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7:44 PM, Monday October 19th 2020
Hey! Let’s take this one exercise at a time~
Starting off, your superimposed lines are looking solid. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. If I had to offer one recommendation, it would be to stick to larger arcing ones, especially at the start. Then, as you start getting comfortable with the shoulder motion, feel free to up the difficulty through smaller sizes. The ghosted lines/planes look good, and I’m especially pleased to see that you’ve plotted start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of the planes. I do notice, however, that your lines have a habit of arcing, as they’ll approach the end point. Try to be a little less conscious of it, if you can. It’s far more important for our lines to be smooth, and straight, than it is for them to stop at the correct place.
The table of ellipses exercise is a bit of a mixed bag. Your ellipses are generally smooth (though they’ll occasionally start off a little stiff, only to stabilize in their second rotation), and rounded (though they’re sometimes a little bumpy/pointy, an indication of a lack of ghosting, or a misuse of the shoulder pivot.) Their rotations are could be a little better. It’s important to go around the at least 2 times, and no more than 3. Finally, try out a bunch of different degrees, rather than just a few. The ellipses in planes exercise looks a lot better in this respect. It’s a lot more difficult for their rotations to match up, here, but this is expected. Just the same, see if upping the amount of time spent ghosting fixes this. The funnels exercise looks decent. Though there’s the occasional exception to both, the ellipses are snug, and properly cut in half by the minor axis. My #1 recommendation is to make sure that this happens all of the time. This is to say, if there’s no more minor axis, either add more, or stop there- ellipses without a goal are of no use to us.
The plotted perspective exercise looks solid- nicely done. Assuming I’m looking at it in the correct order, the rough perspective exercise improves considerably throughout the set. I notice a bit of automatic reinforcing present, however. Remember that each line is drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. Solid attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. The boxes don’t quuuite rotate, but you’ve made an effort to keep their gaps narrow, and draw through them. I appreciate the addition of lineweight/hatching, too. Next time, consider spending a little longer on each line, if you can, to really consider its purpose, individually, and as part of a set. The organic perspective exercise looks great, what with its consistent, shallow foreshortening, and believable increase in size, save for one thing: a box that’s overlapping another shouldn’t hide its lines. We learn infinitely more from our shapes, like that. That’s alright, however. The boxes look quite good too, by the way, but they’ll look even better once you’ve had a chance to study them in detail in the box challenge. Speaking of, move on to it!
Next Steps:
250 box challenge
PureRef
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.