Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-25 20:46
All in all you did a pretty good job. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement - there certainly is - but you're headed in the right direction and have shown a decent grasp of the core material.
To start with, your lines are demonstrating a fairly confident execution, where you're taking the time previously to apply the ghosting technique, before making the mark with a persistent pace to avoid your brain interfering. With practice you'll gain more comfort in the use of the ghosting method and will improve on your accuracy and control, while also ironing the last few little wavers and hesitations, but you're doing well as it is. Just always remember - once your pen touches the page, all you can do is push through. No hesitation, no trying to avoid mistakes. All the opportunities to avoid messing up have passed, so all you can do is commit to your stroke.
Your ellipses are a bit of a mixed bag, which isn't strange by any measure, as each exercise demands a different kind of consideration. Your ellipses in tables were okay, but they did come out rather stiffly where you weren't quite applying the same kind of confidence as you had before. Also, there's a chance that you may have been drawing somewhat with your wrist here, rather than your shoulder, which can also be the cause of such stiff and uneven ellipses.
Your ellipses in planes were considerably better, which is interesting because this is often where students struggle the most. Your ellipses are much more evenly shaped, more confidently drawn, and you demonstrate a fair bit of control here. Lastly, your funnels are again somewhat more stiff and uneven, and while there has been some success in keeping them aligned to the central minor axis line, this is something that does need more work.
Jumping forward to your rough perspective boxes, do remember that as described here, your horizontals need to run parallel to the horizon and your verticals must run perpendicular to it. Before drawing any mark, make sure you consider the nature of the stroke you want to put down, especially during the planning phase of the ghosting method.
Your rotated boxes are actually very well done. They're not perfect, but this exercise is meant to be very challenging, largely focusing on exposing students to a new spatial challenge, something that they'll gradually develop and grow accustomed to. That said, you hit the two main things I look for - you kept your boxes well structured with narrow gaps between them so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, and you also covered the full 180 degree ranges of rotation on both axes. Things did go a bit awry along that top right corner, but still, your work on this exercise was very well done.
Lastly, the organic perspective boxes are an extension of the rotated boxes, in that they're again about challenging students' idea of 3D space. In this regard, you're moving in the right direction and have done a pretty good job, but there still is plenty of room for improvement. We'll continue working on your ability to keep the convergences of your sets of parallel lines consistent towards their shared vanishing points as we move forwards.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-25 20:34
I'm proud to say that you've done a fantastic job, and have clearly gone to great lengths to follow the instructions as closely and carefully as possible here.
Your linework is smooth and confident, and each stroke maintains a consistent trajectory. At the same time, you apply the ghosting method to achieve a considerable degree of control over your marks, resulting in their being precise and accurate.
This carries over to your ellipses, which are both evenly shaped and fit nicely within the space that they are given. Confident, smooth strokes and evenly shaped ellipses are the bedrock of solid construction, so all of this will serve you well in the future.
Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, you clearly went to considerable lengths to ensure that your horizontals ran parallel to the horizon, and your verticals ran perpendicular to it. I'm also pleased to see that you applied the line extension method so as to check where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.
Your rotated boxes hit both the major points I'm looking for - you've kept the gaps between them narrow and consistent so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, and you've done a great job of covering the full 180 degree arc of rotation on each axis. The only slight issue is that along the top left and bottom right corners, those boxes tend to tilt outwards slightly, rather than being tucked in with the rest. Still, phenomenal work, and all on an exercise that is intended to be more about exposing students to a new spatial challenge to get their gears turning rather than actually expecting it to be managed well.
Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a great start. Similarly to the previous exercise, it's intended to be challenging, and is all about exposing students to new challenges. As such, there is room for improvement, but you've still exceeded my expectations. We will continue to work on getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points as we move forwards, but this is all very well done.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-25 20:17
You're not wrong in your assertion that there's plenty of room for improvement, but I will be marking this lesson as complete. The areas where you need more work will be integrated into the next step - this actually isn't abnormal at all, and is exactly why these critiques are available and encouraged.
So the big issue is that your lines waver quite a bit. This generally comes from drawing the marks relatively slowly, and trying to guide our hand with our conscious brain, rather than trusting in our muscle memory and drawing with a confident, persistent pace. Drawing more from the wrist rather than the shoulder [as explained on this page]() can also play a considerable role.
It's important that when your pen touches the page, you accept that any opportunity to avoid a mistake is over. The ghosting technique gives us phases in which we can invest our time, planning and preparing the stroke, but as soon as your pen touches the page, all you can do is push through and accept the inevitability. Mistakes are not the end of the world, and a smooth mark with a consistent trajectory can still be used even if it's a little off target. A wobbly line isn't terribly useful, however.
Your ellipses are a bit of a mixed bag, where there are some that are smoother and more evenly shaped, and others that appear to wobble or deform for the same reasons listed above. You are however doing a good job of keeping your ellipses snugly fitting within their allotted space. This is not as important as drawing with a confident pace and maintaining a smooth, evenly elliptical shape, but it is still important and worth noting. Additionally, you do steadily get better with this as you pushed through the exercises, and your last page of tables-of-ellipses is actually fairly well done.
Also worth mentioning, while you're largely following this in your funnel exercise, you do have a few ellipses that aren't quite aligned to that central minor axis line, so keep an eye on that.
In your rough perspective boxes, watch the behaviour of your individual lines. As explained here, your horizontals need to run parallel to the horizon line, and your verticals need to run perpendicular to it. Part of this is likely how you're approaching the ghosting method - you need to invest more time into thinking about what you want to achieve with a given stroke before you rush into actually drawing it.
A couple things about your rotated boxes - firstly, as mentioned here, keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, otherwise you're going to perform a lot of unnecessary guesswork. Secondly, your boxes are rotating a little relative to one another, but not nearly enough. For the most part, your boxes remain fairly parallel to one another, as demonstrated here. You need to push and exaggerate those rotations further in order to cover the full 180 degree arc on each axis.
Lastly, your organic perspective is a good start, but there is plenty of room for improvement. We'll be focusing specifically on getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points as we continue to move forwards.
So, there are two main things to take away from this:
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Get used to drawing your marks more confidently, so as to keep them smooth and straight. The ghosting method allows you to separate the mark making process into multiple steps, so you can plan and prepare beforehand, then push forwards without second-guessing yourself as you make the mark.
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You do need to pay more attention to the instructions and follow them more carefully, as you are missing quite a few things that were touched upon in the lesson.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge. Not only will this give you an opportunity to work on those freely rotated forms in space, but it will also give you a great chance to work on your use of the ghosting method.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-25 19:31
Very nice work! Your lines are exceptionally confidently drawn, and you execute them with a considerable degree of control and precision. You're applying the ghosting method to great effect throughout this set.
This carries over to your ellipses where you're maintaining the integrity of their rounded, even shapes. That said, you do need to put a little more time into getting them to fit snugly within the confines they've been given. Right now it does seem that you have a tendency to let them float freely instead. We see this most of all in the tables of ellipses exercise. On the other hand, your ellipses in planes are considerable better, which is an amusing thing - usually this is where students struggle most, either deforming their ellipses to fit within the space, or failing to have them rest against all four edges.
Your rough perspective boxes are quite well done. I can see that you've done a good job of keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon line, though watch some of your verticals there - a few are slanted (they should be perpendicular to the horizon). I'm also pleased to see that you're double checking using the line extension technique, to identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.
