3:13 AM, Sunday July 4th 2021
Hello Hummingbird! Welcome to draw a box! I will take a look at your submission.
Beginning with your superimposed lines exercise. On your first page, your lines have some noticeable wobbling as a result of prioritizing accuracy over smooth, confident lines. There is also a bit of fraying in the beginning of your lines, meaning your rushed, or didn’t take the time to place down your pen at the starting point. Fraying on one end of the line is normal and expected, but not at the start. Your second page does look better than the previous one, with a clear starting point on most lines. However, the wobbling persist, except in the last 4 curved lines to the right that appear smooth. Take note of how you executed these lines, because this is what you want to be aiming for, smooth and continuous lines. Your ghosted lines exercise is decent. Most of your lines are smooth with little wobbling. The issue here is the arcing lines, which could be caused by either not drawing from the shoulder and pivoting only from the elbow, or it is a natural habit of yours. If the latter, consciously bending the line in the opposite direction will remove it and result in a straight line. This issue is also present in the ghosted planes exercise, but I think you did a great job still, your lines are coming out smoothly with a good amount of accuracy.
For your table of ellipses exercise, these are off to a good start! You drew through each ellipse two times and, aside from a few wobbly ones (noticeably the smaller ones), most of them are drawn confidently. Here’s some advice that I give other students to improve their ellipse making: notice that little bend or spike at the major axis on some of your narrower ellipses? You can get rid of them by starting and ending at the minor axis instead. This usually solves the problem, and even improves symmetry, for most students I’ve critiqued. So give it a try. Your ellipses in planes is done really well too. It’s good that you chose to keep your ellipses smooth instead of deforming them to fit them in the plane snugly. Your funnels hmm. Ok, a few issues I have with this. First, you didn’t start with a narrow central ellipse, second, the degree barely increases as you moved further away from the center, and third, you only did two funnels. I want you to take a look ta the example homework. Try to mimic it, and do the number of recommended funnels. So, expect a revision for this exercise.
Moving on to your plotted perspective and well, you only did a max of two boxes per section. Now, the purpose of this exercise is to get you familiarized with perspective and see how the box turns out depending on how far it is to the vanishing point, and how the planes behave with relation to the horizon line. So it would have been worth your time to experiment a little more by adding more boxes in different locations. So, I will also be asking for revision here, but I don’t want to give you too much work, so I’ll stick with one section only. Your rough perspective looks good! You extended your lines towards the horizon line, and you still applied the ghosting method to your lines. Still a little shaky with you line making; remember that we need to prioritize confidence over accuracy because a wobbly line is difficult to work with. Another issue I would like to point out is your box's vertical lines are not perpendicular to the horizon line, and horizontal lines not perpendicular to it. Here you can see that there was too much guessing which is what I suspect happened. Your rotated boxes turned out pretty well! You drew through each box and kept them close to each other. You did run into the issue of not actually rotating you boxes, noticeable on the vertical and horizontal axis. Take a look at this and compare it to your work. It’s a common issue among students, so don’t fret. Your organic perspective is done really well too! One thing worth mentioning that will help improve your box construction is the initial Y’s angles must be greater than 90 degrees.
To conclude, you did a solid job for most of your exercises. However, I must stress that your funnels and plotted perspective is, in my opinion, incomplete and possibly rushed; you didn’t do the number of recommended funnels and boxes; you did too little here. I really don’t want to see you submit a piece only for it to be rejected in future lessons. Trust me, from what I’ve seen, the future lessons are tedious and time-consuming. I don’t want to intimidate you, but that’s just the nature of draw a box; it’s a lot of hard work, and hard work is what we expect from all students. So, I want you to come back to these two exercises and redo them. Below, I’ll provide some instructions. I will await your reply, but do take as much time as you need.
Next Steps:
For the funnels:
Do at least 7 - 8 funnels in one page. I also highly recommend you revisit the funnels article here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/video. Re-read the instructions and watch the video carefully.
For your plotted perspective:
I will only ask for only one section (not three) with at least 5 - 6 boxes. Have only one box overlapping the horizon line and the rest on the top or bottom. Keep your vanishing points further away from the center to give yourself more space to work with. Again, looking at the example homework helps.
Again, take as much time as you need. Don’t worry if it takes a long time either, I will wait.