Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
6:31 AM, Tuesday June 14th 2022
I've done the homework on A5 paper as that's all I had unfortunately but I've tried to work as large as I can to maintain the size I'd have drawn on A4 paper.
Nicely done. I can see you took your time and planned your marks.
The organic box exercises lost a bit of the confidence seen in previous exercises. But with each page, the pen strokes show improvement.
Next Steps:
Continue with the next lesson, but remember the work you performed here. Confident strokes after planning/ghosting whilst drawing from the shoulder.
Thanks so much for the critique! I will admit I was losing a bit of hope with the organic box exercise but I tried to persevere. Next stop : 250 boxes! :)
hey there elvenstar207, i'll be the one looking over your submission.
if you do ever find a sale for a4 paper, the investment would be worth it as you'll be able to use it for the upcoming lessons that you'll be tackling once you finish since a5 is pretty hard to work through especially because of it's small size, later in the course when other people critiques your submission, you might get pointed out for having way too many pages rather than what was instructed.
now starting off with your superimposed lines, these are off to a great start! most of them are fairly straight, there aren't any arching lines and i can see that there are only fraying in one end which shows that you took the time to carefully position your pen before marking. your ghosted lines and ghosted planes are also both confidently executed well! the accuracy isn't that far off and you'll get even better once you keep practicing these in your 10-15 min of warm-ups.
your table of ellipses are tight, not overlapping and confidently drawn through 2-3 times, they also seem to be symmetrical when cut through by the minor axis so great work! for your ellipses in planes, there were some cases of deformed ellipses, remember to prioritize confidence over accuracy! if you prioritize accuracy you sacrifice confidence. don't worry too much about accuracy yet since you'll be able to gain mileage overtime, especially for the upcoming 250 box challenge as well as the warmups. in your funnels, i noticed that as the ellipses reach the far end of the funnel, they seem to tilt a bit making the ellipses not aligned although greatwork keeping the smoothness as well as keeping it snug and tight and not overlapping.
now onto the boxes, you've done the plotted perspective exercise well so i don't have anything to say. for your rough perspective, you did fairly well for maintaining the vertical lines perpendicular to the horizon while horizontal lines parallel to it, you've also done good job at extending it on the horizon line and not onto the vanishing point which shows that you followed the instructios by heart, now there's one issue that came up from this exercise and that's the slight hesitation that's showing onto your lines, there are some subtle s/c-curved lines which shows that you're slightly hesitating when marking or that you are focusing way too much on accuracy sacrificing confidence in return, for the subtle c-curved lines, one thing that you can do is to consciously arch the opposite way to maintain a straight line when ghosting, this can help lessen the arching problem. for the subtle s-curved line, try to ghost a lot of times before actually commiting to it, you can also increase the speed of ghosting.
next up is your rotated boxes exercise, it's great that you drew it big but it might've been just the picture that's big so it must've been small when you worked through it, anyways wonderful job here, there's not much guessing happening, the rotation is somewhat good which makes me think that you already have good spatial reasoning, you've also kept the gaps narrow and consistent, great effort here, and you can also revisit this exercise again to check your progress and if you got slightly better in terms of rotating the box. it's honestly way better than my first attempt at this exercise.
lastly organic perspective, there's a good sense of flow in the page giving the illusion that it's going from front to the back page; the boxes are also confidently executed which means that you are probably already comfortable with using your shoulder as well as applying the ghosting method and finally the foreshortening of some boxes are somewhat parallel making it diverge rather than converge, but you'll definitely dive more into that on the 250 box challenge and know both dramatic and shallow foreshortening.
overall this is a pretty solid submission, although there is still some room for improvement, there's no doubt that you can move on to the next lesson/challenge and you seem to understand the concepts behind each exercise, with that i'll be marking this submission as complete and so good luck with the 250-box challenge!
Next Steps:
move onto the 250 box challenge
Thanks so much for your critique!! Really appreciate you going in-depth to my mistakes/things I need to improve because I can now focus more on them. I've already completed my 250 box challenge as I already got a 'pass' from the previous critique I received on my lesson 1 submission. Hopefully there's some improvement there in my linework as I did try to adhere to what the lessons mentioned were common mistakes. Again, thanks so much! :)
Drawabox isn't the be-all, end-all of drawing fundamental education. Our approach prioritizes certain concepts over others, and while we believe it do so for good reasons, ultimately it doesn't appeal to everyone. If Drawabox simply doesn't work for you, give Proko's Drawing Basics course a try - at the very least, you'll probably find it to be a hell of a lot more fun.
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