Your rotated boxes are very well structured, and I'm glad that you kept the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork. One mistake however was that your boxes aren't actually rotating very much relative to one another, as explained here. This is why you ended up adding additional boxes to try and cover the full range of 180 degrees.
Your organic perspective boxes were quite well done, considering that this exercise is meant to be challenging. There is still room for improvement, however, and we'll continue to focus on keeping your sets of parallel lines' convergence consistent towards their shared vanishing points.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-25 19:17
Nice work! Your lines start out quite well - they're smooth and confident, and while you do need to put a little more time into the planning/preparation phases of the ghosting method to keep your lines from arcing, you're doing a great job of maintaining a consistent trajectory and limiting your overall hesitation.
This holds true to your ellipses as well, though I can see them improving over the set, where they start off a little bit more loose and steadily show greater control. The same thing applies here - taking more time to plan and ghost through the motion before actually executing the mark will help tighten up your ellipses and continue to develop those nice, rounded, even shapes.
When we hit your rough perspective boxes, I do think that your use of the ghosting method suffers a little. That is, I can see that your lines become a little less accurate and waver a little more. This is pretty common, often when a student gives themselves less time per line than they would when the focus of the exercise is on the lines and nothing else. Even if you're drawing a box, or anything more complex, always remember that when you're drawing a line, that's all you're doing. No individual part should be rushed.
To this effect, keep in mind that you want your horizontals to run perfectly parallel to the horizon, and your verticals should be running perpendicular to it. There are definitely some places where your lines slant a little, so that's something to work on.
In your first attempt at the rotated boxes, you've done a good job of achieving a full 180 degree range of rotation along both axes, but this falls apart as you reach the corners. This is because you haven't quite kept the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, as explained here. As a result, you ended up having to make a lot of guesses that were largely unnecessary, because there would have been enough information present from neighbouring boxes to tell you how to draw the new edges/lines you were adding.
The second attempt did a better job of keeping the gaps consistent (though they would have benefitted from being closer together), and your horizontal axis covered a solid range of rotation. The vertical axis flattened out however, as described here.
Your organic perspective boxes are a good start, but there's a lot of room for improvement. As we move forwards, we're going to focus more on getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-24 21:54
Nice work overall. Your lines section came out pretty great - you're drawing with a great deal of confidence, so you're able to achieve smooth, consistent marks without much hesitation or wobbling. With this inevitably comes issues of control (like what you described, overshooting your points), but the solution is not to slow down, but rather to practice stopping suddenly. It's not something that comes immediately, but as you noticed, drawing less confidently is going to make your lines wobble, so this is instead a different kind of skill that needs to be developed. It will come with practice though.
This confidence continues into your ellipses, though I can definitely see signs that you're not quite maintaining the same degree of control and precision here, at least at first. Remember that you can apply the ghosting method here as well, and you should - it'll help you to improve control without having to resort to slowing down as you draw. You do have some great ellipses across this set, and many where things are tightening up, but there are enough that are more loose and erratic, so that's definitely an area you'll want to continue focusing on.
Jumping forward to your rough perspective boxes, you're doing a pretty good job, but I am catching a couple cases here and there where your verticals don't quite run perpendicular to the horizon line, or where your horizontals don't quite run parallel to it. It looks like you're not putting as much thought and planning into them as you could, so slow down and focus more when you're going through the planning/preparation phases of the ghosting method. Of course, execution should always be confident, but you need to think about what line you actually want to put down and how you need it to behave.
While your rotated boxes are a bit rough around the edges, you've actually done a pretty good job. You've nailed the two main things I look for - you've kept the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, and you've covered a full 180 degree arc of rotation along either axis. Nicely done!
This exercise and the organic perspective one are intended to be quite challenging, and to push you to think about spatial problems you may not have otherwise considered, so I don't expect things to be perfect. This is definitely good to see.
The organic perspective boxes are more in line with what I'd expect to see at this point - that is to say, they're coming along, but there's plenty of room for improvement when it comes to keeping your sets of parallel lines consistent in their convergence towards their shared vanishing point. We will continue to work on this next.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, and I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-24 21:46
Looking good! Your super imposed lines do start out a little bit wobbly, but I can definitely see a greater tendency to draw with confident strokes once you hit the ghosting exercise. You certainly hit your stride when you hit the planes - your marks are fluid and smooth, and show no signs of hesitation.
You carry this over pretty well to your ellipses where the confidence of your pace holds up the integrity of your elliptical shape and avoids any kind of deformation or stiffness. You're also maintaining pretty solid control, keeping them fairly snug within the space you've set out.
Jumping forward to your rough perspective, you're clearly still using the ghosting method, which is great to see. You're also taking considerable care to keep your horizontal lines parallel to the horizon line, and the verticals perpendicular to it. I'm also pleased to see that you applied the double checking method there to test where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.
With the rotated boxes, there are two things I check for, and you're nailing one of them. That is, you've done a great job keeping the boxes structured, maintaining narrow, consistent gaps between them so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork. The issue however that I'm seeing is that your boxes (aside from the central one) don't actually rotate much relative to one another. They converge towards the same vanishing points, as explained here.
That's a pretty common mistake, and these last two exercises are meant to be quite challenging and I don't expect students to be able to nail them just yet. Instead, they're about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered.
Your organic perspective boxes are coming along well, though there is room for improvement - especially when it comes to getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2019-01-24 00:03
Nice work! You clearly start out not really sure of how to approach constructing these boxes (your convergences are often all over the place, with some divergences and whatnot) but you quickly pick up on what you're doing and I can see considerable progress over the set.
I'm very pleased with your results. I am noticing one relatively minor issue, usually that one of the middle lines of a given set of parallel lines tends to diverge off on its own. This is pretty common, and can be gradually resolved by thinking about all the lines to which the one you're about to draw will be parallel to, including those that haven't yet been drawn. You can think about how they'll all converge at that vanishing point, and the angle between them there. Generally speaking, the two middle lines of a set will have a pretty small angle between them, resulting in them running close to parallel, if not more or less parallel, by the time they reach the box. This can be a very useful point to keep in mind. I expand on this further in these notes.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-23 23:58
Your first exercise definitely shows a great deal of confidence behind your execution, which helps you to maintain smooth lines and consistent trajectories. That's definitely great to see. This carries through into your ghosted lines, but it is worth mentioning that while you're doing this fairly well, it does start to show the beginning signs of sloppiness - just a touch, where it feels like you could be investing more time into the planning and preparation phases of the technique. By and large they're fine, but you do start to get impatient by the end of the page. Just something to keep in mind.
This impatience definitely becomes more visible when you start tackling the ellipses. It looks like you're kind of jumping into them without taking the time to ghost through them. As a result, they don't have a whole lot of control behind them, and tend to get a little uneven or wobbly in certain areas. By and large that confidence is still there, so your ellipses are mostly smooth and rounded, but taking the time to plan and prepare beforehand is definitely going to be key.
I actually feel the first page of the ellipses in planes shows some improvement here, where you've gone to much greater lengths to get them to fit smoothly in these awkward containers. This is actually an exercise where most people have more difficulty, but you've mostly been able to manage it without deforming those ellipses or letting them get stiff. The second page is definitely visibly sloppier, but that first page is really quite fantastic.
