Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

7:03 PM, Monday May 18th 2020

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I struggle a lot with drawing straight lines. I guess drawing from the shoulder is quite difficult. I notice that the angle changes often times depending on how far I hold my hand out from my chest. I try to draw from the same range, but this is not always feasible With the ghosted lines this seemed to go quite well, but once I started drawing boxes they have a slight bend or wobble. So I am not sure whether I am doing that correctly.

The ellipses and perspective is another thing I seem to have difficulty with, but I guess that will get better with practice.

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11:17 PM, Thursday May 21st 2020

Starting with your lines section, your work here is spectacular. You're showing a strong propensity to drawing lines that maintain a confident, consistent trajectory with no hesitation or wobbling. You push that further with your use of the ghosting method, where you reinforce those confident executions with planning and preparation. On the odd occasion I can see a slight wobble when you come towards the end point of one of your lines. This might be due to you slowing down to stop your pen, which can itself cause some hesitation. One way to get around this is to lift your pen up when you hit that end point instead of slowing down. It is a more reliable action we can perform more quickly, and doesn't require us to slow down.

Your ellipses are similarly well executed. You're drawing them confidently and are doing a pretty good job of having them fall where you want them to, and so you do appear to be applying the ghosting method quite well. With practice, you should be able to gradually tighten your ellipses up a little more, but as it stands you're headed in the right direction.

For your funnels, most of these are aligning quite well to the minor axis line, but there are a few here and there that slant to one side or the other. Since they're generally one-offs in most cases, it does suggest that it's just a slight slip-up. If however you catch yourself with alignment falling off track more consistently for a given funnel's ellipses, then you may want to play with rotating the page a little differently to counteract the natural angle your arm wants to draw with.

Skipping down to the rough perspective boxes, this is where I was expecting to see the wobbling you were talking about - and while I see the slightest bit of arcing, and maybe the odd one that went way off track which you corrected (note: don't correct your mistakes in the future, it's a bad habit that draws attention to your blunders), your lines are still looking really well done. They're still quite straight, and while you're definitely overshooting a little, that tip about lifting your pen when you hit the end point should help, as will additional practice and mileage.

Linework aside, you're doing a great job of keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon line and your verticals perpendicular to it. I'm also pleased to see that you're applying the line extensions to see where your estimation of perspective drifts, so you know what to focus on when next attempting this exercise.

Moving onto your rotated boxes, again, your work here is very well done. This exercise is purposely meant to be challenging to the majority of students, but you've done a great job of keeping your gaps narrow and consistent so as to avoid any unnecessary guesswork, and you've achieved a solid range of rotation on both major axes.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes have a great start. This is another one of those challenging exercises where students are being introduced to the concept of freely rotating boxes in 3D space - something you're not expected to have any experience with. There is still room for growth of course, as is expected, specifically with getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but you're off to an excellent start.

As before though, mind your mistakes - be aware of them, but don't try to correct them.

So! All in all, your work is fantastic. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:30 AM, Saturday May 23rd 2020

Thank you so much for the feedback, I really appreciate it! I was feeling a bit discouraged and I must say that your feedback gave me a good energy boost. Thank you!

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I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

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