Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
3:28 PM, Wednesday June 22nd 2022
Would appreciate any feedback thank you
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
2 users agree
2:10 AM, Tuesday July 5th 2022
Hi, great job on completing Lesson 1!
First off with your Lines, they're overall very clean and have have only slight wobbles meaning you have really good line confidence and understand the ghosting method and the use of using your shoulder.
Onto your ellipses, there seems to be a noticeable drop of confidence in your ellipses which is alright. It's something you'll get more practice on and I would suggest incorporating Ghosted Planes with Ellipses as a warm up before you do any exercises in the future. Just some slight minor problems such as not using all the space on Table of Ellipses, ellipses are sort of floating on the Ellipses in Planes and Funnels exercise. One exercise I do that isn't on DaB, is filling 2 pages with ellipses to help with confidence and making them less loose. On one page, I draw ellipses that are circles, while on the 2nd page, I draw ovals. Practicing with different shapes and degress will really help you when drawing organic forms.
Onto your Boxes, there's 2 major problems that you should be aware of. On Plotted Perspective and Rotated Boxes, don't rush your hatching and take time to hatch the sides that are facing the viewer. Making them evenly space and use the ghosting method when doing so. On Redoing lines, wether you're redoing a wrong line or trying to fix messed up line weight. Don't do that. It's best to break out of this habit before you try doing this on organic forms on future lessons and will make your work look messy (for example my Lesson 3 & 4). Move onto the next line and act as if you didn't mess it up.
Overall, your Lesson 1 is very solid and the problems I mentioned can easily be resolved with practice and being aware. To work on your line confidence, just like I suggested in the 1st paragraph, incorporate warm ups before you do any exercises because it'll definitely help you in the long run. I'll be marking this lesson as complete and I wish you good luck on the 250 Box Challenge !! :D
Next Steps:
250 Box Challenge
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something we've used ourselves, or know to be of impeccable quality. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Printer Paper
Where the rest of my recommendations tend to be for specific products, this one is a little more general. It's about printer paper.
As discussed in Lesson 0, printer paper (A4 or 8.5"x11") is what we recommend. It's well suited to the kind of tools we're using, and the nature of the work we're doing (in terms of size). But a lot of students still feel driven to sketchbooks, either by a desire to feel more like an artist, or to be able to compile their work as they go through the course.
Neither is a good enough reason to use something that is going to more expensive, more complex in terms of finding the right kind for the tools we're using, more stress-inducing (in terms of not wanting to "ruin" a sketchbook - we make a lot of mistakes throughout the work in this course), and more likely to keep you from developing the habits we try to instill in our students (like rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach).
Whether you grab the ream of printer paper linked here, a different brand, or pick one up from a store near you - do yourself a favour and don't make things even more difficult for you. And if you want to compile your work, you can always keep it in a folder, and even have it bound into a book when you're done.