Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
2:20 AM, Sunday May 2nd 2021
Phew, haven't done art exercises this rigorous maybe ever. Definitely got difficult on the last few
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 well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.
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 issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. 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 perspectives turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. 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 straight up and down. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.
Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I think one thing that would have helped you here would have to just draw this a bit bigger. Drawing bigger really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent for the most part. One of the problems you are having is that your gaps aren't always consistent which is causing you to guess a bit more. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/guessing You didn't nail the rotations on the boxes but you didn't quite well given the difficulty of this exercise. Nice work. 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. Your box constructions are solid for the most part and you seem well prepared for the 250 box challenge.
Overall this was a very well done 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. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
The 250 Box Challenge
Thanks Rob!
You brought up good points which I totally agree with, I noticed some of these during the exercises like drawing the rotated boxes too small which was made life hard :( There's also good pointers on what to focus on when doing these exercises to improve.
So thanks for the feedback, I'll keep these in mind for the next exercises/lessons!
Marshall Vandruff is a ubiquitous name in art instruction - not just through his work on the Draftsmen podcast and his other collaborations with Proko, but in his own right. He's been teaching anatomy, gesture, and perspective for decades, and a number of my own friends have taken his classes at the Laguna College of Art and Design (back around 2010), and had only good things to say about him. Not just as an instructor, but as a wonderful person as well.
Many of you will be familiar with his extremely cheap 1994 Perspective Drawing lectures, but here he kicks it up to a whole new level.
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