Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
5:42 PM, Friday February 17th 2023
I tried again from the beginning
Hi CertainElf! My name's Flippy and I will be critiquing your submission today. Let's get right into it!
Superimposed Lines Exercise
Your lines are looking good. There is a minor amount of wobbling, but this will go away with mileage.
Ghosted Lines Exercise and Ghosted Plains Exercise
Your ghosted lines and ghosted plains look very on-point with minimal wobbling and barley any overshooting/undershooting. Nice work! The intersections of the plains are especially well-centered.
Tables of Ellipses Exercise
The ellipses of the largest degree are a bit wobbly at times. Always prioritize confidence over accuracy, as your accuracy will improve over time. Consider ghosting over your ellipses more before committing to the page. Also remember to limit the number of passes over your ellipses to 2-3 times (preferably two). https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/a76a8906.jpg It appears you have already been doing this. Keep it up!
Ellipses in Plains Exercise
This can be a tricky exercise. Some of your ellipses don't quite reach all four edges of the plains, but it's fine. Most of them are well-placed. Keep working to tighten up those passes!
Funnels Exercise
Most of your ellipses fit well into the boundaries of the curves, as well as being evenly centered on the minor axis. In the future, I would encourage (though it isn't required) further experimentation with the shift in degrees between ellipses, starting at the narrowest in the middle and expanding out to a full 360 degrees on the ends. I can see you are already doing this to an extent. Also remember to find a comfortable orientation to the page when drawing ellipses. (Or lines, for that matter!) Good job!
Rough Perspective Exercise
Your rough perspective looks good. There's some deviation from your target vanishing point in your first panel, but then in every panel following your angles are much more precise, so I can see you got the hang of it.
Organic Perspective
Once again, on your first panel, the convergences of some of your boxes are a little wonky, but then in every panel after you really nailed it. Not all of them are perfect, but this exercise is all about estimating convergences toward suggested vanishing points, so good job.
Rotated Boxes Exercise
And finally, the rotated boxes. Now, this exercise is supposed to be difficult, and you did a great job with it. The overall form is slightly off-centered in relation to your guidelines. The shape of the form isn't quite a sphere as in the example homework, but as this exercise is teaching us to go off of the existing elements of a drawing to estimate comparatively how each box's parallels converge towards its own vanishing point, it makes sense that little deviations would compile on top of each other, resulting in a slightly warped sphere, but nonetheless accurate. I also like your use of hatching lines, they came out very clean and make the drawing much more readable and believable. Good work!
Overall
So, for your submission overall: your lines look great; your ellipses are coming along, but could use more practice. I would suggest adding some of the ellipse-based exercises to your daily warmup until you are more comfortable with them.
You're probably sick of hearing me say this by now, but you did a really good job with this first lesson. I noticed you haven't included the Plotted Perspective exercise, and I assume that's because you have already worked through Lesson 1 before (as you mentioned you started over) and understand how to work with vanishing points. If you have not previously completed this exercise, I would advise you do so, and submit it in a reply to this critique.
Good work!
Next Steps:
I can tell that you have a good understanding of the concepts taught in Lesson 1. Proceed onto the 250 Box Challenge to further solidify your understanding of drawing within 3D space intuitively.
March on, brave Box Soldier. You've got this!
Thank you so much for the critique! I did the plotted perspective assignment and forgot to include it in the upload. I'll send it through discord for feedbacks still!
You're very welcome!
And yes, definitely post it on the DaB Discord. There are plenty of helpful individuals there who will be able to give good feedback. I'll keep an eye out for it as well!
Take care!
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.