Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

11:45 PM, Tuesday March 23rd 2021

Lesson 1 Homework - Album on Imgur

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1:24 PM, Wednesday March 24th 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. I'm noticing that you are getting quite a bit of wobble in your ghosted lines and planes. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling This is also quite present in some of the later exercises although I am seeing improvement with your final exercise but I still want to mention this advice here so you can understand what the problem likely is.

This is the important part we need to be focusing on and the real problem I'm seeing:

You're hesitating as you execute the line, rather than drawing with a confident motion. Finally committing to a mark can definitely be quite daunting, but it's integral that you get used to accepting that mistakes do happen. Things go wrong - you can prepare as much as possible (and you should) but the moment your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has already passed. Now you must commit yourself, push through with confidence, and execute your line. It's also worth remembering: we can still work with a line that is smooth and even, but there's not much that can be done with a wobbly one.

What's most likely happening is that you are worrying about accuracy too much while making your mark and it's causing you to slow down your stroke to compensate which is giving you quite a bit of wobble in your lines. The other possibility is that you aren't ghosting your lines or you are reverting back to drawing from your wrist on occasion. I can't be entirely sure of which specific thing is happening and it even could be combinations of all of them. So I might normally reassign some pages but since I did see the big improvement with your last exercise I'm just going to leave this in here as some more general advice when it comes to wobbly linework.

Your ellipses are largely suffering from the exact same issue which really just goes to show that once you fix this problem it will improve every aspect of your drawing and that improvement is very evident with your organic perspective boxes and the line confidence I see there. Your tables of ellipses is coming along okay. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and while you seem to be focused on consistent ellipse shape you are getting quite a bit of line wobble trying to be accurate. This is carried over into your ellipses in planes and you are still deforming your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed This is likely happening because you too worried about accuracy and are probably slowing down your stroke to compensate. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. Your ellipses in funnels are having the same issues and you are also tilting your ellipses off the minor axis at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned This is something you should always consider when drawing your ellipses. Another thing you could have done 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/1/13/step3 There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and accuracy so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. There is a pretty big improvement here in terms of line confidence although I am still seeing a bit of wobble in some of your lines. Once again 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. I am noticing that you are redrawing lines on occasion and this is a habit you should try and get out of. Try and stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read. 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 quite 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 straight up and down. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out decently. 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 (most noticeable on the left side) 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 where I'm seeing the biggest improvement in terms of line confidence. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great but there is still room for improvement in terms of consistency. Make sure you are keep up with ghosting your lines multiple times and always drawing from your shoulder with confidence. Your box constructions could definitely use some improvement so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a really good submission that showed quite a lot of growth when it comes to line confidence and quality and ellipses.Your organic perspective exercise was showing massive improvement in terms of consistent line confidence. Keep practicing those ellipses during your warmups. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:38 PM, Wednesday March 24th 2021

Based on what you've seen here, is there some exercise I should focus on? I've started the box challenge as of last night but you highlighted ellipses in particular. I'm wondering what the best thing to prioritize is since I have to do warm-ups anyway based on what's been stated in the lessons. Something about picking one or two exercises for 15 minutes before I do the actual lesson.

Also, I know it's still early on with the 250 box thing, but is that another thing that'll be reviewed like this homework was?

9:10 PM, Wednesday March 24th 2021

Ellipses should be perpetually practiced since they are one of the more difficult things to draw consistently. Any of the exercises from lesson one can be used for warmups. It doesn't really matter which one. Just pick a handful of exercises and practice them for 10 to 15 minutes before you move on to your normal drawing. Later on in the curriculum you will use ellipses to construct cylinders which can be added to your warmups for an increased challenge.

All of the challenges need to be submitted for the critique same as the lesson homework.

4:19 AM, Wednesday April 28th 2021

I'm up to almost 200 boxes and I should be wrapping up the remainder of the challenge next week. There's two questions I wanted to ask, however.

  1. It looks like lesson 7 is the very last one. That's the final thing? There's no kind of "epilogue" or "consult these things for your next steps" message?

  2. I'm still wondering if I should make an attempt to redo the rotated boxes exercise. The stipulation from one of the earlier sections (probably the end of lesson 1) said something about picking a random exercise and doing that at the beginning of each session. For the most part, I've been doing the ellipses in planes, funnels, and rough perspective exercises. Is there some point where I'd want to consider doing the rotated thing again?

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