Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

6:52 PM, Saturday May 20th 2023

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Does it look like I'm being too perfectionistic with my work? I'm wondering because it took me many months to complete the lesson 1 HW. Maybe I just need to put more time in, if I want to complete it sooner? (I try to do an hour a day, though I took some breaks in the summer and winter)

Thank you for critiquing my work! I'm very grateful that Drawabox is available to me, and I think I'm noticing my linework getting cleaner and more thoughtful!

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12:22 AM, Sunday May 21st 2023

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 and planes 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 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. 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. Your ellipses in funnels are having some slight issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great although you seemed to switch to a thicker nibbed pen for adding line weight and we ask that you not do that for any of these homework exercises. Use the same pen did the rest of the homework with to add line weight. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also 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 quite well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that 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. The rotations turned out well for the most part. Some of the corners could be a little better in certain areas but overall well done. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved and how much easier it is do. 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 which is great. I do have some notes regarding added line weight I'd like to share. If you want to add line weight make sure you don't revert back to using your wrist and are drawing from your shoulder with confidence. Also added line weight should be subtle so try and only go over a line one additional time instead of multiple times. Your box constructions are quite solid for the most part and you already seem to be developing a sense for how box lines converge to vps. Nice work!

Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work! There is no rush to complete these homework assignments and it takes as long as it takes. The time varies for everyone all that matters is that you sit down and try to do the best work you can with intention.

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:47 PM, Tuesday May 30th 2023

Hi Rob!

I'm sorry for the late reply. I just wanted to thank you for the detailed critique! You were really paying attention to my work, and you gave me great feedback. I'm going to work on my ellipses!

About the plotted perspective, I actually used the same pen--the thicker lines came about because I used a ruler to add line weight, since I was allowed to use a ruler for part of the exercise. Maybe I wasn't supposed to use the ruler for that part, though...

But anyway, thank you for critiquing my work with both thoroughness and gentleness. It really helps.

I hope you have a great day!

Sincerely,

Grace Mounce

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