Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

1:16 PM, Wednesday December 30th 2020

Draw a Box Lesson 1 - All traditional 30/12 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/IcC3NcD.jpg

Post with 16 views. Draw a Box Lesson 1 - All traditional 30/12

Link in comments: https://imgur.com/a/IcC3NcD

Submitting for official critique since I became a Patron. I previously completed Lesson 1 but with some digital works, so now that I'm all healthy again I wanted to do it from scratch again!

Hope this is fine, thanks

1 users agree
11:31 AM, Thursday December 31st 2020

Lines

Starting with your superimposed lines, you definitely started off trying to drag your arm back into line with the guideline whenever you strayed from it however on the second page, this improved significantly on the straight lines. The curved lines however are still a bit less confident, so make sure you work on these in your warmups. It's good to see you taking the time to line your pen up with the starting point however, as this limits fraying to one end of the line.

Next your ghosted lines and planes are looking quite confident and landing pretty close to the end point. On the ghosted lines, when the lesson calls for a page of an exercise, make sure that you're filling the page up and not leaving big gaps - plus it's good extra practice.

Ellipses

Your tables of ellipses again show significant improvement over the two pages though there is a certain sense of stiffness to all of your ellipses. Make sure you're only drawing through your ellipses 2-3 times (ideally only twice) as they become quite visually heavy and stiff the more you go around them. It's good to see you've squeezed lots of different shapes and sizes of ellipses into the tables and kept them butted up nice and tight against one another.

Next, it's clear in your ellipses in planes that you've focused a bit too much on accuracy, causing you to slow down and your ellipses to wobble significantly. Remember that we are focusing on confident execution of our lines and ellipses because accuracy will come with time and practice but confidence requires a lot more conscious effort.

Finally, your ellipses are keeping to the confines of the funnels pretty well with the previous issues around stiffness and drawing through too many times still present. In terms of alignment to the minor axis, there's some fairly significant skewing throughout. It's worth noting that sometimes you may have a different angle which is more comfortable for aligning ellipses to what you would just drawing them on their own. I've also found that sometimes the angle that I'm looking at my work can affect this too.

Boxes

Next your rough perspective is off to a good start. You've done a pretty good job keeping the horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line overall and your estimation of perspective is not too far off, with boxes tending to stray in expected ways - further from the vanishing point being less accurate. Make sure you're not automatically correcting yourself or redrawing lines unless you're consciously trying to add line weight. Reinforcing your lines tends to draw more attention to the original mistake and in later lessons, may even undermine your constructions.

You've done a good job keeping the gaps between your rotated boxes nice and tight, which has given you the best chance of placing your next box. On the rear planes, you've barely rotated the boxes, focusing your rotation more on the front planes. You've managed to get a bit of rotation on the right hand side, whilst the left hand side tends to follow the vanishing points of the previously drawn boxes rather than shifting the vanishing point along the axis. This exercise (and the following one) are intended to be beyond the student's current capabilities and as an introduction to certain concepts we will utilise in the box challenge and beyond.

Finally, your organic perspective is off to a good start. You're starting to get a sense of scale but you could definitely push this further with the variation of the size of your boxes as well as overlapping the boxes. Your boxes aren't too bad overall, though there is a bit of divergence happening that you will be able to work on in the 250 box challenge. Again, you've reinforced your lines here in quite a scratchy manner - I addressed this earlier in the rough perspective exercise so make sure you're working on this as you progress.

Next Steps:

Before you move on, I'd like to see:

  • One more page of ellipses in planes

  • One more page of funnels

Focus on confident execution and trying to nail down the alignment of your ellipses.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
7:37 PM, Friday January 8th 2021

https://i.imgur.com/DYWSKXM.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/fj9PLCl.jpg

Here are my revisions! I hope that the alignment is at least a little better, I tried to ghost more to make it more fluid but I did feel myself struggle in aligning them and fitting them within the space.

Thank you for your critique :)

9:31 PM, Friday January 8th 2021

The alignment is definitely looking a little bit better. Make sure you keep practicing these in warm-ups and experiment with rotating your page at different angles to see if you can get them better aligned. Your ellipses in planes are also looking a bit better as well though there are some instances where you've overthought what you're doing and slowed down, though I'm glad you only drew through them 2-3 times this time. Again, make sure this exercise is in your warm-up rotation.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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