Uncomfortable

2015-05-02 20:28

Awesome work. The biggest problem that I'm seeing though is that you have a tendency of using very dramatic perspective, and that is making things much more difficult than they need to be.

Any attempt at actually having solid vanishing points (visible on the page) are going to result in this. The closer together those VPs are, the more dramatic that perspective gets, and the more distortion you'll see in the resulting drawing. Instead, always try to use your horizon and that initial box as your points of reference. Together, they just about allow you to approximate the angles of your other lines.

There's definitely a lot of room for growth, but I think you're moving very much in the right direction. I especially love the '69 Camero drawing at the bottom of page 8, and the drawing on the bottom of page 10. Your tanks are pretty well done too. In general, there's a lot of great stuff here. At times things get a little loopy and distorted, but you'll iron that out as you get more accustomed to this sort of drawing.

I'll mark this lesson as complete! ...Except there's no actual badge for it... Eventually I'm going to transition all the critiques and profiles to the drawabox.com website, so once it's there, you'll have a fancy badge to show off your achievement.

Keep up the good work!

Uncomfortable

2015-05-19 23:02

I'm seeing a lot of great shapes and lovely breakdown of complexity into simpler elements. I think the reason that they're hit-and-miss though is that you're kind of missing out on a lot of the basic techniques I mention in my lesson.

For example, you don't start defining the overall box (first step) until later on, and even then you don't find midpoints and subdivide it to carry your proportions over properly. Without the box grounding you and defining your space, it becomes very easy to end up with skewed drawings.

Your drawings are pretty good - some of the cars are very well done in fact - but I can't mark the lesson complete because you're not using the methods I teach, and are therefore missing out on key concepts.

I'd like to see four more pages of these, using those techniques. Also, drawing through your forms instead of just focusing on the lines you'd see in the final drawing will likely help you increase the solidity of your forms.

Uncomfortable

2015-06-09 21:58

Your results, though a bit cartoony (because of your proportions), aren't bad. You are however completely missing the point when it comes to the use of the box. You draw a box, but then just draw your car normally within the box, mostly ignoring that it's even there.

Your approach should be:

1. Proportion study - your rectangle should match the general width and height of your object, and that object should fit snugly within it.

2. Draw a box that matches the general width/height/depth of your object

3. Based on your proportion study, start subdividing that box your major shapes - you can use more boxes for this, even for your cylinders. Draw deliberately - don't sketch, don't explore on the page. Think about what forms you need to draw, and then consider where in the box they are going to fit.

4. Start refining your subdivided forms - turn your wheel-boxes into proper cylinders, start defining any curves you might have - but make sure you're building right off of this structural lay-in of boxes. If you ever find yourself drawing random lines floating in the air, you haven't subdivided enough and you're making too big a jump without any underlying structure.

Look at the train demo again. The video recordings for the train and tank might help as well, though I'm not sure if you have access to that.

Either way, the main point is not to jump ahead where you have no framework. It's like crossing a river, but you're slowly building the bridge under you while you cross. You lay down some planks, then take a step. Then lay down some more, and take another step. You can't take two steps, because there will be no planks and you will plummet to your death.

.. iknowthatsnothowbridgesworkbutitsametaphorD:

On another note, I too very much like your tank. It says a lot though that the front of the tank is set at a completely different angle from your initial box, though.

Give it another shot.

Uncomfortable

2015-06-24 20:15

Lots of improvement throughout the lesson. I especially love your cars - that '66 mustang looks awesome. Your forms are also generally coming through pretty well, but I see one huuuuuuuuuuge problem.

You need to work on your line control. You're too quick to jump into making the mark, before you put in the proper amount of thought and preparation. You don't ghost your lines enough, so when you do draw, the lines are very hit-and-miss and go awry more often than not. Because of this, your lines don't often come out straight, so your forms don't read as solid and firm.

This is really important when drawing hard surfaced objects like vehicles - those forms need to be solid and heavy.

I want you to go back and do a hell of a lot of the exercises from lesson 1, especially the super imposed lines and ghosting/planes ones. Then do a bunch of form intersections. You don't need to submit those to me, just make sure you do them regularly.

Once you feel more confident in your linework, I'd like to see three more pages of vehicles. Remember that mark making is a three-step process:

1. Identify. Figure out what kind of line you need to make. Is it long, short, curved, straight? Where does it start and where does it end?

2. Prepare. Find the most comfortable angle of approach - turn your paper if necessary. We can't all draw perfectly at every angle, so it's fine to manipulate your page to compensate. Then ghost over your line, over and over, thinking about the line you want to draw, and getting used to the motion required to draw it. The motion should feel smooth, persistent and unwavering.

3. Finally, when you feel you've got it, without missing a beat as you ghost through the line, you touch your pen tip down on the page and make the mark. You make it once and then stop. A single execution.

It takes a long-ass time at first, but is far more effective than having wavy, unwieldy lines everywhere. Eventually it'll become more natural, a quicker matter of identifying, ghosting once or twice and nailing it. But for now, you need to put a lot more time into getting used to that.

