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12:38 AM, Tuesday January 31st 2023
Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
Not only does the challenge help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. That being said I'll try to keep this critique fairly brief so you can get working on the next steps as soon as possible.
Things you did well:
- You're doing a good job of experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening. Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding. I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.
Things you can work on:
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You have some noticeable wobbling occuring in your lines. Remember that line confidence is our top priority and that accuracy will improve as we continue to build up more mileage.
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When hatching you want to have both ends of the lines touching an edge of the form they're being drawn on rather than being left floating. Usually when left floating like this it's caused by people hesitating while worrying about accuracy. Remember to take your time to space each line with the ghosting method, and then draw them confidently just like any other line, accuracy will improve with more mileage.
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Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge but I do recommend practicing it in your future attempts. It's an incredibly useful tool but one that people often require a fair bit of mileage before they feel comfortable applying it. The sooner you start to build up that mileage the sooner you'll see better results.
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You tend to draw fairly small, I'd like you to draw larger in the future. Drawing large will help you become more comfortable working from the shoulder and allow you to see any mistakes you've made more clearly.
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There are times when your lines converge in pairs or you attempt to keep your lines a bit too parallel which results in them diverging. This is an example of lines converging in pairs, and this shows the relation between each line in a set and their respective vanishing point. The inner pair of lines will be quite similar unless the box gets quite long and the outer pair can vary a lot depending on the location of the vanishing point. Move it further away and the lines become closer to parallel while moving it closer increases the rate of foreshortening.
The key things we want to remember from this exercise are that our lines should always converge as a set not in pairs, never diverge from the vanishing point and due to perspective they won't be completely parallel.
I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you end up just creating further issues on top of them.
I'll be asking you to draw 50 more boxes please. I get the impression you may have tackled this too quickly, I can see that your lesson 1 submission was 19 days ago and it's not unexpected that the box challenge can take up to a month to complete. I would recommend taking a look at ScyllaStew's videos, she recorded herself working through some of the exercises which can help give a bit of perspective of just how long some of these exercises can take.
Once you've completed your boxes reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready I'll move you on to the next lesson.
I know you can do this and look forward to seeing your work.
Next Steps:
50 more boxes please.
8:18 PM, Monday February 6th 2023
Hello!
First of all, thank you so much for the feedback, I took a lot from that! For the next boxes, I tried to slow myself down and do not much more than a page a day (on two days I did a little more haha). I also tried my best to get the line convergence not in pairs but in one set, didnt work on every try but I did my best!
I feel a lot better about those 50 boxes than the 250 boxes, so theres that. Even if theres often one odd line going bananas, they are overall much better in my opinion!
Hope they are good enough!
-Stroomy
9:32 PM, Monday February 6th 2023
These are looking better, well done.
Your line quality has gone up and your boxes look more well thought out overall.
One thing I will note is that you tend to rely on perspective shifts when trying to bring your vanishing points in closer (shifting to 2 point perspective where you leave 1 set of lines parallel is something you do a fair bit) while these boxes are well done try to practice bringing all 3 vanishing points in closer more frequently. I'm confident that you can do this in your own time so I'll be marking your submission complete.
Keep practicing boxes and previous exercises in your warm ups and best of luck in lesson 2.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
Framed Ink
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.