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10:47 PM, Monday December 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 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/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.
The plotted perspective exercise looks good although the instructions mentioned that if you are going to add hatching to the front plane of the box you are supposed to take your time with it and make sure you draw your lines from end to end of the plane and your look a bit sloppily drawn in at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/15/step8 The rough perspective exercises have several issues that I'd like to discuss. The first is that both pages were supposed to be done in one point perspective. Secondly, you were supposed to draw through all of your boxes for this exercise. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/step5 Third, you didn't extend your depth lines back to the horizon line correctly and instead you extended your corners to the vanishing point which the instruction specifically tell you not to do. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/step6 You did do a good job keeping up with confident linework throughout this exercise but because you simply skipped some steps and also did a whole page in two point perspective which was not the assignment I'm going to ask for a redo on both of these pages. Make sure you look over all of the instructions again and give them another shot.
The rotated box exercise turned out decently but once again you didn't follow instructions here completely. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. The main issue though is that once again you didn't draw through your boxes which is a main part of the instructions for this exercise. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/notdrawingthrough You also could have done a little better of a job keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/guessing Keeping the gaps narrow and consistent really helps with inferring information about neighboring boxes rotation and proportion. Your line quality is also starting to become a bit concerning now that you are adding line weight. I have some notes regarding added line weight I'd like to share. If you want to add line weight make sure you don't revert back to using your wrist and are drawing from your shoulder with confidence. Also added line weight should be subtle so try and only go over a line one additional time instead of multiple times. Since you only drew through a few of your boxes for this exercise I'd like you to redo this page as well. 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. That said as I mentioned earlier your line quality is becoming a bit concerning because of all of the added line weight and you are also redrawing lines pretty often. This is a habit you should try and get out of. Try and stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Try and get more used to just putting down a single confident line and sticking with it. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read. Your box constructions are pretty solid for the most part but you are relying somewhat heavily on parallel lines for your box constructions which is leading to divergences in some cases. 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 submission showed a decent understanding of most of the material you simply just seemed to ignore some key instructions in a few exercises. Take your time while reading through these lessons and instructions as you will be assigned revisions for not following them completely. Another important thing to realize is that we are not drawing "finished" pictures here to show off to people. Instead these are exercises that are designed specifically to help you develop good draftsmenship habits and to think in "3d space" more naturally while drawing. They are not necessarily meant to look good. Once I get those revisions I'll take a look and you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.
Next Steps:
Two pages of the rough perspective exercises - Follow all of the instructions
One page of the rotated box exercise - Make sure you draw through all of your boxes
1:50 AM, Tuesday December 13th 2022
Hey Rob. Sorry for the delay. I was hoping to get those revised assignments to you by the end of last week but I ended up being pretty busy, and while I have completed versions of each, I'm not especially happy with how they turned out, and have started reworking them with an emphasis on clean decisive careful strokes. They otherwise ought to comply with the directions, but they're a little skewed and messy, and since your feedback re-emphasized line quality so much, I feel like it might be worth my time to redo the rough perspective and rotated box assignments one final time and really focus on that, rather than resubmit sub-par ones that I might have to redo again anyway. If you think it'd be better to just push those through and continue drilling clean strokes during warm-ups, let me know. Otherwise, I'll hopefully have versions suitable for resubmission by the end of this week. Mainly I just wanted to touch base and let you know I appreciate your feedback and am sorry I'm being less timely than I'd have liked on those assignments.
10:26 PM, Tuesday December 13th 2022
Don't worry at all about rushing to get these in. Take as much time as you need. I would also not recommend grinding these exercises and redoing them a bunch of times. All of the skills you are practicing with these exercises you will be practicing throughout this entire course.
2:48 AM, Friday December 16th 2022
Here is the link to my revision assignments. Thank you!
Sakura Pigma Microns
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.