Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
3:46 AM, Thursday November 14th 2024
I really have no frame of reference here, and I hope it was correct of me to work over my ghosted planes with the ellipses exercise.
Hey there ZayBoyy, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!
Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. You can also add curves (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/exercise) for some variety, if you'd like.
Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Accuracy is just a matter of mileage, so as you continue with this exercise in your warmups you'll find you can hit the mark more precisely, and more often, over time. Confidence will be your main focus whenever executing freehand lines, so don't worry as much about a mark being inaccurate as long as you put effort into making a bold mark. That said, you've reached a considerable degree of accuracy with these already.
Good job on your ghosted planes and ellipses in planes, it's clear that each stroke has been executed with confidence and care, and the ellipses have been drawn through and fit within the bounds of the plane. Totally fine to combine the two exercises here; most students do, in fact.
Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. Well done.
Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. I see a small amount of wobble in here that wasn't showing up in your table of ellipses or ellipses in planes; try to let loose and allow the ellipses to follow the confident motion of your shoulder, even if that means they stray from the curve a bit. For an extra challenge, I would recommend that for future iterations of this exercise, you try varying the degree of your ellipses to create the illusion of expansion as you move out from the center (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3).
Your plotted perspective exercise is also satisfactory. Each box traces back to its appropriate vanishing points, and the vertical edges are parallel and drawn to the appropriate corners. I had a couple minor pointers about your homework page, but overall it's done quite well!
Your rough perspective exercise is well done, each front and rear plane is believably parallel in space and a good attempt was made to extend each back toward the vanishing point. I saw you made a note of having shaky hands that day -- while shaky hands is one thing that can't always be helped, I noticed that from this point onward you've begun a habit of redrawing lines. In Drawabox, we really want to avoid redrawing lines when a mistake is made. While a redrawn line here and there isn't a huge deal, but there a couple consequences of getting in the habit of redrawing your lines -- it lets you be a little lazy about your planning, lending to "if I mess up I'll just draw the line over until I get it right," which sometimes leads to a huge jumble of ill-planned lines. It also makes it harder to evaluate your mistakes when you are having your work reviewed, because instead of seeing one mistake clearly, now the reviewer has to pick through multiple lines trying to achieve the same goal and evaluate each individually instead of one earnest attempt. I see this error persist through your next two exercises as well, so I want to impress the importance of Drawabox's essential "one line, one attempt" rule, which is introduced in the ghosted lines exercise (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/execution): "Your job is to make a single smooth stroke. The second your pen touches the page, you need to accept that any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed, and all you can do is commit to the motion and push through."
Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes; however, your exercise is missing the four corner boxes. These tricky boxes can be easy to miss when we get caught up in the complexity of this exercise, but they're essential to completing the form and achieving that rounded look. Because they are brushed over in the official homework page and video, I don't assign revisions on the lack of these boxes alone, but please note for future exercises that missing certain parts of a form will result in an assigned revision, so I would recommend returning to this exercise on your own time and adding in those boxes regardless.
For your organic perspective exercise, I see a great variety in Y shapes and sizes; this method of freeform drawing will serve you well in the box challenge. I also see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick. It looks like you may have been trying to add weight to some of your edge lines to assist in the size illusion -- this is fine for this exercise, but make sure you are using the ghosting method to add your line weight as well. I see lots of chicken scratching (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/3/continuous) in your weighted lines that leaves them looking fuzzy and uncertain.
In all: great work! I'm very pleased to mark your Lesson 1 as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Congratulations!
Next Steps:
Proceed to the 250 Box Challenge.
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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