Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
11:35 PM, Friday December 18th 2020
Hi.
This is me restarting this course since 2018! I see improvement since my last time but I still think I can be better.
Lines
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are exhibiting a good amount of confidence overall. You're taking the time to line your pen up with the starting point, which minimises fraying. You do have a bit of a tendency to pull your arm back into line with the original guide when you start to go off track so make sure you're accepting the trajectory of your lines as you execute them.
Next, your ghosted lines and planes are pretty confident however you do have a little bit of arcing present, so make sure you work on trying to consciously counteract this when you draw your lines.
Ellipses
Your tables of ellipses are overall quite good. You've packed a good variety of shapes and sizes into each of the table cells and kept them butted up nice and tight against one another. I did notice the ellipses with a smaller degree (skinnier) generally tended to be a whole lot more confident than the ones that had a wider degree (closer to circular). Make sure you're ghosting these as much as you need to and not allowing other pivots of your arm to creep in while you're executing the ellipse.
Next the ellipses in planes are looking quite a bit more confident than some of your smaller ellipses. You're doing a good job for the most part getting the ellipses to touch the four sides of the plane though there are a few that feel a bit more like they're floating. As with ghosting lines and such, it's generally preferable to overshoot these than undershoot.
Finally, onto your funnels. You're getting the ellipses fairly well aligned for the most part, there is some significant skewing on the top ones on the page. Your ellipses here also lack the confidence we saw in the previous exercise and I suspect you're focusing a lot more on accuracy here. Whilst we don't want to be loose with the way we place our ellipses, it is important to be confident since accuracy will build with time and practice.
Boxes
You're doing a good job keeping your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line in the rough perspective. Your estimation of perspective is pretty on point as well, and while there is a certain amount of the usual variation from the boxes further from the vanishing point, it's very subtle. I noticed you reinforced some of your lines here, perhaps as an automatic correction - try not to do that as each of our lines in Drawabox should be carefully planned and executed confidently and this kind of correction often draws more attention to the mistake than otherwise would have been placed upon it. Try to work with the error rather than overriding it.
Next your rotated boxes, you've done a good job keeping everything nice and tight together which has given you the best opportunities to place your next boxes as you draw. In terms of rotation, you tended not to rotate so much as elongate your boxes, following the vanishing point of the previously drawn boxes rather than sliding the vanishing point along the horizon line. That said, this (and organic perspective) exercise is designed to introduce you to new concepts you may not have otherwise considered, so we don't expect students to nail it the first time.
Finally your organic perspective boxes are looking pretty good! There's not a huge amount of divergence in your boxes and you're starting to capture a nice sense of depth with how you overlap the boxes. I think you could push that depth by drawing more of the smaller scale boxes and increasing the size a little more gradually.
Overall, your work pretty well done and your line confidence has definitely improved as you've shaken off the rust. You should continue to focus on your ellipses as you move forward, even though you won't directly use them much in the 250 box challenge, it's important to keep your hand in for them as they're used heavily everywhere else.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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