I had previously submitted this for community critique, but now want to start doing official critique. During the community critique I had to re-do the funnels and organic perspective exercises which I have posted down below.
Hello, and welcome to drawabox. Let’s take this one exercise at a time, shall we?
Starting off, your superimposed lines look good. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. There’s the occasional fraying on the left, so I’ll recommend being a tiny bit more patient when you’re lining them up, but otherwise, there’s no issues. The ghosted lines/planes show some nice improvement throughout the set. I’m especially pleased to see that you didn’t forget to plot start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of the planes – most students do. That said, try to be a little less conscious of them, if you can. I notice in a lot of cases, your line will stop short of its end point, and you’ll have it limp to the finish – try to avoid that.
The table of ellipses exercise looks good. Your ellipses are quite similar (which is to say, there’s not a lot of variety when it comes to their degrees/angles), but they’re smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. With regards to that last thing, however, see if you can lift, not flick, your pen off the page at the end of your rotations – it’ll help get rid of those tails. The ellipses in planes are well done. Despite their more complicated frames, the ellipses here do a good job of maintaining their prior smoothness/roundness. The ellipses in funnels (looking at the revised page) are better aligned, but they’ve some spacing issues, this time around, so I’ll recommend ghosting each ellipse here a little longer than you are currently.
The plotted perspective exercise is well done, but its line-work looks a little scratchy. This exercise is drawn using a ruler, so there’s no excuse for this, really.
The rough perspective exercise shows a good start, but it’s not quite there. What’s likely happening – and I suspect this, because I don’t see too many unused points on your page – is that you’re going with a lot of your first guesses. But, as you can see from your correction lines, those first guesses aren’t correct. This isn’t exactly new, since our brains hate drawing boxes that don’t consist of sets of entirely parallel lines, but for this exercise, they need to. As such, what we do is plan first, and then, execute according to that plan, rather than what our brains are telling us. It’s important, then, to really take your time, planning. So plot a point, check it (by ghosting it to the horizon) alter it, check it again, alter it again, and so on, until it’s perfect - then commit to it.
The rotated boxes exercise looks good. It’s big (huge positive!), and, though its boxes aren’t exactly snug (some more patience would’ve helped with that, I expect), they make a solid attempt at rotation, and do a decent job of it, overall. Ultimately, this exercise isn’t so much about getting things right, so much as about seeing something complicated, and challenging through to the end, which you have, so you’re all good.
The organic perspective exercise looks decent-enough, so I’ll look at it pre-revisions. Line-work is, as with the rest of this submission, a little lacking (you’ll really want to work on your overshooting issues in the box challenge!), but the boxes are well constructed, and flow well, as per their size, and foreshortening. Regarding that last one, the foreshortening here is a little dramatic (we’d want it to be a little more shallow, normally), but, since it’s consistent, it conveys the necessary illusion well enough, even like this.
Next Steps:
I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, and sending you off to the box challenge, but be so kind as to take note of what I’ve sad, so as to improve upon it in your warm-ups. Good luck!
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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