Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
11:24 PM, Thursday February 13th 2020
Here is my Lesson 1 for review. Thank you.
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4:40 AM, Saturday February 15th 2020
Hi there, TA Meta here to look over your work. Before we get started, I did notice that you scanned these pages but you seem to have used one of the document modes, which has done some funky things to your lines. So in future try using the photograph mode on your scanner to maintain the quality of your lines.
Starting with your superimposed lines, these look nice and confident. You've taken the time to line up your pen with the starting point, which has limited the fraying of your lines to one end, which is good to see. Next, your ghosted lines and planes are looking pretty straight and confident. There's a little bit of arcing to your lines in places and you can try to counteract this arcing by consciously trying to arc slightly in the opposite direction to what your arm naturally does.
Onwards to your tables of ellipses and these are looking pretty good! Your ellipses are drawn with confidence and for the most part, they're a good, round shape. Keep working on tightening up the shape of your ellipses and on your confidence for the smaller ellipses. It's tough to do these with the shoulder at first but as you gain more control over the muscles, it'll start feeling more natural.
Next are your ellipses in planes and there's a bit of wobbling present in some of your ellipses here as it seems like you were focusing on accuracy in these cases. Make sure to keep prioritising confidence, as accuracy will come with time and mileage.
Finally, your funnels show more of this preoccupation with accuracy, with many of your ellipses looking quite wobbly. The little funnel in the middle is actually quite well done in terms of aligning your ellipses to the minor axis. Again, an inaccurate but confident line is far more workable than a wobbly, accurate one so make sure when you execute, you're not fussing too much over whether your line or ellipse will land in the right spot and just work with it.
Next up, your rough perspective is showing promise. You've clearly understood the requirement to keep your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line and endeavoured to do this in each box you've drawn. Your line confidence here is a lot lower than we saw back in the ghosted planes exercise and the weight of your lines clearly indicates to me that you're pressing down on your pen more, possibly as a result of being more uncertain and stressed out by the exercise. Take a breath, loosen your grip, and plan your next move. If it misses the mark, no big deal, this is all just practice after all.
Onto your rotated boxes now and you've done quite a good job here keeping the gaps between your boxes consistent - this gives you the best chance of correctly placing the next box in the series as it gives you little contextual hints about how it should be constructed. Confidence here again isn't great and you definitely should've tried to draw this a bit bigger (which gives our brains space to work through these kinds of spatial problems). There is a good amount of rotation, but it seems to have all been done on the outer layer of the boxes, giving it that kind of odd square look. That said, these last two exercises are intended as introductions to new kinds of spatial problems you might not have otherwise considered and it's definitely not expected that you be able to nail them first go.
Finally, on your organic perspective, you've done a good job varying up the sizes of your boxes, but you seem to have been somewhat afraid to overlap them. It is suffering from that lack of confidence that all your box exercises have exhibited, but to a more extreme extent, with almost all your lines either chicken scratched or wobbling. It's possible that you were just eager to get the lesson over and done with, or it could be an indication that the way you mentally allot time to the exercises may be slightly skewed. When we draw a line, we tend to think of it as one unit of time, an ellipse is one unit also, but when we draw boxes, we should be giving them at least 12 units of our time - one for each line of the box.
Next Steps:
I did think about asking you to do revisions however from your lines and ellipses, I can see that you're capable of executing your lines confidently, you just may need to put more time into planning and get less overwhelmed with the details. Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge, keeping in mind what I've said here.
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