Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

12:33 PM, Monday August 1st 2022

Lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

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

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I am Left handed. If you need anything please let me know. Thanks for look over these!

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10:33 PM, Monday August 1st 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 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. 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 was obviously a bit of a struggle. 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 but the real reason this seemed a lot tougher than it needed to be is because you didn't even attempt to keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/guessing Doing this would have made it much easier to infer information about neighboring boxes rotations instead of some of the wild guessing you have going on here. I'm not going to assign a revision here but I would highly recommend coming back to this exercise 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 for the most part. There are still some wobbly lines here and there so keep in mind what I said earlier regarding wobbly linework. I am noticing that you are redrawing lines on occasion and 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. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read. Your box constructions are quite wonky throughout and you need to develop a sense of how box lines need to converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a pretty good submission that showed some nice growth. Your ellipses are coming along well but keep working on that confident linework. Other than that, 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.

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:44 PM, Tuesday August 2nd 2022

Thanks for the constructive criticism! It was very detailed and give me alot of things to think of. On another note I kind of wanted to give the rotated boxes exercise another shot. Should I do this or would this be considered grinding the exercises and just wait until it comes up as a warm up later on naturally?

Thanks again for the help :)

9:16 PM, Tuesday August 2nd 2022

No need to do it right away. I'd give it another shot after the box challenge or lesson 2.

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