Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

11:40 PM, Thursday April 18th 2024

Lesson 1 Submission - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/jzxrZZB

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Hi there,

First time uploading here.

Finally finished my lesson one. I believe I followed all of the instructions to the best of my understanding.

Thank you for taking your time to check my work.

Looking forward to the critiques before proceeding to the colossal 250 box challenge!

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8:45 PM, Friday April 19th 2024

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. Some of your ellipses in funnels are having some 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. 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 a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/wobblinglines 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. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases(very evident on the right side compared to your bottom side where you can see a clear rotation) but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/21/notrotating 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 for the most part. I'm still seeing a tad bit of wobble which tells me you are still slowing down your stroke for accuracy. Remember to fully commit to your marks and it's okay if your line is slightly off as our current priority is a confident smooth line. Your box constructions are fairly solid for the most part and I can see you are developing a sense for how box lines converge to vps. Nice work!

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.
5:02 PM, Saturday April 20th 2024

Hey Rob,

Thanks a bunch for your critique!

I'll make sure to pay special attention to ellipses and try to get better at rotating boxes going forward. And you're right about me falling back to drawing from the wrist and/or slowing down for some of the lines in later exercises as I found really short lines rather difficult to draw from shoulder without overshooting. I'll try and remember to not fall back on that habit.

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