8:54 PM, Friday April 17th 2020
Hi Lifebeat, I'll be handling your lesson 1 critique.
It's great that your enjoying the lessons so far, but before I get to specific exercises I just want to clarify a few things. On your ellipses in planes page you ask about hovering your hand above the page, so basically you want to have at least some form of support under your arm. Resting your hand or elbow gently on the table is fine as long as you aren't using them as a pivot. If you just try to keep your entire arm held in the air you strain your shoulder which you may not notice at first but if you continue to do can result in injury which can take quite a while to heal.
With that out of the way let's start with your Lines exercises. Your biggest mistake across all the exercises in the lesson is basically that there is no confidence in your linework and you're adjusting to using your shoulder. Across super imposed lines to ghosted planes you get quite a bit of wobbling and arcing. Remember that before every mark we make (whether it's lines or ellipses) we use the ghosting method, plan out our lines a few times above the page before lowering our pen and in a single smooth fast motion we create a confident line. If we go too slowly our brain tries to course correct what it sees as mistakes and instead of correcting it just creates wobbling the entire length of the line.
In the Ellipses section it's a bit of the same story, you left quite a bit of space in between ellipses in your tables and you get some wobbling occuring which makes your ellipses not as smooth as they should be. It's great that you experiment with shapes and sizes, keep that up since experimenting is what leads to understanding, we just need to improve your confidence to really show the quality of work I know you're capable of. I can tell that you tried to keep your ellipses in funnels divided evenly which is great, but you ended up with poor spacing between the ellipses as seen here.
Lastly we'll go over your Boxes. In your Rough Perspective exercise your correction lines are mostly converging in the area of the vanishing point which is great, you do need to pay attention to how you construct your boxes however. You want to make sure that your horizontal lines are parallel and your vertical lines are perpendicular to the horizon line, due to some wobbling and maybe rushed planning you end up with some tilting that you want to try and avoid. For a quick reminder of the rules you want to follow regarding where your lines should be check here. You showed that you have some grasp of 3D space in the rotated boxes exercise which is great. You mostly kept your spacing even and you achieved a nice bit of rotation, once we tidy up your linework it'll look even better. Your organic perspective exercise is really interesting compositionally, I'm glad you experimented and made them look as interesting as you did. Your linework also took a step in the right direction here, your lines look more confident and thus look straighter. You did a have a habit of trying to redraw your lines to cover up your mistakes which is something you need to avoid doing, but overall this is a solid attempt and a step in the right direction.
So to finish up your critique I will say that I'm happy to see you understand a lot of the concepts being shown here, but I don't feel you're ready to move on just yet. I'll need you to go over the super imposed lines and table of ellipses exercises and resubmit 1 page of each. When doing so remember that we want you to ghost a few times and create your mark with a smooth confident motion. We need to get rid of your wobbling as soon as we can because it will create a weaker foundation for the rest of the concepts to sit upon if we don't address it.
So take a deep breath, go through the exercise material again and give them your best attempt. We don't expect perfection but I know you can do better than this and once you see you can as well you'll hopefully have less issues with line confidence and feel great going forward.
Next Steps:
Redo and resubmit:
-1 page of Super Imposed lines.
-1 page of Table of Ellipses.