Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

12:07 AM, Sunday March 20th 2022

Lesson 1 - Album on Imgur

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

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Hello! I just joined the community. I struggled a lot with practicing my drawing because I lacked structure and direction. This course helped me tremendously. I'm drawing constantly and with more focus. I wanted to say thank you for providing such a great resource for studying.

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4:50 PM, Sunday March 20th 2022

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. One thing you could have pushed a bit more 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/1/14/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. 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. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also 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. One thing that would have helped you here would have been to just draw this a bit bigger. Drawing bigger 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. Even though you drew this a bit small the rotations here are pretty good for the most part. You just made this much harder on yourself by drawing it so small as the rotations are much easier to think through at a larger size. 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 which is great. You also appear to be getting confident linework while adding line weight which is good to see. Your box constructions are really solid for the most part and you seem well prepared for the 250 box challenge. Nice job.

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.
1:45 PM, Monday March 21st 2022

Thank you Rob for reviewing my work. I try my best to submit my first tries. I felt an intense urge to redo the rotating boxes but just kept at it. That's a very important lesson for me since I never seem to finish my pieces.

3:30 PM, Tuesday March 29th 2022

Hi, Rob.

Thank you for your help. This is most helpful and confidence boosting.

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