This is my second go at these lessons. I sort of fell off after lesson 3 a few months ago and I wasn’t properly following the guidelines highlighted in the lessons. I would redo the exercises until I was satisfied and I felt an extreme amount of guilt. This time around I’ve left my mistakes on the page and I have properly implemented the 50/50 rule into my routine. Thank you for your work. I look forward to your feedback.
Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. I myself took a similar path the first time I attempted drawabox where I gave up after lesson 3 and then restarted the entire course getting an official critique as I went through it again. I found that I had a much easier time understanding the core concepts the second time through. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.
Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. A few of your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are looking fine for the most part I'm not seeing any real issues here which makes sense as you've worked through this material before.
The plotted perspective looks good although a few of the vertical legs on your boxes are slanting a bit. It's important to realize in a two point perspective drawing like that all of your vertical box legs should be perpendicular(straight up and down) to the horizon line. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.
Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are solid for the most part and it's pretty clear you already have an understanding of how box lines are supposed to converge to vps. Nice work.
Overall this was a really solid submission which shows a good understanding of the material. Your line confidence and ellipses are both looking good. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
The 250 Box Challenge
Thank you very much! Hope you enjoy a well made or at the very least a tasty dinner sometime soon.
Michael Hampton is one of my favourite figure drawing teachers, specifically because of how he approaches things from a basis of structure, which as you have probably noted from Drawabox, is a big priority for me. Gesture however is the opposite of structure however - they both exist at opposite ends of a spectrum, where structure promotes solidity and structure (and can on its own result in stiffness and rigidity), gesture focuses on motion and fluidity, which can result in things that are ephemeral, not quite feeling solid and stable.
With structure and spatial reasoning in his very bones, he still provides an excellent exploration of gesture, but in a visual language in something that we here appreciate greatly, and that's not something you can find everywhere.
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