Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

11:56 PM, Monday November 2nd 2020

Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes (Scamp) - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/Oos12kS.jpg

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Hi guys, thanks for your feedback on this in advance! New artist and I'm loving the accessibility and straightforwardness of the content.

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6:24 AM, Tuesday November 3rd 2020

Lines

Starting with your superimposed lines, the first page had quite a bit of wobbling going on but as you did the second page, your confidence increased significantly, resulting in a generally smoother result. You've done a good job taking the time to line your pen up with the starting point in all cases, which has limited fraying to only one end of the line.

Your ghosted lines and planes are looking quite smooth and confident as well, though I do notice a small amount of arcing present in your lines, so make sure you work on trying to consciously counteract that when you ghost and execute your lines.

Ellipses

Your tables of ellipses are overall remarkably confident and you've done a good job packing them in there nice and tightly. If I had to pick anything about them, it would be that you might want to slow down just a touch to get that second pass a little closer though be sure you don't slow down so much that you start wobbling. It's one of those things where you'll have to experiment with what speed works for you at a certain time and as you become more experienced, you'll be able to draw slower without wobbling.

Your ellipses in planes exhibit similar confidence and the looseness on the second pass that I mentioned previously. You have tried to get them to touch the four sides of the plane without worrying too much about accuracy, which is good to see as accuracy comes with time and practice.

Finally, you did lose a little bit of the confident linework we'd previously seen on your funnels. This is pretty normal since we're putting another demand on top of those already asked - draw confidently, fit the ellipse in the bounds, and then align to the minor axis. You've done a good job fitting them within the bounds but your accuracy has suffered and in most cases you're slightly skewed off the minor axis. I did notice it's by about the same amount each time, so you might want to try rotating your page and approaching these from different angles to see what works best for you.

Boxes

Next, your rough perspective is off to a pretty good start! It's good to see your linework remains confident here and you've done a pretty good job trying to get your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line. There's a few lines that shear right off past the vanishing point, but this will improve as you get more experience with drawing boxes.

You've done a good job keeping the gaps tight and consistent in your rotated boxes and even managed a little bit of rotation. I think where you came unstuck here is that you didn't rotate the inner layer of boxes quite enough and then tried to fit the rest of the rotation into the outer boxes. Again, it's good to see you've maintained confident linework here as well. This exercise and organic perspective are intended to be beyond a student's current capabilities and introduce them to a new kind of spatial problem.

There's a good amount of depth conveyed in each composition of your organic perspective through the variation in the scale of your boxes. Don't be afraid to push this illusion further by overlapping boxes. One thing I did notice here is that your lines often didn't quite reach their end points in a lot of cases. You can place as many dots as you need to guide where you want to place your lines, don't forget to plan and ghost each line as you go, and in a lot of cases, it's better to overshoot a little than undershoot by a lot. Finally, the boxes themselves have a lot of distortion and divergence going on, which is fine, because we don't expect students to be able to draw boxes properly at this stage, which is why we assign the 250 box challenge!

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:15 PM, Tuesday November 3rd 2020

Many thanks, Meta! Your observations are truthful and well-written. I'll practice the suggestions you've given me and start on the 250 boxes after a recreational drawing break.

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