Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
4:03 PM, Saturday November 5th 2022
I'm reuploading it because I'd like an official critique of this and lesson 2, but I think I'll have to wait until I get the second credit, right?
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 looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. 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. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also 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. You are having quite a lot of issues with slanting lines on your boxes. 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 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(mainly just on the left side although the top is very very slight as well) but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/notrotating Some of your rotations on the outer rows here are very slight overall, which is perfectly fine given the difficulty of this exercise. 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 am seeing a little wobble coming back into your linework here and it could be happening because you are slowing down your stroke for the sake of accuracy while drawing boxes. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling 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. Your box constructions are fairly wonky throughout and you need to develop a better sense of how box lines converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.
Overall this was a pretty solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your ellipses are coming along nicely. Your line confidence took a slight dive with the organic perspective exercises so remember to fully commit to your mark once you go to make it and to not slow down your stroke for the sake of accuracy. Otherwise, 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. You will need to submit the 250 box challenge for critique before you can submit lesson 2 and there is a two week wait time between submissions.
Next Steps:
The 250 Box Challenge
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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