Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

10:16 PM, Saturday April 11th 2020

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  1. I feel like I am drawing "with confidence" after ghosting but too often I end up either:
  • Unintentionally correcting trajectory towards the end.

  • Not ending at the point I was aiming for.

  1. I suck at ellipses currently, even when drawing quite quickly I see myself correcting trajectory and it ends up uneven and wobbly.
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1:00 PM, Tuesday April 14th 2020

Hey tungsten, no worries about these issues, as they are common for all beginners. The short answer to everything is: you don't suck, you're new, and you'll get better with purposeful practice like doing warm ups everyday. So let's get to your critique.

Starting with your super imposed lines, they are indeed confident and the fraying isn't too bad. The one thing I am noticing though is a lot of arcing indicating more use of the elbow than the shoulder. Your ghosted lines are doing pretty will, and as you said there's some wobbling near the ends of the lines as you try to maintain your direction to the point. What I like to do is lift the pen off the page instead of stopping on a dime. I find it easier and it gives a nice taper to your lines.

Whiel your ellipses are rough, there is nothing remarkable about it. In other words - ellipses are hard and take lots of time to get better. Couple that with trying to learn to use the shoulder and it's a lot to balance. Keep these in your warm ups every day for a long while and you will become comfortable. You're doing a good job drawing through them, and while you do want to work on getting those follow up passes to stay tighter, this is a fine start. You are showing a good conceptual grasp of things - your ellipses in planes are packed in so they aren't floating around and your ellipses in tables leave no room for ambiguity by also being tightly packed for the most part. I see you trying to keep your minor axes aligned to the funnel axes and succeeding some of the time in your funnels exercise. This one has a lot ot balance with ellipses and alignment and keeping them in the funnels so you have a nice start.

Looking at your rough perspective boxes, you make a lot of progress even through this one exercise in terms of line quality. They get more crisp, in general, and confident. You do a good job keeping your horizontals aligned to the horizon and verticals perpendicular resulting in properly oriented boxes. Your converging lines are right on track where we expect and you properly applied your check lines.

Now lets move on to the rotated box exercise. While there are some issues I'll get to, overall this is a great start. You accomplished the only thing we ask of students - a complete submission to the best of your abilities so that you can be exposed to new types of spatial problems and solutions. Your boxes are packed fairly tight so that you can leverage adjacent lines as perspective guides, but could be a little tighter in some areas. You are not not rotating your boxes so much as skewing them and moving them over, so give this gif some more study now that you have some context and try to internalize how the rotation is driven by the motion of the vps. You did a nice job keeping things neat on here, and a nice job overall.

Finally let's look at the organic perspective. Your compositions are lively, and your line quality continues to get better. Your perspective is hit or miss, but that's normal and we'll get to that next. You do a good job exploring three dimensional space through the variation of your box sizes to establish clear foreground, midground, and background, and the overlapping of the forms leads to them appearing to coexist in the same space. Now with your perspective, lines are diverging sometimes resulting in near planes being smaller than far planes, but that's ok as you'll get that worked out in the 250 box challenge, which is your next step. So your lesson 1 is now complete and you are free to move on. Keep up the good work.

Next Steps:

250 boxes for ye!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:33 PM, Sunday April 19th 2020

Thanks a lot for the critique, it is both helpful and motivating !

Especially the tip about lifting the pen is great to counter something I am struggling with a lot :)

I will do more of those ellipses during warm up and now I'm up to the 250 box challenge.

Have a nice day !

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