Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

11:26 PM, Monday December 13th 2021

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Any feedback is appreciated!

I think I had a lot of difficulty with ellipses, especially on the Ellipses in Planes exercise. I have a tendency to make them malformed to fit the plane.

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1:47 AM, Tuesday December 14th 2021

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 well. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on a consistent smooth ellipse shape. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes although you are deforming some of your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/deformed This is likely happening because you are too worried about accuracy and are probably slowing down your stroke to compensate. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. Your ellipses in funnels are having the same issues and you are also tilting your ellipses off the minor axis at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always consider when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a fine start but there is a plenty of room for improvement when it comes to overall consistency of shape and accuracy so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. 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. The other possibility is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist for some of these lines. Just something to keep an eye on. You should be drawing from your shoulder for basically every line you draw even shorter ones. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only. 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 pretty 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. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/notrotating I'm also seeing some wobbly linework here which seems to be from you reverting back to drawing from your wrist on occassion. 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 good. You seem to be getting more comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great and this is a very good improvement over your previous two exercises. Nice work. Your box constructions are quite solid for the most part but I do see a few wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you to become even more consistent.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely but keep practicing those ellipses during your warmups. Otherwise, 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!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:04 PM, Wednesday December 15th 2021

Thanks for the reply! That was really helpful.

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Staedtler Pigment Liners

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These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

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