Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

7:26 PM, Wednesday April 22nd 2020

Imgur: The magic of the Internet

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

Post with 18 views. HW DRAWABOX - LESSON 1:LINES, ELLIPSES AND BOXES

Some annotations that I made in the process and at the end:

Lines. I felt uncomfortable to do the first straight lines. I think it would be just straight lines, but I see the example, so I was do some curvy lines. In one of them I really see I messed up. So, in the next ones I tried to no over think (just pay more attention). Because that one curvy line I did not like, I do another sheet of lines, but finally I decide to put the first one, because it made me pay more attention. Sometimes I wonder when I feel comfortable and secure about the line trace and when I just do by doing.

Ghosted lines. First I just do it, I feel super uncomfortable. But, line after line I prepare by ghosting a Little more. Sometimes I fail, if I concentrated about the fail I mistaken more in the next lines, so it was an exercise for breath, draw, analyze and move on for improve.

Rotated boxes. Mentally I had a lot of resistance to perform this exercise, in the end I managed to get in front of the sheet and try it. I constantly reminded myself of what I said in the lesson, "You just have to finish it." In the end I realized that I had made one more box on each side of each quadrant, so in the end it seems to me a little overloaded.

Organic boxes. I also resisted doing it a bit and there are things that I hope will be clearer to me in the 250 boxes challenge. It was really difficult to understand all that information because there are words that I do not know and that when translated in Google sound out of context to me.

In the end, I think that learning, in addition to being "technical", is that the ultimate goal of drawing is to express myself and enjoy the process in between, no matter how difficult it feels. Wanting to make it perfect and not facing it doesn't help me move forward.

Thank you. Greetings from MX

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11:59 PM, Saturday April 25th 2020

Hey there montseag, good job on completing lesson 1. I'll be going over your work today so let's get started.

Starting with your super imposed lines you did a good job staying confident and using your shoulder to drive the motion of the lines. Your accuracy will improve with time but it's a good start. Your ghosted lines are also looking confident, but there are some times where the end of the line has some squiggles due to you trying to stop on the point. Instead of trying to stop, what I do is lift the pen up and not fight the motion. This has the added bonus of giving your lines an aesthetically pleasing taper.

With your ellipses, you have appeared to forget to attach your tables of ellipses, so I will go over your ellipses when you get those to me.

Your rough perspective boxes are hit or miss. The hits are when you pay close attention to make sure your horizontal lines are parallel to the horizon and verticals are perpendicular. On the flipside, there are other boxes where you don't pay as close attention to this and you end up with skewed/distorted boxes. Overall, your lines are showing some serious arcing meaning you might be neglecting using your shoulder. Remember to always ghost and always use your shoulder to confidently execute your lines. Your converging lines are where we expect them to be as indicated by your correctly applied check lines, and the accuracy of those types of lines with a distant target will improve with practice.

Moving on to your rotated boxes you did a good job pushing to completion. The only goal here is for students to complete it so they can learn of new types of spatial problems and ways to go about solving them. Your lines are still a little hesitant here and drawn with the wrist and elbow instead of your shoulder. So in terms of execution you were not rotating your boxes so much as skewing them so give this gif some more attention now that you have context and study how the rotation is driven by the motion of the vanishing points. You did an ok job keeping your boxes packed tightly to leverage adjacent lines as perspective guides. Overall you have a fine start here and pushed through in the face of complexity. Your line work could be a little more confident and some clarifying techniques such as hatching could be employed, but this is a rediculously difficult challenge the first time so good job on pushing through.

Now let's look at your organic perspective. Your compositions have a lot of motion and you did a good job making the forms appear to exist in the same space through overlapping them. Your sense of perspective still is pretty young and you have a lot of divergence where near planes are smaller than far planes, but that will get taken care of in the next steps. You have a good start in making the piece feel three dimensional, and you could have pushed the illusion further with more smaller boxes to appear they are really receding into the background.

Next Steps:

Go ahead and pass me those ellipses in tables exercises and we can finish this off!

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
2:30 AM, Sunday April 26th 2020

Tables are here, sorry, I didn't realize it wasn't loaded properly.

THANKS A LOT!

https://imgur.com/a/f6Jhu2B

2:12 PM, Sunday April 26th 2020

No worries - it happens, especially with imgur being such a pain to use sometimes.

So your ellipses are off to a fairly good start. There are no major points of flatness or sharp corners, and you do a good job drawing through your ellipses the appropriate number of times.

With your ellipses in planes, you do a good job being mindful of making contact with the correct points on the planes resulting in ellipses that are fit snugly within the bounds and with no room to float around. Your ellipses in tables are likewise packed together neatly to leave no room for ambiguity and you do a good job maintaining consistent size and orientation within each row. Your ellipses here are getting a little wild so keep practicing using your shoulder and keeping your subsequent passes tight on the original pass. Finally, with your ellipses in funnels you do a good job making sure the funnel axis bisects the ellipse meaning your minor axes are aligned correctly. You are also successful in managing maintaining proper contact with the curved boundaries.

So now your lesson 1 is officially finished and will be marked as complete. Your next stop is the 250 box challenge. Keep working on ghosting your lines and practicing ellipses in warm ups. Keep up the good work.

Next Steps:

250 boxes.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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