Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
10:00 PM, Friday January 10th 2025
Very beginner artist taking a crack at these lessons and exercises for the first time :)
Any feedback is much appreciated!
Hey there Ectodrop, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!
Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. Great job including a varied array of line lengths and curves.
Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Accuracy is just a matter of mileage, so as you continue with this exercise in your warmups you'll find you can hit the mark more precisely, and more often, over time. Confidence will be your main focus whenever executing freehand lines, so don't worry as much about a mark being inaccurate as long as you put effort into making a bold mark.
Good job on your ghosted planes and ellipses in planes, it's clear that each stroke has been executed with confidence and care, and the ellipses have been drawn through and fit within the bounds of the plane.
Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. As with ghosted lines, your ellipses will naturally tighten up with time, and you're doing well to keep up confidence in your marks. Well done.
Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. For an extra challenge, in future iterations of this exercise you might try varying the degree of your ellipses to create the illusion of expansion as you move out from the center (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3).
Your plotted perspective exercise is also satisfactory. Each box traces back to its appropriate vanishing points, and the vertical edges are parallel and drawn to the appropriate corners.
Your rough perspective exercise is very clean, each front and rear plane is believably parallel in space and a good attempt was made to extend each back toward the vanishing point.
Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes.
For your organic perspective exercise, I see a great variety in Y shapes and sizes; this method of freeform drawing will serve you well in the box challenge. I also see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick.
In all: great work! I'm very pleased to mark your Lesson 1 as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Congratulations!
Next Steps:
Proceed to the 250 Box Challenge.
Every now and then I'll get someone asking me about which ruler I use in my videos. It's this Wescott grid ruler that I picked up ages ago. While having a transparent grid is useful for figuring out spacing and perpendicularity, it ultimately not something that you can't achieve with any old ruler (or a piece of paper you've folded into a hard edge). Might require a little more attention, a little more focus, but you don't need a fancy tool for this.
But hey, if you want one, who am I to stop you?
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