Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

10:36 PM, Sunday December 13th 2020

drawabox lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/Sp7lWdE.jpg

Post with 21 views. drawabox lesson 1

Hey, I've done till lesson 2 on the free track and decided to get more serious and restart with the official critique.

So feel free to nitpick as much as you want :)

A bit of self-critique / difficulties I had:

On the rough perspective and rotated boxes exercises, I had some problems properly aligning the boxes' front plane to the horizon line making things look kinda tilted. Don't really know how to improve on that (maybe mainly practice, I guess?).

Thanks.

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3:57 PM, Monday December 14th 2020

Hello, and welcome to drawabox! Let’s take this one exercise at a time~

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking quite good, save for 2 things. First, you’ll occasionally fray a little on the left. Be sure to take your time lining up your pen to the correct starting point. Second, your arcing superimposed lines are at times a little stiff. Remember that it’s far more important for them to be smooth, than to match their guideline. The ghosted lines/planes look good, though I’d spend a little longer ghosting them, as, judging from your points, your accuracy isn’t too great. Don’t push so far in that direction that your lines end up wobbly, though. On the subject of points, make sure to plot some for the non-diagonal center lines of the planes.

The table of ellipses exercise looks solid, these being confident, and rounded, though I notice a few things (mainly, that they haven’t been drawn through 2 full times, that the flick at the end of the motion is a little aggressive, and that their positioning is at times a little loose), that makes me think that you’re drawing these a little too fast (either the speed of the motion itself, or how quickly you move from the ghosting stage to the execution stage.) Figure out which one it is, and see if you can fix it, during your daily. In regards to the looseness, remember that an ellipse needs to fill its frame, touching all available sides of it, instead of floating inside of it. The bottom right frame in page 1, then, and others similar to it, are incorrect. In regards to the flick, see if you can lift your pen off the page, instead. The ellipses in planes exercise looks good, what with the ellipses maintaining their smoothness/roundness despite the more complicated frame, but here too there’s issues in regards to their number rotations, so be mindful of that. The funnels exercise is, unfortunately, a little loose. It doesn’t seem like you spent enough time ghosting these ellipses, most of them being not only poorly spaced, but of varying degrees, too (remember that their degrees should either remain consistent, or increase as they move away from the center.)

The plotted perspective exercise looks clean- nicely done.

The rough perspective exercise look good, too. The issues related to its convergence improve in its second page, proof-positive that you’re taking your time planning each line. As per your question, the answer lies in that same step. As you’re plotting your points, don’t only check to see if they’re converging, but also if they form parallel/perpendicular lines with the other lines in that plane. If they don’t, that’s the time to make sure that they do. Speaking of planes, be a little more attentive to their shapes. Because of the rules of 1-point perspective, the shape of your far plane needs to be identical to that of your near plane. If it isn’t, then you know for a fact that your box is incorrect, so give it a second look, if you can.

The rotated boxes exercise could’ve gone better, certainly, but this is a solid first attempt. The boxes are, as far as I can tell, snug, and rotate nicely. Next time, consider drawing a little bigger, to give your brain some room to think. Looking at the shapes of your far planes, your understanding of the respective rotations it’s solid; it’s just that you shot yourself in the foot by having the other layer be a little skinny, and then were forced to commit to it as per the ‘use neighboring edges to your advantage’ rule. If you have the space, you’ll be able to properly consider each line, so I definitely recommend it.

Finally, though I only see 1 page of it, the organic perspective exercise looks fine. Just to confirm, you should be using points to mark the start/end points of your lines, not simply the direction they’re converging in. Outside of that, however, your boxes properly follow the flow line, increasing in size, but maintaining a consistent, shallow foreshortening as they do. Well done.

Before you move on, I’d like to see:

Next Steps:

1 page of the funnels exercise, that’s mindful of my notes

And, for the record, the other organic perspective exercise

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:30 PM, Thursday December 17th 2020

Hi Benj, thanks for the critique!

Here are the pages you asked for:

https://imgur.com/a/hy9gGd4

Sorry for the missing page. I probably messed something up when uploading to imgur. This time all pages should be in there (I hope at least).

I tried to redo the funnels exercise with your comments in mind. It's far from perfect but I hope it got better. Your point about slowing down on the ellipses was really helpful. As it stands, I was kinda confusing "being confident" with "drawing as fast as I can"... I still have some problems with fitting the ellipses though. Even though I ghost touching the boundary of the previous ellipsis, when I'm really putting the ink on paper, mostly only one of my passes touches it.

Thanks again!

6:45 PM, Thursday December 17th 2020

This looks quite a bit better. As for it being, still, not quite there, that's not a concern. The rest of the improvement will come as a result of milege, as you continue practicing these concepts as a part of your daily warmups. As far as this submission is concerned, I'm satisfied. Well done, and good luck in the box challenge!

Next Steps:

250 box challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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