7:23 AM, Monday October 10th 2022
Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. I’ll be taking a look at it for you.
Starting off, your superimposed lines look mostly good. I do see some empty space on your first page, and it does seem like you’ve not superimposed all of these the recommended 8 times, so I’d certainly recommend being a little more patient, and conscientious, but beyond that, they’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory, so all is good. Your ghosted lines/planes look fairly confident, too, and they’re all well drawn (except for that one that you drew a million times – remember that, regardless of how it turns out, each line is meant to be drawn once, and only once!) I’ll also recommend being a tiny bit less conscious of your end points, if you can. Your lines have a habit of wobbling, as you approach them, so I suspect that you’re slowing down, as you near them, in an effort to not stop short, or overshoot. That’s irrelevant, however – what matters most is that your lines are smooth, and straight, so prioritize that, instead.
Moving on, the table of ellipses exercise is well done – a lot of confidence on display, here. So much, in fact, that I’ll recommend you stick to 2 rotations only, from now on; it’ll be easier to see your mistakes, like that. Speaking of, I’ll quickly remind you that ellipses inside of a frame need to maintain a consistent degree, and angle, and that all ellipses need a goal. Specifically, they need to touch all sides of the frame they’re in – a few of your ellipses (look at page 2, row 7, column 2, on the left, for example) are floating inside of their frames. The ellipses in planes show a good start, but they’re nowhere near the quality of their neighbors. Though this is understandable – this exercise being much more complicated – it’s also irrelevant: the process of drawing an ellipse doesn’t change because the exercise does. Here, too, you should be prioritizing the smoothness/roundness of your ellipses, rather than letting it take a hit for the extra bit of accuracy that that’ll afford them. Finally, the funnels are well done (if at times drawn through a little much). They’ve the occasional spacing issues but, I assume this is due to the size of your ellipses on those particular funnels – the smaller a mark, the harder it is to engage the shoulder for it, as you know – so no issue. What is an issue (a minor one, anyway), is that you’re flicking your pen off the page at the end of your ellipses, which is giving your ellipses those weird tails. See if you can lift it off, instead.
The plotted perspective exercise looks clean – well done.
The rough perspective exercise is a little mixed. Your convergences are in a fairly good place by the end of page 2, and the linework, too, is improved, but there’s still the occasional instance of automatic reinforcing (redrawing a line you consider to have come out ‘wrong’), which, as mentioned, is not something we encourage.
The rotated boxes exercise looks mostly good. Rotation is, more often than not, a little minimal (probably because you skipped one of the first steps – the one that has you draw 4 reminder boxes), but the boxes are snug, and, more often than not, well constructed. As for the ones that aren’t, no stress: that’s what the box challenge is for.
Speaking of boxes, the organic perspective exercise is well done. Your boxes here are a little same-y, but they flow well, as per their size, and foreshortening, and your compositions end up looking quite believable because of it.
Next Steps:
I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, and sending you off to the box challenge. GL!