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3:51 PM, Sunday March 19th 2023
Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. I’m TA Benj, and I’ll be taking a look at it for you.
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The longest ones least so, but I can tell that you’re aiming for them to be, so all is good. The ghosted lines are equally confident, but the planes struggle a little. There’s no reason for this, however; though they add up to a bigger picture, these lines are also drawn one at a time, same as the ones in the ghosted lines exercise. Try not to let the scale of the exercise overwhelm you. Both here, and everywhere else in this entire course, all you’re drawing is, essentially, is a collection of lines, that are handled one at a time.
Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise looks great. Your ellipses here are smooth, rounded, and all properly draw through. The ellipses in planes look good, also. Despite these more complicated frames, you’ve done a good job of maintaining your ellipses’ prior smoothness/roundness. Nice job on the funnels, too. Do be careful, however, that all of your ellipses have a goal. This is to say, that if you notice that the minor axis doesn’t extend all the way through for the next one over, either extend it first, or simply don’t add one. The same can be said for the frame.
The plotted perspective exercise is well done, though if you were going to rush the ‘hatching’, I wish you hadn’t bothered with it to begin with. Right now, it simply detracts from the piece, by drawing attention toward itself, as opposed to away (what it’s meant to be doing). The rough perspective exercise is a little mixed. Its convergences are great. You may not think so, as per the correction lines, but they actually improve throughout the set (the boxes in that second page are a little harder, hence the difficulty). Linework, on the other hand, is a little insecure. I can say the same thing here that I did for your ghosted lines: don’t let yourself get overwhelmed. Solid attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. Its rotation is a little light, but your boxes are snug – both up front, and in the back! – and nicely constructed, too. Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks solid. You’ve got some interesting compositions here, which flow well as a result of the size, and foreshortening of your boxes. Keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, so you may head on over to the box challenge. Best of luck to you!
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Framed Ink
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.