Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

7:08 AM, Wednesday May 31st 2023

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Thank you! For the organic perspective exercise, I wasn't entirely sure if I was supposed to follow the vanishing points created with the first Y throughout the boxes or just rotate them and go off of the new Y created with each box. I did a page each sticking mostly to one method.

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8:08 PM, Wednesday May 31st 2023

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 slight issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/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/1/18/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 looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting mostly confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/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. The other possibility is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist for some of these lines. Just something to keep an eye on. You should be drawing from your shoulder for basically every line you draw, even shorter ones. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only. You are 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 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 pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. 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 fairly wonky throughout this exercise and you need to develop a better sense for how box lines converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a good 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

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:54 PM, Wednesday May 31st 2023

Thank you for the critique! Just so I understand the organic perspective box exercise a bit better for the future; when dealing with the vps in this exercise are the vps reset with each box or are the vps established from the initial Y we draw with the first box?

9:28 PM, Thursday June 1st 2023

The vps are different for each box

8:20 AM, Thursday January 25th 2024

Hello! So I have a couple questions for the 250 box challenge. https://imgur.com/a/wR0ixN9

I've been struggling with the back Y coming together properly fairly consistently. Sometimes I can point to obvious mistakes in the other lines that make up my box, but in number 68 for ex., I'm having a bit more trouble as it seems like most of the lines here are converging and lining up with each other nicely. That being said, the line for the dark green mark (on the right side) that should line up with the Y is completely off and converges way too fast and this is without placing it to where the corner of the other two inner lines meet. Is there something obvious I'm missing with the box's construction that's causing this axis to have one line that's wildly inconsistent with the other two?

For the back lines should I just draw them forming a neat Y even if one line is obviously going to be converging or diverging sooner than it should or just connect two and have the other meet one of the other lines naturally?

Thank you!

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