Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

4:54 PM, Friday January 8th 2021

Drawabox lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/UnR87SU

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

Really struggled with the boxes section of Lesson 1 but grateful for it to exist as it's definitely been an eye opener.

I'm not too satisfied with it and still struggle to confidently draw lines when trying to construct boxes. As a result things look shabby in the box section of the homework.

During my time doing the homework I did enjoy the videos and lessons. I will continue with Drawabox until the end but will try and be a bit more patcient.

1 users agree
5:56 AM, Saturday January 9th 2021

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with pretty minimal wavering throughout. Your ghosted lines and planes are looking very good. You are using the ghosting method to great effect to get very confident linework and while your accuracy could still use some improvement that will come with practice. Nice job.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along great. You are doing a good job drawing through all of your ellipses and focusing consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't too concerned with accuracy at this point. Although accuracy is our end goal it tends to come with mileage and consistent practice and can't really be forced. Your ellipses in funnels are having some slight issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned This is something you should always be considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are in great shape and your accuracy is already getting quite decent and will get better and better with practice. Nice work.

The plotted perspective looks great nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective boxes turned out quite well. You are doing a great job keeping up with the confident linework here. You are redrawing lines on a few occasions and that's a good habit to try and break. Try and stick with your initial slightly misdrawn line. More lines just tends to make things look messier and more confusing. You did a good job extending the line back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were off but this will become more intuitive with practice.

The rotated box exercise turned out decently. You did a good job drawing through all of your boxes and keeping your gaps fairly consistent. You are still struggling a bit with the box rotations which is completely normal given the difficutly of this exercise. In some cases even you aren't really rotating your boxes at all but are instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating This is a great exercise to revisit after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective boxes are looking pretty good. You seem to be quite comfortable with the ghosting method and drawing from the shoulder and your linework is mostly confident although you are still redrawing lines on occasion. Your box constructions are pretty decent for the most part but there are some wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a really well done submission that showed a real nice amount of growth. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey very thoroughly. 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

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:56 AM, Saturday January 9th 2021

Thanks so much, Rob! I really appreciate your feedback; it's a confidence booster and insightful! :)

I'll try to work on not redrawing lines and will revisit the rotational boxes at some point.

Onto the 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 I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.