Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

9:32 AM, Saturday May 22nd 2021

drawabox homework lesson 1 (from JosiahZ) - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/YoiZkjM.jpg

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Thanks Uncomfortable, i really enjoyed this lesson despite the fact that i made a LOT of big mistakes... and am looking forward to starting the 250 box challenge soon. i defenetly had the most trouble with the last exercise. hope you dont have too much trouble sorting out my mess. Thanks again :)

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7:10 PM, Sunday May 23rd 2021

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. 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. I'm noticing that you are getting a bit of wobble in your ghosted lines although I'm seeing nice improvement in your ghosted planes I'm still noticing this wobble in later exercises so I'm going to bring this us up here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling

This is the important part we need to be focusing on and the real problem I'm seeing:

You're hesitating as you execute the line, rather than drawing with a confident motion. Finally committing to a mark can definitely be quite daunting, but it's integral that you get used to accepting that mistakes do happen. Things go wrong - you can prepare as much as possible (and you should) but the moment your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has already passed. Now you must commit yourself, push through with confidence, and execute your line. It's also worth remembering: we can still work with a line that is smooth and even, but there's not much that can be done with a wobbly one.

What's most likely happening is that you are worrying about accuracy too much while making your mark and it's causing you to slow down your stroke to compensate which is giving you quite a bit of wobble in your lines. The other possibility is that you aren't ghosting your lines or you are reverting back to drawing from your wrist on occasion. I can't be entirely sure of which specific thing is happening and it even could be combinations of all of them. So I might normally reassign some pages but since I did see the big improvement with your some of your exercises I'm just going to leave this in here as some more general advice when it comes to wobbly linework.

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 issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/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/1/13/step3 Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing them during your warmups.

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. Once again 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. 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 straight up and down. 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 but you started to run into some problems because you didn't keep the gaps between your boxes very consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/guessing You are also 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/1/16/notrotating 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 pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework but you are destroying that confident linework by redrawing lines at times which is a habit you need to try and break. If you look at the lines here where you didn't redraw them you'll notice that they are much more confident overall. Your box constructions definitely could use some work so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a pretty solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely just get that habit of redrawing lines under control. 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.
11:50 AM, Tuesday May 25th 2021

Thanks Rob, ya you were right about the lines and me hesitating a lot... another thing i noticed is that when i drew the lines i couldn't really see the line that i was drawing(my hand was in the way) and it resulted in me moving my hand and making ether a wobbly line or a not acurate one... but then i changed my form and were i put my hand, that helped a lot. Thanks for checking my work you did a great job and i will work on all of those things that you said. I'm going to start the 250 box challenge really soon and am looking forward to it. dont know if this piece of info is hepfull or not. thanks again :) -JosiahZ

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