Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
11:27 PM, Wednesday November 9th 2022
I used a sharpie gel ballpoint up until the organic perspective pages when I switched to a Pigma Micron 0.5.
Thanks in advance!
Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. Let’s see how you did, shall we?
Starting off, your superimposed lines are well done. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your arcing lines started off a little lacking, in that respect, but improved a lot by their second page – keep that up. Your ghosted lines look confident, though I’d have liked to see a few more in that page. As for the planes, though you’ve forgotten 1 line in each of them (remember, each plane consists of 8 lines – 4 inner, 4 outer), what is here is good – smooth, and straight.
Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise is well done. Your ellipses here are smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. With regards to their rotations, however, make sure that you hit the minimum of 2 (rather than settling for 1 and change), and see if you can lift, not flick, your pen off the page at the end of them – it’ll help with those tails. Save for the aforementioned issues, the ellipses in planes are well done. It’s clear that confidence was your priority, here; the ellipses are smooth and rounded, and not especially concerned with their frame, but still fitting well into it. The funnels, too, are well done, and I’m pleased to see how big you’ve drawn them. Your ellipses here continue being smooth/rounded, and are also snug, and properly cut in half by their axes – nicely done!
The plotted perspective exercise looks good, but I’m wondering why some of these lines are as thick as they are. It’s not in any way consistent, so I can’t argue lineweight, though automatic reinforcing also seems strange in an exercise done using a ruler. Hm.
I notice that this is the case in the rough perspective exercise, too. Here, it is automatic reinforcing, though, so I’ll remind you that each line is to be drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. Anyway, this looks better in their second page. There, the only thing to look out for is the shape of your planes. Remember that, since we’re dealing with 1 point perspective, only 1 set of lines converges to the horizon, the other 2 stay as they are. As such, the front and back faces of our boxes (the ones consisting of those same lines) are – should be – of the exact same shape, but not size. Notice, however, how in page 2, frame 3, in the leftmost box, its back face is a much more stretched rectangle than its front face. Notice how the correction lines are telling you the same thing? It need not go to that point, however – knowing to expect them to be the same, you can tell this right from the point stage!
The rotated boxes exercise looks good. It’s big (though it could be bigger still!), its boxes are snug, and they do a solid job of rotating. This applies in the back, too, which is considerable, since that’s not something we get into until the box challenge – I suppose you’ll have a head start in it!
Save for a few slight misunderstandings, the boxes in the organic perspective exercise look good, too. The misunderstandings in question, are that a box that’s overlapping another should hide its lines (it should not!), and that you don’t need to plot start/end points for your lines here (you do!) Beyond that, however, your boxes flow well, as per their size, and foreshortening, so keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
I'll be marking this lesson as complete. Head on over to the box challenge, and good luck!
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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