Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

6:51 PM, Wednesday July 29th 2020

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Heres photos of my attempts at lesson 1 exorcises. I Don't have the most ideal tools, such as using a cutting board on my lap when being at a table mightve been a better choice. there were times i thing i should've did at least one or two excorsises to remind my muscle memory on even the most basic things. i also have some learning dissabillity, allot of it memory related, so i might come back to lesson 1 in it's entirety at some point. this was also over the course of a week and a hjalf...i think.

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1:44 AM, Thursday July 30th 2020

Well first off let me be blunt most of your errors seem to stem the fact you didn't do this on a stable surface like a table. linked here in the faq this question is answered as follows:

Is it okay if I do my lessons on the bus, laying on my bed, on the couch, or in other similarly less-than-stable positions?

"Probably not a good idea. Anything that keeps you from being in a focused, studious mindset should be avoided. This includes unstable drawing positions, busy/crowded/noisy spaces, messy environments, drawing on lined or graph paper, and so on. You absolutely want to put your best effort into completing the exercises, as that is the way you're going to get the most out of them. Being in a less than optimal mindset will cause you to work sloppier, which is something you want to avoid at all costs.

If you don't have any kind of a reasonable table or desk at home, consider going out to a public library instead."

You should always draw on a stable surface perfeable a table as this allows you to use you shoulder like the lesson teaches you how to moving on to what you turned in I cannot give an accurate critque knowing that you have not done the lesson on a stable place as I can't tell if its the set up of techinque that is causing the issues. I will give you some general tips but I am going to suggest you redo all the lesson's homework at least one page to get a better idea of how well you understood the lesson.

Super imposed lines

I see fraying at the beginning remember when you are placing your lines make sure to slow down and place your pen in the same position. Also I see wobbling in your lines remember let the line flow the goal of this excrise isn't to create line that exactly match the first line you drew with a straight edge rather its to make confident lines that wobble. Focus first on creating confident lines then you can try for accuracy

Ghosted lines+Ghosted planes

There is wobbling and arcing lines. This singles to me you might be too focused on hitting the dot as opposed to making a confident line. Remember let the line flow the goal of this excrise isn't to create line that exactly match the first line you drew with a straight edge rather its to make confident lines that wobble. Focus first on creating confident lines then you can try for accurracy. Don't be afraid to ghost a few times I suggest around 8-10 times at first.

Table of Ellipses

I am noticing that your circles are not smooth. Again try ghosting a few more times if you see your lines losing smoothness and use your shoulder. Also reread the lesson as you seem to have missed that they should be touching but not overlapping.

Funnels

Some of your funnels have circles that are all the same degree make sure to make them smaller as they go towards the center. You also didn't make sure your ellipses where touching each other.

Ghosted planes with ellipses

Good these circles stay within the bounds. My suggestion to make the circles a bit smoother is to ghost them more times before placing them. For me personally when I did them I ghosted them about 10-20 times before I placed them down and that has been reduced to about 5 times as of today.

Rough perspective

I noticed some of the trouble you had doing this I had issues myself with this one too. One thing that helped me to get better at this was to first understand that only one set of lines should be converging towards the vp while the rest should be going straight off the page. I think this advice from my own reviewer was very helpful "Remember that the front and back planes of each one of them should have the horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and the vertical lines perpendicular to it." -Pedro Also remember to ghost your lines and draw from the shoulder to prevent the wobbling with your lines.

Rotated boxes

This one is hard as well. I think you may benefit from rereading the homework. but don't worry too much you'll get better with time and when you use a stable surface

Organic Perspective

This one is also a hard one to do at first but become much easier after you do the 250 boxes challege. remember that the perspective lines of each face should converge to a specific vanishing point. I think what really helped me was to draw two dots per line, one that represents the correct ghosted angle to the vp and another that is for the juction between lines that still adhear to this ghosted angle I mentioned before.

Next Steps:

Please redo at least a page of every exercise listed in lesson one on a stable surface like a table or desk.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:20 PM, Sunday August 2nd 2020

https://imgur.com/a/35in9lA

heres a partial redo so far. the rest will be finished/uploaded in a day or two. i was having friction troubles with the table so i eventually kept the cutting board on top of it as it was a little bigger than the paper, nontheless the table setup ended up being a much better arrangement. also i noticed having my elbow pointed up helped a fair bit to get my arm to do the brunt of the work in controlloing the motion after some frustration as i think that has helped linework a bit. there was some struggling and impatience with the table of elipses, but i think i might need to do those again, or at the very least, make ghosted planes with elipses in them a goto excorcise for warm ups for awhile

9:46 PM, Sunday August 2nd 2020

They look much better so far. Another tip would be to place 10-20 pages of paper under your current sheet you are working on this will help improve the issues you are having with the table friction even more. Good to see you haven't given up and are actively trying to figure out how to improve your art skills that's one of the most important steps to becoming a good artist. This is a hard skill to learn even the basics can take 1000s of hours of work to master. Make sure you are drawing for fun as well it maybe hard to since you may not like what your final products are but its one the most important steps to absorbing the knowledege you gain here.

9:39 PM, Saturday August 8th 2020

okay, this is way later than i though, but stuff happened. lol anyway here some more revision on lesson 1, though sans plotted perspective, rotated boxes and organic perspective. i also went ahead and did a few pages for the 250 box challenge after the little bit of lesson 1, and it';s cleared up some thing in terms of making boxes at all, though it seems i still need to work on my lines in general, as well as boxes.

https://imgur.com/a/RBdeTn6

should i do the other exorcises now or after the 250 box challenge?

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