Jumping ahead to the rough perspective boxes, there are a couple things I noticed:
- Here and there I can see places where your horizontals aren't quite running parallel to the horizon, or where your verticals aren't quite running perpendicular to it. It's not all throughout, but keep these relationships in mind. Also, I noticed a few places where you accidentally filled one of the back faces of your boxes with hatching instead of the front face - this resulted in a bit of visual confusion. Generally when adding hatching to a face like this, make sure that your lines are parallel, consistent and stretch all the way across from edge to edge rather than floating arbitrarily in the middle of the plane.
Your rotated boxes have a few strengths and a few weak points. Towards the center, you did a very good job of keeping them well structured, maintaining narrow gaps between them so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork. This is something that fell apart as you reached out towards the corners, and I'm not entirely sure why that happened. Keeping the gaps narrow throughout allows you to use neighbouring edges as hints when adding new lines.
You also did manage to cover the full 180 degree arc along your horizontal axis. Along the vertical axis however, the boxes furthest out stopped rotating relative to their neighbours, in a manner quite similar to what's explained here.
It is worth emphasizing that this exercise as long as the organic perspective one are both assigned here with full expectation that they're perhaps too challenging for students to be able to manage successfully here. Instead, the intent is to expose students to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered. It helps a great deal to get your gears turning in this regard.
Lastly, your organic perspective boxes do definitely suggest that there is plenty of room for improvement. A couple of your boxes here were constructed decently, though just about all of them did struggle to have their sets of parallel lines' convergences remain consistent towards their shared vanishing points. This is something we'll be practicing next.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"
2019-01-23 23:46
Well, the cylinder challenge is a prerequisite for lesson 6, so if you're leaning towards doing it now there's no harm in that.
When it comes to drawing boldly and confidently, you can see in my demo drawings that I don't hold back on those lines - everything is drawn with the same level of confidence, and I only come back near the end to add a little line weight here and there to make the drawing pop.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects"
2019-01-23 23:37
Very nice work! You've applied a lot of the concepts and techniques to great effect, and the result is a series of drawings that feel tangible and believable, and above all - solid. I'm especially pleased with how you handled a lot of your curves. They carry a strong sense of intent and purpose to them, and they don't tend to feel arbitrary or accidental. I especially like some of the more organic curves on the back of the camera, where due to the nature of the object it wasn't as easy to adhere to the box's straight edges, but all the same your curves still maintained the illusion of solidity that is so easily lost.
I believe there are two major issues that I noticed, but both are pretty normal to see and are simply a matter of continued practice.
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What stood out most was that you certainly do struggle with your ellipses and cylinders, especially when it comes to positioning them in 3D space relative to other objects. The issues weren't really egregious or anything, but rather it was that often an ellipse would be skewed or sheared off at an odd angle. If we look at the end of the camera's lens for example, it doesn't align quite correctly to the same minor axis as the rest of the cylinder, and therefore doesn't sit as it should. I strongly recommend taking a look at the 250 cylinder challenge (which is actually a prerequisite for this lesson, which you'll see listed at the top of lesson 6's first page). The cylinder challenge explores ellipses quite a bit, and specifically their relationships to circles and perfect squares in 3D space.
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The other issue has to do with some of your starting boxes. Honestly you actually nailed many of your boxes, but there were a handful that didn't sit quite right in perspective. For example, the closed lighter, the table (which I assume was built for children, judging from how it's put together) and the stapler all stood out in this manner. This again is really quite normal, and I'm not surprised to see it here. Boxes are a fundamental building block of all we construct, and we need to keep on top of practicing them on a regular basis, and continually honing our ability to keep our sets of parallel lines' convergences consistent towards their shared vanishing points.
Anyway, by and large you've done very well, so I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Though I did critique this lesson despite you not completing the prerequisite, I do insist that you move onto the 250 cylinder challenge next. Note that this is also a prerequisite for lesson 7, along with the 25 wheel challenge.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"
2019-01-23 20:56
These are definitely better. There are some issues that I want you to address as you continue to move forwards, but I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Here are the issues I noticed:
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Your linework, especially when you're blocking in your initial masses, tends to be a little bit stiff and overly careful. Remember - ghosting method for everything you draw, and if anything is remotely ellipsoid, try to draw through it so as to better maintain the integrity of your elliptical shape. Confident, smooth lines and evenly shaped ellipses are the bedrock of solid construction.
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In your wasp construction video, you very clearly blocked in your initial masses with a much fainter line. I specifically advised you against this approach in my previous critique. Every mark you put down should be drawn with your focus only on putting the mark down with confidence, not on refraining from pressing hard on the page. That said, that wasp was done fairly well - but that minor part of your technique is contrary to what we're learning here. That is, to break the process apart into several individual steps, tackling one problem at a time, rather than several.
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Whenever you've got two forms interpenetrating each other, it helps a great deal to go over the exact area of intersection between them with a contour line, as shown in the sausage diagram I linked before. You employed this to great effect in this image, but I noticed that you didn't always make a point of doing it. It was missing in the legs at the top.
Anyway, like I said - you're doing much better, so consider this lesson complete.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-22 23:02
Imgur can be a bit finnicky at times, so no worries on that front.
Your lines section is looking great. You're executing the marks with a confident, persistent pace, and maintaining smooth strokes and consistent trajectories with minimal hesitation. At times it does look like you might benefit from putting a little more time into the planning/preparation phases of the ghosting method (specifically in the ghosting exercise, the planes exercise was actually a fair bit better), but you're headed in the right direction and the marks you're making good headway.
Your ellipses carry over that same confidence, which helps you to maintain the integrity of their rounded shapes, but I am noticing that you've got a lot of ellipses that aren't quite touching their bounds. Again, put more time into the planning/preparation phases of the ghosting method (which can and should be applied to all kinds of mark making, not just straight lines), so as to improve your overall control and accuracy without losing the smooth flow and even shapes that arise from a confident execution.
Jumping down to your rough perspective, you've done a great job of maintaining horizontals that run parallel to the horizon, and verticals that run perpendicular to it. You do seem to have skipped the step of the exercise where we extend our lines back to the horizon to check how our estimation of perspective tends to drift. This gives us a better sense of what we need to work on during the next attempt.
Your rotated boxes came out quite nicely - you made a concerted effort to keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, so as to avoid any unnecessary guesswork (although they started to separate a little towards the corners). Also, you are demonstrating visible rotation across each axis, though this can certainly be pushed a little further, especially right at the ends. I think the boxes on the extremities should have their far sides tucked in further, so as to show us less of that front-face (the one without the hatching lines).
It is worth mentioning that this exercise as well as the organic perspective one have been assigned here not with the expectation that students would be able to produce perfect work, but rather to expose them to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered, and to get the gears in their brains turning. I fully expect students to struggle, and all things considered, you did a pretty great job.
Your organic perspective boxes are a good start, though as I mentioned, struggling is expected and there is plenty of room for improvement. For example, you do need work on getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points. This is something we'll work on next.
In addition to this, I noticed that you have a habit of reinforcing your marks or correcting them if you're not fully satisfied with them. Don't. Drawing by reflex in this manner means you're not applying the ghosting method (which demands that you plan and prepare before each stroke). Furthermore, fixing mistakes just adds more ink to problematic areas and draws the viewer's attention to them. It's generally better to leave them untouched and move on.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2019-01-22 16:43
Hah, wow! Yeah, I definitely meant 10 boxes, not 10 pages.
