Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

8:32 PM, Thursday February 13th 2020

Drawabox - Lesson 1 - by Reset - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/oWUf9XB.jpg

Post with 20 views. Drawabox - Lesson 1 - by Reset

Hello,

Here's my submission for lesson 1. Any feedback is appreciated.

Also, can I move on to the 250 box challenge or is there anything that I should redo first?

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3:22 AM, Saturday February 15th 2020

Hey there, TA Meta here to look over your work, so let's get started.

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking great. They're nice and confident and you're taking the time to line your pen up on the starting point, which limits the fraying to one end of your line. Your pen does seem to be dying a lil but looks like you replaced it before starting your ghosted lines and planes - which are again, looking beautifully straight and confident.

Next your tables of ellipses are looking really good. You've packed your ellipses in there nice and tightly and the ellipses themselves are a good shape and drawn with a lot of confidence. As you get more mileage with these, you'll be able to work on tightening that second pass up and having it fall closer to the first. Your ellipses in planes exhibit the same well-shapen and confident linework that we saw in the previous exercise. It's great to see that you haven't sacrificed this confidence for a need to be accurate. Finally, your funnels also look really good, you've managed to correctly align them to the minor axis. There's only very slight signs of skewing here and there but that's honestly more of a nitpick.

Onwards to your rough perspective and you've done a fantastic job here keeping your horizontals and verticals aligned parallel and perpendicular to the horizon line respectively. There's a very slight drop in line confidence here but it's clear that you've taken your time to think about what line you need to put down next and as a result, a lot of your boxes a pretty close with their convergences and where it does stray, it's generally in the ways we expect to see - e.g. boxes further from the VP are more inaccurate.

Next you've done a good job keeping the gaps between the boxes on your rotated boxes nice and consistent. You did draw this a bit small, we do encourage students to draw as large as possible because it gives our brains room to work through the spatial problems we're presenting them with, especially tricky ones like this! Anyway, you've managed a fair amount of rotation on a couple of the axes while on others you've tended to follow the vanishing point of the previous box rather than sliding it along the axis. I noticed this particularly on the rear planes of your boxes, where some of them are almost facing us straight on while the front face is converging. These last two exercises are intended as a kind of introduction to new types of spatial problems you'll tackle in your box challenge, so we don't expect students to nail them down the first time.

Finally, your organic perspective is off to a good start, you've created some interesting compositions here with the variation in scale of your boxes and overlapping conveying a fairly relatable scale. I did notice that you had a tendency to "correct" lines here, which we discourage, as you tend to reinforce the mistake and draw more attention to it, as well as these particular lines not being as well planned as the first one you lay down.

Next Steps:

Solid work! Make sure you draw large and try not to correct lines as a kneejerk reaction to being wrong. Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:25 AM, Saturday February 15th 2020

Thank you very much for the in depth reply.

Regarding the corrections, I noticed that myself, as you guessed, they do not come up as a "thought" mark, it's more like an intuitive reaction. Perhaps an old habit. I will try to stop doing that.

I'm going to continue while keeping in mind everything you said.

Onward to the box slaughterhouse then!

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Sakura Pigma Microns

Sakura Pigma Microns

A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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