Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

12:31 AM, Monday August 2nd 2021

DAB: Lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

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Post with 8 views. DAB: Lesson 1

Hey kind stranger! Here are some of my thoughts:

  • Rotated boxes. Was confused about whether the gaps between boxes get wider or smaller as they got further away. In my head, the gaps got smaller as the box faces went around the curvature of the sphere-like shape, but in the example homework, the gaps got larger, or more of the box's side was exposed as it rotated. Both seem to make sense - but in different ways. Could you correct my understanding of 3D space?

  • Organic perspective. As I drew more, I picked up the knack of making the lines converge towards the vanishing point. This should have lead to improvement as I completed the exercise, but please correct my if my understanding is mistaken.

Appreciate the critique - thanks : )

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4:44 PM, Monday August 2nd 2021

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. 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. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

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 looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. 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 although I'm already seeing improvement with the second page. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling 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 a bit 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 perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. 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 and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. You are 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 good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are solid for the most part but there are a few wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you to be even more consistent with your constructions.

Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. 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. Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:55 AM, Wednesday August 4th 2021

Thanks for the feedback! I don't know if you'll reply to this but its worth a try - which boxes specifically seemed to not be actually rotated? I'm having a had time seeing this - is it the last boxes on each vertical column and row of boxes?

  • Bonsai
2:18 PM, Wednesday August 4th 2021

I took a quick look at this again and it was mainly the the boxes on the top that share the same vp. The rest seem to have a slight rotation at least.

10:19 PM, Wednesday August 4th 2021

Thanks for the reply!

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