Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

3:43 PM, Wednesday April 17th 2024

Lesson 1 - draw a box - Album on Imgur

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I used Stabilo point 88 fineliner with a line width of 0,4mm.

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11:08 PM, Wednesday April 17th 2024

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. Although you extended the lines back on your boxes you didn't do this quite correctly. You were supposed to extend your depth lines to the horizon line and instead you extended your corners to the vanishing point. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/20/extendinglineswrong Please pay a bit closer attention to the instructions. While the way you did it still shows if your constructions were accurate or not the other way gives a much clearer indication and better shows you how off your estimates were. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are a bit of a mixed bag. I can see some boxes here where you are understanding how box lines converge to vps but I am seeing boxes with convergence issues throughout this exercise the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you to keep working on this.

Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:11 AM, Sunday April 21st 2024

Thank you for your critique Rob.

It would be most helpful going into 250 boxes challenge if you could give me a little bit of extra clarification of your remarks regarding organic perspective exercise. Is it possible to mark few of the 'good' boxes and few of the boxes with issues ? I had mixed feelings doing that particular exercises so examples of good vs bad would help.

Have a nice day!

5:07 PM, Sunday April 21st 2024

I understand the anxiety associated with moving on and feeling like things may not be entirely clear, but I assure you that is an entirely normal aspect of how the course is designed. The TA provided you with feedback on any issues that you needed to worry about right now.

The box challenge is daunting, but you are appropriately equipped to tackle it. Try not to give too much weight to your anxieties, and focus on the advice Rob already provided - it's easy to, out of a desire to be a conscientious, come up with a lot of other things to worry about, but that only serves as a distraction.

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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

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