As for the two point perspective, extending those lines is still useful in that regard (although in this case you may want to extend them in both directions for a vanishing point 'at infinity', as explained here), so you'd be testing the lack of convergence on both sides.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2019-01-22 15:54
This is an improvement, but there are two major mistakes that I want to point out so you refrain from making them in the future:
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You appear to have extended only two of the three sets of parallel lines. Boxes are made up of three sets with four parallel lines in each set, as demonstrated here. That you missed this suggests that you're not being terribly careful in following the instructions, and you need to pay more attention to these. Upon looking at my previous critique, I can see that I pointed this out there as well.
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For the most part you've done this correctly, though on a few boxes, you've extended your lines in the wrong direction. Remember that these lines should be extended away from the viewer, not towards them. Your numbering is actually kind of confusing (not always legible, and I can see that you've got duplicates), but on Image 9 in that folder, the box marked as 230 is one example of such a box, where the blue lines come to wards the viewer (generally the hatching is applied to the face that is closer to the viewer). Similarly, 268 shows the same issue.
Now I was ready to mark this finished and let you move onto lesson 2, but I am genuinely concerned that the issue I raised about extending all three sets of parallel lines in my previous critique is still partially an issue here. I want you to do one more page of boxes, showing me that you fully understand the instructions. Based on your past pages, that should just be 10 pages.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge (Patreon Critique Thread)"
2019-01-22 00:10
Thanks for increasing your pledge! It's much appreciated, and I'm glad you felt the critiques I gave warranted it.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-21 23:03
You started off pretty nicely - your super imposed lines were smooth and confidently drawn, which is definitely a big plus. You carried this through into your ghosted lines and planes, where you were able to maintain consistent trajectories and keep those lines relatively straight without much hesitation or wavering.
Your ellipses were pretty well done, and definitely demonstrated an excellent degree of control, though they were also just a little bit stiff as a result. Not enough to be a big problem, but I do want you to try and execute those ellipses with a little more confidence, and keep yourself from hesitating as you draw them. Using the ghosting method can help a great deal here, if you're not already using it, as it separates the process into phases where you can invest your time in planning and preparing, before executing the mark with the understanding that the second your pen touches the page, the opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed, and all you can do is push forwards.
This stiffness is more visible in the ellipses in planes. While it's pretty normal to see students stiffen up and deform their ellipses to try and get them to fit in these awkward containers, always remember that maintaining the integrity of your elliptical shape and keeping it smooth and fluid are your top priorities.
Your plotted perspective is looking pretty good. Your rough perspective was also fairly well done, though I did feel that it was a bit lacking in terms of the actual number of boxes you included in each frame. There was plenty of empty space there, space that could have been taken advantage of to make the most of the exercise.
It's worth mentioning here that the rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes exercises were both assigned here not with the expectation that students would be able to complete them with ease, but rather to expose students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered. Struggling with this is normal, and it's really only here to get the gears to start turning in your head. That said, your attempt was pretty admirable. There are still a couple major issues:
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You made some attempt to keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, but the further you got out from the center, the more this started to fall apart. The less consistent and the wider your gaps got, the more guesswork you had to employ instead of using your neighbouring edges as hints.
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You also drew the boxes aside from the centermost one as being fairly parallel to one another, resulting in very little rotation between them. This issue is explained in these notes.
Your organic perspective boxes were a solid attempt, and while there's plenty of room for improvement - specifically in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points - you're heading in the right direction.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-21 22:52
Well done! Your super imposed lines have been drawn with a distinct sense of confidence driving them to be smooth and fluid, maintaining consistent trajectories without much hesitation. Once you get to the ghosted lines exercise, I noticed that most of that confidence remained, but there was a sense of stiffness there that suggests that you weren't 100% sure of how you were approaching it. I am pleased to say however that as you pushed into the planes, that full confidence returned, and your lines smoothed out once again.
This continued on through your ellipses, where the confidence resulted in smooth, even shapes, although I did notice that your control here does need work. Remember that you can apply the ghosting technique to everything - straight lines, curves, and even ellipses. So try to use that to ensure that your ellipses fall within the space that you're aiming for. Still, your first priority is maintaining the flow and integrity of the shape, so you're doing that well.
Jumping ahead to your boxes, your plotted perspective is very solid. Your rough perspective is coming along as well, and I'm pleased to see that for the most part, you're mindful of keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon, and the verticals perpendicular to it. In addition to this, I'm glad to see that you're applying the line extension to check how your estimation of perspective drifts.
As far as spatial understanding goes, your rotated boxes tick my two main boxes. You kept their gaps narrow and consistent so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, and you covered the full 180 degree range of rotation on both axes. What is definitely weaker here however is that your linework is visibly rushed. It doesn't look like you applied the ghosting method here, which, as always, should be applied to every single mark you put down for these lessons.
You've got a good start on those organic perspective boxes - I expect students to struggle with them, and this exercise is here largely to expose them to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered, and to get the gears turning in their heads. As such, while you have plenty of room for improvement, especially in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, you're headed in the right direction.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"
2019-01-21 22:37
Admittedly your photographs aren't the clearest but your work is generally quite well done. The drawings you did from the demos - that is, the louse, the scorpion, and to varying degrees the wasp at the beginning (the one at the end was much better), as well as this horrifying thing did a great job of conveying strong constructional skills and a general awareness of 3D space and how your forms interact with one another within it.
That said, I am looking at the dates and I can see that this page is more recent than those other drawings, and they are vastly different. There's one issue (with the legs, which I'll get into in a second) that stands out above all else, but in general your approach here seems to be much more simplistic. I can clearly see that with the ladybug along the bottom, you were going to great lengths to draw the underlying masses faintly, and you then engulfed those forms with darker lines in a way that did not necessarily suggest a clear relationship between the underlying form and what you were adding on top. As a result, this kind of breaks the constructional connection and gives the object less solidity.
Also, as far as my lessons go, stay away from drawing things lightly and then going back over the drawing with a darker, richer line. The marks you put down at any given point should always be drawn confidently. Consider what that mark is going to contribute to the drawing, whether it fleshes the construction out so you can understand the illusion you can create and the relationships between the forms, or if it communicates a specific feature or detail to the viewer. If it does any of these things, and if no other mark does so more effectively, then draw that mark without trying to keep it hidden. You can come back after the fact to add line weight to specific sections of existing lines (NOT to go back over the entirety of a line and replace it with a darker one, as this results in stiffer linework), but this is only to clarify the way different forms overlap, not to create a separate "finished" drawing on top of your more approximate sketch.
Take these notes to heart. The forms you construct must be solid and confidently drawn, and you really want to understand at every phase of your construction that they feel solid and represent real, three dimensional forms - not just loose shapes on the page. I strongly recommend that you give the updated lesson content of lesson 2 a read. The changes I've made there really hammer this concept home and should help put things in perspective, especially on that first page about "thinking in 3D".
Now, about the legs. You have a tendency in many of these drawings to construct the legs that segments that are essentially stretched spheres or stretched ellipses. As covered in this demonstration, your leg segments must be constructed with sausage forms. It may feel like they're the same, but there is a core difference. With the stretched ellipses, through the first half of its length it is steadily expanding along either side, and then through the second half, it steadily contracts. This makes it quite stiff - you can't easily bend such a form. A sausage on the other hand, is really just two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Because of this tube, it can bend and flex as needed, giving it a greater sense of gesture and flow. This is why the legs on your scorpion and louse were much better, because they could bend and flow as needed. The first attempt at the wasp however had leg segments that were very stiff and unwieldy.
