Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

4:23 AM, Friday November 18th 2022

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The fine tip pens I purchased at first were garbage, so I ended up using a gel pen until I reached the rough perspective, which is when I received the fine tip pens I ordered from DrawABox.

I also posted this for free critique but was getting impatient so I got the Patreon subscription, if possible you can go ahead and delete my free critique submission.

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4:21 AM, Saturday November 19th 2022

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. 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 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 ghosted planes I'm starting to see some line wobble come back into your lines here and there. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling mention this advice here so you can understand what the problem likely is.

This is the important part we need to be focusing on and the real problem I'm seeing:

You're hesitating as you execute the line, rather than drawing with a confident motion. Finally committing to a mark can definitely be quite daunting, but it's integral that you get used to accepting that mistakes do happen. Things go wrong - you can prepare as much as possible (and you should) but the moment your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has already passed. Now you must commit yourself, push through with confidence, and execute your line. It's also worth remembering: we can still work with a line that is smooth and even, but there's not much that can be done with a wobbly one.

What's most likely happening is that you are worrying about accuracy too much while making your mark and it's causing you to slow down your stroke to compensate which is giving you that occasional line wobble. The other possibility is that you aren't ghosting your lines or you are reverting back to drawing from your wrist on occasion. I can't be entirely sure of which specific thing is happening and it even could be combinations of all of them.

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 for the most part. 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. That said I'm seeing a little wobble in some of your ellipse shapes in these exercises. This is likely happening because you are slowing down your stroke for accuracy. Remember to only really worry about accuracy while you are planning your mark. Once you've ghosted your ellipses it's time to just commit to making your ellipses once you put the pen down on the page. Hesitation leads to wobble. Your ellipses in funnels are looking smoother overall but you 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 off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to consistent smooth ellipses shapes as well as accuracy so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling This is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate and this is a bit more severe than the wobble I was seeing your ghosted planes. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced. I am noticing that you are redrawing lines on occasion and this is a habit you should try and get out of. Try and stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read. You are 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 decently. Although you drew this at a fairly good size one thing that would have helped you here would have been to just draw this a bit bigger. Drawing bigger 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 getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework but I'm still seeing a fair bit of wobbly line and redrawing lines. So as a revision I'd like you to do one more page of this exercise with a focus on confident linework. No redrawing lines and use the advice I gave earlier regarding wobbly linework. I'd like you to get more into the habit of not redrawing lines and putting down consistent confident marks even if they are slightly inaccurate before moving on to the 205 box challenge. While you have some solid box constructions here you are relying somewhat heavily on parallel lines for your box constructions which is leading to divergences in some cases. The 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you in order to develop a better understanding of how box lines need to converge to vp's.

Overall this was submission showed some really good growth but I'd like you deal with that habit of redrawing lines and getting more consistently confident linework while drawing boxes before moving on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

One page of the organic perspective exercise - Focus on confident linework and no redrawing lines.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
10:18 PM, Saturday November 19th 2022
edited at 10:19 PM, Nov 19th 2022
edited at 10:19 PM, Nov 19th 2022
6:40 PM, Sunday November 20th 2022

Okay, this is a solid improvement. Nice work. There is still a little wobble here and there so keep working on confident line work as you do the 250 box challenge. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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