Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

10:16 PM, Sunday July 3rd 2022

Drawbox Lesson One - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/FJW9zpv.jpg

Post with 34 views. Drawbox Lesson One

I know I did one of the rough perspective exercises wrong; I fixed it in page two!

Also any tips you can give regarding the rules of how boxes behave would be helpful -- I have dyscalculia and unless something is explained in words I have trouble internalizing it in my head, and I'm still not sure why -- for example -- my lines don't always end up parallel or what I can do with my lines to affect the end rotation of a box.

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11:02 PM, Tuesday July 5th 2022

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out pretty well but you are getting some line wobble here and there. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling This is also present in some of the later exercises although I am seeing a lot of improvement with your final exercise but I still want to mention this advice here so you can understand what the problem likely is.

This is the important part we need to be focusing on and the real problem I'm seeing:

You're hesitating as you execute the line, rather than drawing with a confident motion. Finally committing to a mark can definitely be quite daunting, but it's integral that you get used to accepting that mistakes do happen. Things go wrong - you can prepare as much as possible (and you should) but the moment your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has already passed. Now you must commit yourself, push through with confidence, and execute your line. It's also worth remembering: we can still work with a line that is smooth and even, but there's not much that can be done with a wobbly one.

What's most likely happening is that you are worrying about accuracy too much while making your mark and it's causing you to slow down your stroke to compensate which is giving you quite a bit of wobble in your lines. The other possibility is that you aren't ghosting your lines or you are reverting back to drawing from your wrist on occasion. I can't be entirely sure of which specific thing is happening and it even could be combinations of all of them. So I might normally reassign some pages but since I did see the big improvement with your last exercise I'm just going to leave this in here as some more general advice when it comes to wobbly linework.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are having some slight issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. You also only do one single ellipses in funnel exercise when the homework explicity told you to fill the page with the exercises and gave you this example. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/example So as a revision and because I think you could use the ellipse practice anyways I'd like you to do one more page of these. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling This is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced. You are doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work although I can see you did it incorrectly for the first page but ended up correcting that on the second one. Good job. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out decently. One thing that would have helped you here would have been to just draw this a bit bigger. Drawing bigger really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes although one of the reasons you started struggling a bit more towards the corners if you didn't keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent there. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/guessing You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases(mainly on the top and left side) but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/notrotating This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. While you have some solid box constructions here you are relying somewhat heavily on parallel lines for your box constructions which is causing some weird divergences in places. The 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you in order to develop a better understanding of how box lines need to converge to vp's.

Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. Once you get that revision submitted I'll take a look and you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

One page of ellipses in funnels. - One ellipse in funnel exercise does not count as "filling" the page as the homework states. So I'd like you to do one more page of this exercise and fill the page like the example homework

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:19 AM, Wednesday July 6th 2022

Hi Rob, here's the link to the fresh ellipse page: https://imgur.com/EKd9PfU

  • I'm pretty sure that one was a practice one I drew and then I put Drawabox down for two weeks, came back and forgot to do more of them! I see that some of these are off-center, but isn't that determined by the frame I drew rather than the ellipses themselves? Not sure how to correct for that. I know a lot of wobbles happened because I revert to using my wrist while trying to draw on a lap desk, so I'll try to make sure I always practice on a flat table for these.

I actually thought the boxes were supposed to be constructed using parallel lines because I didn't internalize how vanishing points actually affect what I'm supposed to do to the box itself. After a friend helped me conceptualize it in words, I think I understand it a bit better, but I definitely have trouble seeing the difference between rotating the boxes and just placing them further back! I'll keep working on it in the 250 box exercise. I have a lot of trouble seeing geometric concepts the way most people do because of the dycalculia issue, so it's going to be a lot of learning individual rules until I can grasp the whole thing.

Thanks for your feedback!!!!

6:02 PM, Wednesday July 6th 2022

Okay these good. You are correct that if the frame isn't correct the ellipses can look slanted but even besides that you are still tilting some of these off the minor axis. For the most part these are pretty good though. I'm going to mark this as complete and you can move on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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