Now, I am really happy with those first several pages, but since most of those are demos and they were followed by more questionable drawings, I want you to read through the various notes I linked to, then try another 3 insect drawings. I'm confident that you are capable of reproducing the quality of those few successful drawings, but I need to be sure before we move on.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge (Patreon Critique Thread)"
2019-01-21 22:12
Nice work completing the challenge. You were definitely very thorough in working through these, and I can definitely see improvement over the set. The cylinders are notoriously difficult just because there's so many sets of parallel lines to be mindful of, and precision is quite challenging - it's for this reason that lessons 6 and 7 allow for the use of ellipse guides and rulers, but working through this challenge helps a great deal in understand how to apply the use of such tools.
One thing I noticed here and there in your cylinders-in-boxes was that you often extended some of your lines in the wrong direction. For example, on the last page, you've got the cylinder on the bottom right with its green lines being extended towards the viewer, rather than away.
I definitely feel that as you work through them, the cylinders themselves start to feel considerably more solid, and while the square proportions are still elusive at times, you're getting more consistent. So, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 6.
I do want to mention though that you've definitely submitted quite a few times this month. Generally the tier is priced at what would be fair for one submission, though I'm always flexible enough to accept in order to keep from impeding a student. That said, I am going to ask that you hold off on any further submissions until February, and try not to submit quite so many times so close together.
I expect that with the massive increase of submissions I've received this month (the average submission rate is about 2.5 per day, but over the last week I've been looking at more than double that), I'm probably going to make some changes including increasing some of the tiers' pricing (the $10 tier will remain as is), and imposing a 2-week-between-submission rule. I'm considering other things as well, as I'm getting really swamped.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2019-01-21 21:42
I'll be honest, I was a little concerned that this was submitted less than a week after it was assigned. I thought that either you'd rushed through it, or that you'd skipped the line extensions, or didn't reflect upon your work after applying the extension technique... But it seems I was wrong. You've done some excellent work here.
Throughout the set, your linework is confident and concise, and I can clearly see steady improvement from being somewhat uncertain of how to approach structuring these boxes, to ultimately demonstrating considerable control over the convergences of your lines. You've improved a great deal.
The one thing that I feel is missing is for the most part optional, but will help continue to kick your boxes up to the next level: line weight. Right now you're working with pretty uniform lines, but going back over a box once it's constructed to subtly add weight to key lines (mostly along the silhouette) can really have a great impact on the sense of cohesion and solidity of a box. You'll find more notes about it right here.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects"
2019-01-21 20:04
Very nice work! You've very clearly invested a great deal of effort into stepping through each phase of construction carefully and with a lot of attention to how everything is put together. I'm very pleased with how you've worked through each construction with ample subdivision, and how at no point do you ever rely on trying to add elements just as 2D elements on the drawing - everything you draw is clearly built out in three dimensions.
Now there certainly is room for improvement in certain places - line quality is sketchy at times (though only really in places where it's entirely understandable, with the latest modifications to the lesson allowing the use of ballpoint pens, rulers and ellipse guides for a very good reason), but there are a couple key things that I'm going to point out in terms of some of the choices you've made that should be more helpful than nitpicking linework.
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With your thumbtack, you chose to work with a pretty dramatic foreshortening. While there's nothing wrong with this at all, it is an excellent opportunity to discuss what this communicates to the viewer. Foreshortening that is this dramatic tells us one of two things - either the object itself is very large, like the size of a building, where the top of it is so far away that there is visible compression of space due to perspective, or the object is extremely close to the viewer's eye (which is especially fun to imagine with a thumbtack!). The viewer does inevitably understand that this is a thumbtack, and as such, we understand that it's probably a small object when not given any other cues to suggest scale, so we're more likely to assume that it's very close up. If it was set beside other objects, especially people, then we'd might be able to build the illusion that it's a very big thumbtack.
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There were some places where your boxes were constructed in such a way that they were definitely not rectilinear (a common mistake at this phase, as constructing free boxes like does result in blunders, and it was the right decision to move forward with it regardless). A good example of this was your stapler, whose box was visibly skewed. That said, you did build the stapler quite well within those awkward confines, and I'm quite pleased with how you adhered to it. Construction is all about answering questions, and you answered a question incorrectly with your initial box, but by sticking to that answer the rest of the way through the lie you told at the end still held together. If you're unsure of what I mean by "lie", I discuss it in the first page of the update to lesson 2.
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I think the only thing that really bugs me at all are the holes in your pencil sharpener, and it's for two reasons. First off, you weren't as meticulous when laying out the holes' footprint as you were in other areas. You didn't place them with subdivision and all that. Obviously though you understand the benefit and employed it elsewhere, so I'm not holding this against you. The other issue is that you blocked it in with black. This is unfortunate because when something is solid black, we're essentially given no real spatial understanding of what it represents. Just because something is dark in your reference doesn't mean that you need to convey that, especially not in a constructional drawing that conveys no other lighting information. The holes, though not placed or built correctly, could still have come out to be more believable, had they not been blacked out in this manner. So in general, try and avoid that in the future.
Anyway! You did a great job overall, and while you've got plenty of room for improvement, you're heading down the right path at considerable speed. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge next (which is the prerequisite for lesson 7).
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"
2019-01-20 21:54
Your arrows do a pretty good job of exploring all three dimensions of space, and flowing fluidly through it. I can clearly see the compression of space, both in the size of the arrow's farther end, as well as (in some cases) the space in between the lengths of the arrow as they go back and forth. I do want to mention though that at times the hatching lines are kind of erratic and messy - remember that these are not necessary, but if you do wish to add them (as with anything) you should apply the correct techniques to ensure that they don't come out looking sloppy.
I'm glad to see that you stuck to fairly simple sausage forms for your organic forms, though there are some issues to address with your contour lines:
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The contour ellipses on the second page (IMG_3270) are visibly better, in that they're a little tighter and they're consistent. On the first page, you seem to be intentionally trying to keep them lighter along one side, and darker along the other - trying to balance multiple things at once like this isn't a great idea. You should be focusing on the only task in front of you, which is at that time, to draw an ellipse that is smooth and controlled.
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On that second page though, I am noticing issues with keeping aligned to your central minor axis line. Remember that your ellipses should be running perpendicular to the flow of the sausage form, and so even if that minor axis line you draw isn't exactly correct, it should give you a better idea of where the "correct" one would be. Your ellipses should align to this "correct" minor axis line, such that each ellipse is cut into two equal, symmetrical halves down their narrower dimension.
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For the contour ellipses, they're actually quite well done, aside from one major issue: they're all falling outside of the form itself. The contour line technique relies on creating the illusion that these lines run along the surface of the form - the second your contour ellipse or contour curve fails to fit snugly between the edges of the organic form, you lose undermine this illusion.
Your texture analyses were actually quite interesting. The tree bark was the only one that I'd deem to be entirely successful, but it was very well done. Considering how challenging texture can be, and that this seems to be your first major exposure to this kind of exercise, being able to achieve this within your first three attempts is pretty damn good. The cat fur wasn't too far off either, but the skin had major issues.
Basically it comes down to the amount of intent is driving your marks. With the skin, they're very clearly quite random and erratic. If you were to pick a line that you've drawn and look at the reference you were working from, you'd be pretty hard pressed to identify which feature that line was meant to represent. Instead, you seem to have seen something fairly chaotic and in there, you saw nothing but randomness. Understanding that, you went to your paper and drew, as you saw, randomness.