Uncomfortable

2015-07-02 19:21

I see considerable improvement over the course of your work. Your later vehicles come out much more confidently and solidly. There are still issues, of course, but you're moving in the right direction.

The biggest problem that I noticed is that your lines are very sketchy. You're thinking right on the page, rather than deciding what kind of line you want before putting your pen to paper. You may want to back to the section in lesson 1 about the ghosting technique and practice it some more. It should be used on all freehand lines, as it forces you to think and plan before making any marks on the page.

Above all, avoid chicken-scratchy lines, and do your best to draw each line with only a single mark.

Another issue I noticed was that here and there, you lose track of where the center of the front plane lies. I saw this with the moped and the tank. On the moped, your front wheel ended up deviated pretty far from the middle of the box.

That said, by the time you reached that point, you didn't really have any sort of correction you could make without ruining the drawing, so I do believe you made the right decision to keep going as it was.

Anyway, keep up the great work.

Uncomfortable

2015-07-28 19:56

You're going in the right direction. Of course a lot of it falls in the realm of just putting the time in and practicing, but for the most part you're grasping the concepts.

There are a few things that I would like to draw your attention to, however. For one, mind your horizon line. You'll notice in that example, you drew the top edge of the side plane as angling towards the top left. All of the other lines imply a horizon line that sits lower however. Since the vanishing point sits on the horizon line, it gives us a clue as to in which direction each line will converge.

Secondly, I noticed that when you draw cars, you tend to misalign the wheels slightly. I know that often times the front wheel is turned slightly in most reference photos, so that's fine, but in examples such as the top of page 3, the back wheels do not align to the overall box of the truck. You should probably go back and review the notes and video in the 250 cylinder challenge and practice those more.

Anyway, since you seem to generally be on track, I'll mark this lesson as complete. Well done.

Uncomfortable

2015-08-12 01:33

I really like your moped and the hotrod. You really got in there and broke them down quite nicely.

Your boxy constructions are generally done fairly well, though you definitely seem to be struggling with cylinders. Based on your comfort with boxes, I think you'd do best to start off the cylinders as boxes as well, and then fit your cylinders inside of them (as I covered in the How to draw a cylinder video).

With the boat as well as your car, I think the biggest thing that led you astray was not starting off with a box as you did with some of the others.

The logic behind it is fairly straight forward - we start from simple forms, and fit slightly more complex forms into them. And then more complex forms into those, and so on, breaking them down until we achieve a fine degree of detail. Every level of detail hinges on the one before it, using it as a scaffolding. We use that scaffolding to make sure that our angles and proportions are sitting correctly in 3D space.

When we start off with a box, that box gives us a solid sense of our three dimensions. It gives us planes for each individual dimension, and summarizes where the vanishing point is. Within this box, we can now place any line and be fairly certain that it'll come close to sitting correctly in perspective.

The box can also be subdivided easily. Looking at your submarine, had you started it off with a box as well, you'd have been able to use the exact same method to subdivide it as you did with the 2D proportional study in the corner. That way you could have aligned the smaller details more precisely. Despite that, you still did a pretty good job with the submarine, but you certainly could have done better had you started with a box.

Now, you did use your box in some places, which is great. But you may have felt that the box was less useful, and ditched it later on because of that. The reason the box may not have been as useful as it could have been because you had a tendency to stray from it here and there.

Take a look at this.

So, while your hotrod looked pretty damn cool, some of your forms didn't line up to the original box. Specifically the front of the car. Its vertical line was slanted (all your verticals should be straight up/down), and its horizontal was angled the wrong way. In drawings like this, the box gives you the majority of your landmarks, but marking out the horizon line also helps establish a stronger understanding of the space. You always know that at the horizon, the lines flatten out. When a line is above the horizon, it angles a certain way, and it reverses when it dips below the horizon.

Always look to the box and the horizon for hints as to the angle of your line. If you look at my overdrawing, you'll notice that when I was drawing the top line of the front of your car, I compared it to a line slightly above it on the block-in box. They're not at exactly the same position, but they're pretty close, so I used it to estimate the line that I wanted to draw. Always look for these kinds of relationships. There usually is a line that relates fairly closely, and if there isn't, you may want to subdivide your box a little more.

Anyway, you're definitely moving in the right direction, but we just need to solidify your grasp of how to use these block-in boxes. So, I'd like to see four more pages of vehicles, but don't go into detail. Just stick to laying in those major forms, starting with an overall subdivided box. Also, be sure to start your cylinders off as boxes as well.

Uncomfortable

2015-09-13 01:40

Some of these are definitely better than others, though I do see significant improvement over the course of the homework set. One thing I am concerned about however is that in general, it looks like you're not terribly comfortable with the construction of simple boxes (and to a lesser degree, cylinders), so when you're tasked with drawing them in the context of a more complex construction, you get a little overwhelmed.

I think you would benefit greatly from doing the 250 box challenge and the 250 cylinder challenge, as well as a few pages of form intersections from lesson 2.

Once you feel comfortable, try another 4 pages of vehicles.