Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
10:53 AM, Monday March 2nd 2020
Please provide comments. I have also completed 250 box challenge will be sending it for review soon.
Hi there sumgup, sorry for the delayed response in your critique, the TAs have all had various things going on, but hopefully we are back on track now.
LinesWith your super imposed lines you are doing a good job prioritizing flow and confidence over accuracy. At this point just keep practicing different speeds to try and get your lines to fray less and get tighter grouping. With yoru ghosted lines they are confident, but arcing indicating elbow use instead of your shoulder so be mindful of that.
Ellipses Ellipses are hard. Full stop. They need lots of practice in warm ups and there is no other way around it. For all of your exercises the ellipses are drawn through, but pretty wild in terms of grouping. Keep practicing using your shoulder and the ghosting method for your ellipses and things will improve. With your ellipses in planes you do a good job making contact with the edges of the planes where appropriate, but the planes themselves seem rushed. Remember with drawing simply completing exercises won't help you improve, so try not to rush through anything but take your time and do everything to the best of your abilities. In your funnels exercise you do a good job keeping your minor axes aligned to the funnel axes and in your tables exercise your ellipses are nicely packed leaving no room for ambiguity.
Rough Perspective Here you are doing a good job executing your lines with confidence and with your shoulder with only a few hiccups. Your vertical lines are perpendicular to the horizon and horizontals are parallel to the horizon resulting in correctly oriented boxes. Your converging lines are of varying accuracy but that's ok; as you continue to practice your line accuracy both to near points and far points will improve.
Rotated Boxes So with this exercise, good job completing it. The only thing we expect of our students is a complete submission to the best of your abilities, which you have done. This is because we only care about introducing students to new types of spatial problems and ways to solve them. So in terms of what you could have improved on, the first thing is rotation of your boxes. You aren't rotating your boxes but rather skewing and shifting them. Give this gif some further examination and study how the motion of the VPs drive the rotation of the boxes. Regarding your corner boxes, you can see that they weren't really rotating, and you could have had more success if you had utlized the
adjacent lines as perspective guides as explained in that link. Overall though this is definitely a hard exercise and you should not feel bad with your result as persevering through is more important.
Organic Perspective With this exercise you were off to a good start in terms of your exploration of three dimensional space. You could have pushed the illusion of space further by scaling more boxes (smaller to recede in to the background and larger for the foreground) as well as more overlapping forms. Your boxes themselves are quite divergent, and normally I would allude to the box challenge helping you work through this but since you have already completed it I will forgo that point. Throughout the exercise your lines seem to fall in quality/start to get more rushed so I will remind you once more not to rush, as it is counter productive and will only hinder your progress.
Next Steps:
So with this I will mark this lesson as complete. If you had not already completed your 250 boxes I would have asked you to submit more pages of the ellipses in planes exercise to continue to practice your draftsmanship, so instead I will just suggest you continue to work on those exercises in your warm ups. You are still subject to the 2 week cool down period before you can submit your boxes so in addition to the ellipses in planes warm ups I suggest you just enjoy the break and draw for fun as much as you can! We will see you in two weeks with your boxes.
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.
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