The most important thing in texture is to understand that as random and nonsensical they may look up close, this is never the case. Texture always carries some manner of rhythm, flow or structure that can be identified and transferred to a drawing.
Looking at your cat fur, you did pick up on it somewhat there - you had your fur flowing in similar directions. The tree bark however, while it did have some erratic marks to it, these were controlled and were only erratic within a certain limited space. For the most part, your texture contained visible structure, and you did a comparatively good job of employing the same things you'd observed to achieve a varying range of density from left to right.
Admittedly you never did fully blend the textures into that thick bar along the left, but you came pretty close to it in this last one.
Despite the difficulty you had here, your dissections were actually really quite well done. I can see that the date listed on the page says that it was done prior to the newer exercise, but despite that I'm not surprised. It is a little different to try and tackle texture when it's flattened out, versus when it's actually applied to a three dimensional form. You tackled a number of different subjects here, and while the grass did get kind of random/chaotic, you demonstrated a good grasp of these different kinds of textures and worked well towards controlling your shadows and detail density. All in all I'm quite pleased with your results here.
Your form intersections are coming along decently. Aside from the fact that you included some of the stretched forms (like longer cylinders) that I advised you against in the instructions due to their tendency to overcomplicate this exercise by bringing in additional foreshortening, you are mostly doing a good job of keeping your forms relatively consistent within their shared space.
I can however see places where your linework sometimes gets erratic - for example, edges where you've drawn a number of different strokes. Every mark you put down should be drawn using the ghosting method, without exception - this means that every mark should be preceded with planning and preparation, rather than drawing by reflex, which is often what happens when we see marks that have been automatically reinforced with another stroke. If you make a mistake, leave it be - adding another mark is only going to draw more attention to it.
Additionally, it's worth mentioning that your boxes are coming along, but there are plenty of places where they're lopsided or skewed, so be sure to continue incorporating them into your regular warmup routine.
Lastly, your first page of organic intersections (IMG_3280) came out very nicely. Your forms feel solid, your contour curves fit snugly within each form, and you demonstrated a strong awareness of how they interact with one another in 3D space. The second page definitely went awry, due to a combination of some forms being more complex (you've got some that taper through their midsection) and you going way overboard with the shadows and losing control over that aspect of the drawing.
So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You do have plenty of things to work on, but you seem to have demonstrated a good enough grasp in each area. So, feel free to move onto lesson 3.
As for the cylinder challenge, you definitely struggled through the beginning. It seems that you were not drawing your lines using the ghosting method, and that you struggled a great deal with the idea of constructing a cylinder in a box. You've probably seen it by now, but in case you haven't, the material for this challenge was updated quite significantly, especially to focus on the mechanics of boxes and ellipses/cylinders, so I'd recommend checking that out.
That line quality issue seems to have stuck with you through the entire challenge - I really cannot stress this enough: the ghosting method must be applied to every single mark you draw, be it a straight line, a curving one or an ellipse.
Also, I am noticing that your use of the minor axis isn't entirely consistent. You use it for a great many of these cylinders, but you leave it out of plenty of them, and in others it's drawn somewhat sloppily (where it's not entirely straight). Also, I do want to point out that you have a tendency of placing your ellipses on the ends of the minor axis, so the line doesn't penetrate all the way through each ellipse. In the future, place the ellipses such that the minor axis passes through the completely instead, as shown here.
All in all, I strongly believe you can do much better than this. Much of this is quite rushed, and not always following the instructions as closely as you ought to. You have completed the challenge, and I'll be marking it as complete, but you have a lot of room for improvement on this front. It's not that you're not capable of drawing these things cleanly, or drawing straight lines - it's just that when faced with the task of drawing so many of them, you as many others do, put less effort into each individual component. A line is a line is a line is a line - whether it's one of a thousand or one that stands on its own, it should be drawn with the same care and consideration.
You do luckily have plenty of time to continue working on this for yourself, and the cylinders only really become particularly important by the time you hit lesson 6 (which is why it's not a prerequisite until then). When you have a chance, review the newer material for the challenge, and start incorporating them into your warmup routine.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Cylinder Challenge (Patreon Critique Thread)"
2019-01-20 21:25
Old thread got locked, those eligible for private critiques can post their work here.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"
2019-01-20 20:47
Nice work overall! Your arrows flow quite nicely through space, exploring all three dimensions. One thing that I did notice though was that while the far ends of your arrows did get smaller, the actual space itself did not seem to compress with perspective. This is discussed in these notes.
Your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are coming along quite nicely - I'm seeing a nice transition of degree, and you're managing the curvature quite nicely. You definitely do need to keep working on your control however - when the ellipses fall out from being snugly squeezed between the edges of the form, we lose the illusion that this line runs along the surface of the form. As such, having your ellipses/curves fall outside of the silhouette of the form, or when they float arbitrarily inside of it, we lose the effect we're trying to achieve. Keep working on applying the ghosting method here to improve your accuracy, without giving up the nice, smooth, confident strokes.
Also, I noticed that some of your contour curves struggle with their alignment to the minor axis at times, so keep an eye on that as well.
You've got a nice variety of experimentation in your texture analyses and dissections. On the subject of hair, I'm not entirely sure of what you were trying to draw on the left there - it looks like you may have been creating little patches floating in space, and then applying fur to them. Instead, think of it as though you're zooming in on the side of a squirrel - the entire square should be filled with hair, like this. Instead of focusing on individual hairs, try and look at the rhythm and flow that is present there - each hair does not exist in isolation, they move like currents of air or water. This kind of rhythm exists in all textures, though it's not always easy to see.
I felt your gravel came out quite nicely, both with the study and the gradient, and your cucumber was quite nice too. With the cobble stone, it became quite graphic, where you focused primarily on the flat shapes, rather than the actual shadows that each cobblestone form would have been casting. This in turn made it quite difficult to transition from dark to light, so we can see that strip of black along the left side quite clearly. I actually did a quick demonstration for a student who was struggling with something similar when trying to draw the texture of a leaf, which you can see here. They, like you, attempted to do it as shown in the middle - blocking out the negative space as shapes. What you want to achieve is more like the far right, where we focus not on enclosing and defining each form, but rather capturing only the shadows it casts - this is something we can play with, to make them more prominent or blast them away with light.
I think you conveyed this sense of cast shadow rather than enclosing lines much better in your dissections, though you still do have a strong tendency to enclose things (like in your armadillo scales). Your second attempt at corn was getting there, though, so you're progressing in the right direction.
Your form intersections are looking pretty good, though I am glad that you did the extra two pages with all the forms interconnecting rather than doing so in smaller groups (something that was specifically included in the old instructions as something to avoid). You're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another within the same space, though I would recommend maybe easing up on some of the foreshortening, especially on this page's boxes, as it causes the scale to become somewhat inconsistent and visually confusing.
Finally, your organic intersections are coming along well, though the forms themselves are definitely much more complex than they need to be. As you can see in my demonstration here, if you think of the forms as being water balloons, the balloons themselves have enough tension in them to keep the form together for the most part, rather than having them spill over each other a viscous liquid. When doing this exercise, focus on how they'll sag against one another, slumping where their weight is not supported, but without losing their overall sausage-like form. Here's another example.
Anyway, you're doing very well so far - a few things to keep in mind, but you're well on your way. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"
2019-01-20 20:30
Overall your work here is actually pretty good. There are a few little issues I noticed, but by and large you're employing the methodologies covered in the lesson to great effect, and are demonstrating a good grasp of how to establish the fluid motion of your leaves.
