Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

11:49 AM, Thursday August 20th 2020

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Hi,

thanks very much in advance for your thoughts on my first submission here. During the 'Rough Perspective' excercise I got frustrated with the wonkiness of my lines and asked the Discord for help. User @Wooz pointed out I should try and sacrifice my attempts at precision for more assertive lines, and I think it shows from there onwards. Also, I felt I had a good grasp of the last two excercises, the rotated boxes (even though I think I started out with a too small first box which didn't help) and particularly the Organic Perspective excercise. I decided to have fun with the second page of those and try and see whether I could get the impression of one single box spinning consecutive turns. Let me know what you think!

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4:35 PM, Thursday August 20th 2020

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. Your superimposed lines are off to a decent start. Like you mentioned in your post I think you were a bit too concerned with accuracy for a lot of these exercises and your lines turned out quite wobbly as a result. There is a large amount of improvement in this regard once you did the rotated boxes and organic perpsective exercsises. Still I'll just talk about that wobbly line for a minute here and why it usually happens. Achieving consistent smooth linework is one of the goals of working through these lesson one exercises and this is achieved by doing a few things. One is using the ghosting method to to basically do all of your planning and thinking before actually making a mark. Once you begin making your mark you almost want to do so without thinking as this leads to a smoother and more confident line. Another thing you want to get used to is drawing from your shoulder instead of the wrist. Using the shoulder at first will usually make your accuracy much worse but it will get much more accurate as you practice using it more and more and your linework will be much smoother than using the wrist particularly on longer lines as the shoulder is a much bigger pivot point. Learning to to do these two things in tandem for basically every line you make will give you a huge boost in quality to your line quality. Eventually you will develop better control and will begin integrating using your wrist and elbow more into your drawing but you really want to get used to ghosting and using the shoulder as much as possible when you are starting out and really make it into a habit that you don't need to think about. So all that said I think you kept a clear starting point on your superimposed lines and while you were a bit too focused on accuracy overall the tapering on your lines isn't too bad. Your ghosted lines and planes also looks pretty decent but that wobble I've discussed and which you have noted yourself is still present.

The table of ellipses exercise is looking pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses although I did a notice a few places where you didn't. Just a reminder that you need to draw through EVERY SINGLE ELLIPSE you draw while working through the drawabox lessons without exception. It doesn't matter if you feel like you nailed it the first time you still want to draw through. You were deforming your ellipses in planes quite a bit for the reasons I mentioned the first paragraph. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed Accuracy is what we want to build towards but right now your main focus should be on nailing a smooth ellipse shape consistently. One of the easiest ways to do that is to not slow down your stroke and worry about accuracy while you are drawing but to instead draw at a good pace almost without thinking and to rely on your planning during your ghosted strokes. The ellipses in funnels look decent and you are starting to get pretty consistent with your ellipse shapes although you tend to have a bit of a heavy hand with your line but that type of fine control will develop more with mileage.

Plotted perspective looks fine nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective boxes turned out pretty good despite the wobbly linework problems. You did a great job extending your boxes back here to check your work. As you can see your perspective estimations weren't always there but that will grow with practice.

Your rotated box exercise turned out decently. Like you said your line quality here is much improved and your did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. You're not quite nailing your rotations yet which is to be expected and yes I agree that drawing bigger is almost always a better option as it lets you deal with the spatial problems you are facing much more easily. Finally, your organic box exercise is a pretty large improvement to your line quality and that is good to see. Your box convergences are actually pretty good for the most part but you will be getting a lot more practice with that during the 250 box challenge.

This was a good submission and it's great that you got some feedback and integrated that into your last few exercises and started to work on getting better line quality. It really does show in those last few exercises. I think you are doing a good job understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey. There's still plenty of room for improvement with your ellipses so I would keep practicing them in your warmups. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:14 PM, Thursday August 20th 2020

Hi Rob, thanks so much for the very detailed and constructive feedback! This gives me very specific pointers as to what to focus on going forward.

Appreciate it a lot!

Kind regards

Simon

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