grip on these finicky horsetails, and I’m not seeing a lot of fraying. Your confidence here is a good start, but there’s some undulation in some of the longer ones that you want to slowly erase out. Remember, once you've began your stroke, that angle is law, and you have to follow it through, even if it means you careen way off into another line above or below.

Moving onto ghosted lines, your confidence here is solid. I do wish you would've done some longer ones, just as a challenge though. Something to keep in mind for warm-ups.

Your ghosted planes are nice too. I also like how you aren’t afraid of your mistakes; I don’t see any redrawing of lines that missed the mark (for the most part). The next step for you would be to refine your ghosting technique even more so that you’re able to not undershoot or overshoot.

Moving onto your ellipse tables, I like that you're keeping your ellipses tightly packed within the bounds that you've set. There's expected room for improvement in getting your ellipses to be tight and tidy, but drawing through with confidence is more important at this stage, which you are. The next step for you would definitely be refining your ghosting technique so that when you put pen to paper, the ellipse comes out nice and tight even through the draw-throughs.

Your ellipses in planes show a bit of an improvement in that regard. More importantly, you don’t stretch out your ellipses needlessly to hit the bounds, opting instead for a confident ellipse (outside of a few boxier ones in some planes).

Next, your funnels generally do a good job of aligning to the minor axis that you've set. You do have a few that get pretty wobbly here however, for example top right. Make sure to be confident on these ones too, and it’s okay if you edge out the sides of the funnel a little bit to maintain that speed and confidence.

No problems with plotted perspective!

For your rough perspective, I’m pleased to see that you are applying the error checking method correctly, extending your lines parallelly back to the horizon line instead of directly to the vanishing point. In general, you kept your horizontal and vertical lines parallel and vertical to the horizon line respectively as well. One thing I’d like to comment on is a bit of degradation in your line work, with scratchy lines and double lines appearing here and there. This is definitely not a habit you want to have, so after you put a line resist the urge to do anything else to it.

And now, the one you’ve been waiting for: rotated boxes. Before anything, I wanted to congratulate you on its completion; it's not something you're really supposed to be ready for. In general, I like how you’ve structured this exercise, keeping the gaps between boxes consistent and drawing through each box. And I also liked how you did two extra rows and columns (you only have to do 5 columns and rows, not 7). The main problem I see here is not enough rotation with the boxes. Keep in mind that as the boxes rotate, the vanishing points slide along the horizon line, so the two sets of parallel lines that aren't parallel to the axis of rotation will get new vanishing points. This causes the boxes to have their faces be shrunk by a lot, which you did, but you didn’t distort the vanishing points correctly. The faces should become almost trapezoidal due to the vanishing point sliding towards itself. Take a look at Uncomfortable's example again and you'll see what I mean.

Finally, onto organic perspective. In general, your boxes do a good job of shrinking and growing as they move through space. I'm pleased to see a little bit of overlapping here and there as well (although I do think you could've done a bit more). There's work to be done in getting those parallel lines to converge to their shared vanishing point, but you can iron that out with the box challenge. The problem that arises here would be your linework, and I’m seeing sketchy lines sneak in here and there. Remember that all lines we put down are law, and laying down more lines to fix something will only create more contradictions and draw eyes to a mistake.

Overall, this is a pretty solid lesson, but I am a little worried about that linework habit. I don’t think it’s enough to keep you from going on to the box challenge, but please keep in mind that for every line, only do one stroke. With that being said, good luck on the 250 Box Challenge!

Next Steps:

50 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:07 AM, Saturday August 29th 2020

Thanks!

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