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The first issue I noticed wasn't always there. It has to do with how you handle your more complex leaf detail. Towards the bottom left of this page, you're doing it well - you're adhering every little bit of extra detail to the underlying phase of construction. On the leaves on this page however, you're zigzagging back and forth more freely, sometimes sticking close to that underlying construction line, but not always, and it seems like you're drawing with a single stroke, back and forth. As described here, each little ripple should be drawn independently.
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Also, on the bottom right of the leaves page, you do appear to be trying to follow the multi-step construction process for more complex leaves like this, but again you're drawing that final edge with a continuous line, and you're jumping gaps that are simply too big. This kind of thing must be done while adhering as closely as you can to the underlying phases of construction, as shown here as well as in this extra demo.
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In your branches exercise, you're generally doing a good job of practicing getting your segments to flow smoothly into one another, but keep pushing yourself to draw these segments as confidently as you can. Some of them do tend to look a little stiff, especially the ones where you've made the segments longer than usual. As a result of the increased length, you slow down (which causes the stiffness).
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When you're drawing your plant constructions, I'm noticing a tendency to put down lighter construction lines before committing with darker strokes to replace the ones put down previously. This was actually discussed in the form intersections video from lesson 2 - I don't want you to employ this process. Reason being, it has a tendency to cause us to draw more slowly and carefully as we follow up with that "clean up pass", which results in much stiffer linework. Instead, every line you put down must be drawn with the same confidence, without attempting to go out of your way to hide it. We then go over them afterwards to add line weight to certain key areas - generally not the entire length of existing lines, but parts of it instead, and we do so employing the ghosting method as before. Every mark you put down is a part of your drawing, line weight just becomes a matter of bringing some of them forward, or clarifying how certain forms overlap one another.
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On this page, I can see where you've covered the branch/stalk below the petals with some really erratic contour lines. Remember that when you're working through these exercises, every mark you put down must be planned and considered. Don't draw mindlessly in this manner, as it results in lines that do not reflect clear intent, while also putting down marks that serve no real purpose. When we go to put a line on the page, we consider whether or not this mark will help us to further understand the construction and forms of the object, or whether it will communicate some key aspect of what we're drawing to the viewer. If it does either of these things, we then consider if its purpose can be accomplished by another mark, or if it is already being accomplished by a mark that is present in the drawing. We only draw marks whose purposes are clear to us, and whose purpose is not already being taken care of. This is the inherent difference between rough sketching and what we're doing here - not to say sketching roughly is bad, just that it is not what we are practicing in these lessons.
You asked about controlling the direction and dynamism of your sugar cane leaves, your cactus and your palms. To be honest, I'm uncertain of what you're referring to in regards to the sugar cane and palms, as I felt both of these had a great sense of flow, and that they moved through space in a believable manner.
For the cacti however, I think I might see what you mean. They do feel somewhat stiff, especially in this one. This isn't necessarily wrong, but this is actually something that comes up in the next lesson (specifically in these notes about how we handle the construction of legs with sausage forms). The trick is that when you draw forms that are essentially stretched ellipses - like you've done for your cacti - those shapes are naturally stiff and have no sense of flowing direction. This is because they are, through the first half of their length, constantly getting wider along both sides, and then through the second half, they are constantly getting narrower. This even roundedness makes it very difficult to portray them as bending, because either side is always getting farther away, or closer together.
When I want to portray a similar kind of form, but one with a greater sense of directional flow, I'd sooner use a sausage form - which is essentially two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Because the width along the length of this sausage is consistent, we can bend and twist it as we wish, conveying a gestural quality.
On the topic of that cactus, I do want to mention two other things:
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Make sure that whenever you have forms that interpenetrate each others' volumes in this manner, that you actually define where they intersect by drawing a contour line right where they touch each other.
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You definitely overused contour lines here without really thinking about each contour line's purpose. You could have achieved a similar result with just one or two contour lines, and didn't need to create a full wireframe here. The wireframe appearance however actually increased the general stiffness of the drawing as well. That's another great thing about sausages - we don't place contour lines along their lengths, we only reinforce where they intersect with one another, as this is usually enough to convey the illusion of solidity and 3D form. By leaving the lengths clear, we can focus on their gestural fluidity instead.
Anyway, I've had a lot to say here, but your work was still done quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects"
2019-01-20 20:02
Very well done! Your constructions are looking well thought out, and you're clearly working through the spatial problems with a great awareness of how these forms all intersect and interact with one another. For the most part, I'm also pretty pleased with how you're handling curved corners (like with the charger) where you tend to follow these concepts quite well. In the spray bottle you approach it somewhat differently, but still convey a good grasp of achieving smooth, intentional curves that maintain the solidity of your form rather than undermining it.
One thing that did stand out to me was that in comparison to many of your other forms, your cylindrical ones tend to be the weakest, like in this mug and in the water bottle. Still, it's a matter of practice and getting used to drawing cylinders more. I can see that you haven't yet completed the cylinder challenge, so that would be a good idea.
The only other thing I noticed was that you do have a tendency to draw your construction lines to be a little more faint, and then you go over them with another stroke - along their entire length, as if to replace them with a "cleaner" or "committed" mark. In general, I don't want you to do this, as it results in slower lines that wobble or stiffen as they attempt to follow a particular guideline rather than being drawn with the confidence and preplanning of the ghosting method. When it comes to line weight, it should be employed with that same ghosting method, and applied to sections of existing lines where clarification of overlapping forms is required.
Aside from that, you're doing really well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but I strongly encourage you to move onto the cylinder challenge next, followed by the 25 wheel challenge.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-20 19:46
Honestly, your work is pretty fantastic. You really take the concept of executing your marks with a confident, persistent pace to heart - I don't see a hint of hesitation or deviation, you maintain a consistent trajectory through each stroke, clearly trusting in your muscle memory to push through. You're also not doing this willy nilly - you're employing the ghosting method to achieve exceptional control and precision.
This carries through into the ellipses where each one achieves an even, consistent shape with no sign of wobbling or stiffness. Here your control varies here and there - by and large it's pretty good, but it does leave room for improvement, which will come with continued practice and use of the ghosting method. It's worth mentioning that I can already see improvement on that front throughout the work you've done here.
When it comes to the ellipses in planes, keep working on getting them to fit snugly within the plane, but you're absolutely focusing on the right area - I can see that you've prioritized getting your ellipse to be evenly shaped and to maintain its consistent, rounded nature, before worrying about accuracy. You made the right call.
Very nice work on the plotted perspective - you were very thorough and filled each frame nicely. This was admittedly one of those more basic exercises, but despite that you've still managed to produce work that was impressive in its cleanliness and general presentation.
In your rough perspective boxes you've clearly taken great care to keep your horizontals parallel to the horizon, and your verticals perpendicular to it. I'm also pleased to see that you've applied the line extension method to check those convergences against your vanishing point. This helps to keep track of how our estimation of perspective tends to drift.
For the rotated boxes, you achieved solid rotations along either of the major axes, though I did notice a slight tendency to stretch your boxes as they rotated along the vertical one. Your spacing and proportions were more successful along the horizontal. Along the vertical, this stretching resulted in the boxes rotating less, resulting in less coverage of the full 180 degree range. Also, worth mentioning that while you maintained consistent, narrow gaps between your boxes for the most part (so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork), your corner boxes seemed to deviate from this pattern.
