Hey there kingprawn, good job on finishing lesson 1. I'll be going over your work today so let's get started.
Lines - Your super imposed lines are looking pretty wobbly indicating to me that you are letting your brain try to consciously steer the pen instead of letting your shoulder just execute a strong confident stroke. At this stage we value flow over accuracy so learn to let that shoulder go an execute a mark swiftly. Accuracy will come in time. Your ghosted lines are looking a bit more confident but there is a lot of arcing indicating more elbow than shoulder use. Additionally there is a lot of overshoot; what I like to do is lift my pen up instead of stop the motion so that you don't have to fight momentum and lines get a nice taper to them.
Ellipses - First thing I'm noticing is you are not drawing through your ellipses with your ellipses in planes exercise. This is an important part of the process so please read this again. Additionally you are definitely rushing through this section. Rushing and drawing confdiently are two different things so keep that in mind. With your ellipses, they are hit and miss when it comes to making contact with the planes at the proper points so a lot of times your ellipses are floating around. This comes from a lack of planning and ghosting which is the key underlying principle to all of our drawing exercises. With your tables of ellipses you are not ensuring contact with your ellipses to ensure there's no ambiguity. This is important because as you learn more constructional drawing methods a key tenant is building up construction on previous stages, which means if you have forms floating around and not anchored onto previous "layers" things end up ambiguous and not solid. Regarding your ellipses in funnels, you are not aligning your minor axes to the funnel axes sso make sure to slow down and think about your marks and what you need to be doing before executing.
Rough Perspective - Your lines are getting pretty scratchy here. You should not be redrawing your lines but carefully planning each line and ghosting as much as you need to draw a confident line. Redrawing lines builds up bad habits of not planning, builds visual clutter, and draws attention to areas you'd rather the viewer not focus on. You do a pretty good job keeping your horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and verticals perpendicular which results in properly oriented one point perspective boxes. Your converging lines are fine, and the accuracy to far off points will improve with practice.
Rotated Boxes - You did a good job here on pushing through the exercise to completion. The only goal for students is a complete attempt so that you can be exposed to new types of spatial problems and ways to go about solving them. In terms of the mechanical executions of the exercise, you are off to a good start in rotating your forms, but the rotation [could be pushed further]((https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating) so watch this gif some more to internalize how the rotation is driven by the motion of the vanishing points along the axis. Your boxes could also have been packed tighter to better leverage adjacent lines as perspective guides. You could also have benefitted from drawing your exercise larger as there's a lot of space left on your page and drawing larger always gives your brain more room to puzzle through these spatial problems. Remember to keep ghosting drawing your lines confidently so that things are more controlled and neat. While there is a lot going on here, this exercise is not meant to be done well the first time but rather just expose you to different problems. You pushed through and kept thingss relatively neat, so good job there!
Orgnaic Perspective - Moving on to your last exercise, I am starting to see some good line confidence develop! Your perspective is still in need of a lot of work, but that's what the next steps are for. For now, your compositions are off to a pretty good start, especially the second page. This is where you have a good arrangement of scales to delineate between foreground and background, which helps sell the illusion of 3d space on the 2d sheet of paper. You also start to overlap your forms which gives the illusion that they exist all in the same space further selling that illusion of space.
OVerall you are off to a good start, but before I mark your lesson as complete I want to you to do 2 more pages of ellipses in planes. You are showing a lot of signs of rushing, and still need to get your lines and ellipses under a bit more control. Make sure you are ghosting every mark and executing confidently with the shoulder. After that is finished, we will reassess.
Next Steps:
Two more pages of ellipses in planes.
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.