It's worth mentioning that this exercise, along with the organic perspective one, were included here with the full expectation that students would struggle considerably with them. They're here to expose students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered. As such, your work is still impressive on this front, and you've accomplished more than I would have expected.
Your organic perspective boxes - where you're left free to rotate them however without nearly as much structure - was more in line with what I'd expect to see. That is, your boxes mark a good start of exploration of 3D space, but there is plenty of room for improvement here, especially when it comes to keeping the convergences of your sets of parallel lines consistent towards their shared vanishing points. We'll continue to work on this next.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"
2019-01-20 18:48
Honestly this is a considerable improvement. Your understanding of form and construction has definitely come a long way, especially in the last two drawings. There are a couple things I want to address however:
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You're right, constructing the sausages and then drawing the "actual shape" on top is not ideal, and it's not an approach I want you to employ because it waffles between thinking in terms of form and construction (the sausages) and thinking about the 2D shapes you want to put on the page. Forget about the 2D shapes for now, and forget about the fact that you're actually drawing on a piece of paper. The entirety of your construction should always consist of form. Your later two drawings were okay because your brain seemed to be leaning more towards understanding what you were putting down as solid forms even when you were thinking about the "actual shape" of things. That said, there are still areas - like where the mantis' thorax comes reaches the abdomen where you have some little bumps that stray from the underlying form. Whenever you create additional bumps like this, don't just make them up - you need to add the solid forms that create them and work through the three dimensional puzzle that is their interaction/connection to the other forms they're built off of.
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Don't draw your construction lightly and then "commit" with darker, cleaner marks. That's not what line weight is for. Line weight generally shouldn't be applied to the entire length of an existing line, especially not to replace it. Instead, it should be applied only to certain local areas of a mark to emphasize rather than replace it, and to clarify where certain forms overlap each other. Aside from that, make sure that every mark you put down is done so with confidence - don't go out of your way to hide lines by drawing them more faintly, and don't switch to a thicker or thinner pen. These drawings should be done with the same pen weight.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Your last two drawings really are remarkably better than what you'd drawn previously, and they definitely demonstrate a developing understanding of form and space. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2019-01-20 18:33
You've definitely shown a good deal of growth and progress both in the confidence of your linework and the consistency of your convergences, so that's great to see. There are a couple of things that I want to point out, but by and large you're doing well.
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What stands out most is the fact that you only applied the line extension method as you should have (to every box, and to every set of parallel lines for each box) on the first and last pages. In skipping this process for many of your other boxes, or only applying it to a select few, you definitely robbed yourself of the opportunity to grow more and to make better use of the exercise as a whole. This should be applied to each box on a page after that page has been completed, so you can identify the patterns of mistakes that you're making, and attempt to improve upon those specific areas of difficulty in the next page.
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When adding hatching lines to one face on a box, don't scribble or draw erratically. Draw consistent, parallel lines that stretch all the way across the plane from edge to edge.
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Your convergences definitely improve, though there are a few little mistakes that I see coming up frequently, even towards the end. For example, sometimes you'll have three of the four lines of a given set converge correctly, but then a fourth (usually one of the two middle lines) goes off at its own angle. You can avoid this by employing the following approach: when you go to draw a line, think about all the other lines to which it is parallel (rather than thinking about the lines with which it shares a corner, or with which it shares a plane). Focus only on the lines within the same set, including those that have not yet been drawn. Then think about how those points all meet at a vanishing point and think about the angle at which they'd be leaving that VP. The lines that have a smaller angle between them are likely to be running more or less parallel to each other (when drawn on the page) by the time they reach the box (or near parallel at least). Being aware of this relationship can help avoid mistakes considerably. I demonstrate this further in these notes.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 6: Drawing Everyday Objects"
2019-01-20 05:59
Yeah, you can go ahead and post the work you completed. Whenever I update a lesson, I'll continue to accept the old assignment for some time before transitioning over fully.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"
2019-01-19 21:29
This is such a significant improvement, and in the course of only a few days! You're demonstrating a much greater grasp of the relationships between your forms, and your constructions feel considerable more solid and believable now, with an excellent balance between the structural soundness of the bodies and the slightly gestural, flowing quality of the limbs. Your head constructions have come along as well, they're now displaying a much clearer understanding of how all these forms come together into a precise, three dimensional puzzle.
Keep up the fantastic work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 4: Drawing Insects and Arachnids"
2019-01-19 21:26
Honestly I think you're demonstrating a really great use of form and construction throughout this set. There are a few minor issues that I'll mention, but I don't think the concerns you're worried about there - about thinking too geometrically, jumping too complex too soon, etc - are issues I see in your work.
The issues I do see are as follows:
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I notice what appears to be a use of line weight here and there to take lines that you've already drawn and "commit" or "replace" them with a sort of cleaner stroke. You do this often when it comes to ellipses, because I do think you may need to work on drawing them to be a little tighter (remember to ghost them, draw from your shoulder, etc. as both of these can help bring the multiple lines of your ellipses to come closer together). Also, there are places where you're purposely drawing certain lines to be lighter or fainter. I don't want you to approach line weight in this manner. Every mark you put down should be drawn with a confident stroke, not attempting to keep it faint or hidden. When you do add line weight, focus on using it to clarify specific line weights to emphasize lines that exist already, rather than replacing them. The key here is that this allows you to add weight in a more limited fashion, where it can be drawn with a more confident stroke, rather than a slower, more careful one. Line weight isn't about separating the "real lines" with the ones you'd rather have disappear - it's about building an overall hierarchy where all lines are important, but some need to be brought forward in relation to the others.
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While your form construction is coming along great, I do think that when you decide to start approaching detail, you tend to give it a lot less attention than you ought to. There are very few places where you've tried it (which is totally fine - it's not a requirement of these lessons). The tarantula, for instance. It's very important that you take the time to study your reference carefully, and you transfer detail information only one or two lines at a time, looking back at your reference in between to refresh your memory. Your memory will try and oversimplify things, resulting in detail that looks somewhat cartoony and doesn't actually reflect any specific element of your source material. The key is to spend most of your time studying that reference and carrying over only specific bits and pieces, all the while being mindful of how those bits and pieces should be arranged along the surfaces and forms to which they are being applied.
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Proportion is another area that you do need to work on, though this is pretty normal and will improve with time. For instance, on your wasp, I definitely noticed that the legs came out very small in relation to the rest of the body. One trick that can help is to pay attention to the negative shapes - that is, the shapes on the image itself that are created in between forms. Studying these can help us understand the positional relationships between different forms. Proportion is all about relationships between forms, and further work on observing and studying your reference will also help you become more aware of this.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. As far as construction goes, you are doing very well - just make sure to implement what I've mentioned above as you continue to move forwards through the lessons.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-19 21:03
Lovely work across the board! Your lines are remarkably smooth and confidently drawn, showing no sign of hesitation or stiffness. Once you start applying the ghosting method, you lose none of that confidence, but imbue each stroke with greater control and precision, to great effect.
You then go on to carry this into your ellipses for the most part - there's a touch of stiffness there, where the ellipses are perhaps drawn just a little too slowly, with just a bit of hesitation. Your shapes are still quite evenly shaped, but if you look closely at the linework there you'll see that some of them have a bit of a jerking stutter that makes them ever so slightly bumpy. It's very minor, so just keep the idea of always drawing confidently from your shoulder in mind, that the moment your pen touches the page any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed, and it should resolve itself.
Despite the many self-corrections and whatnot through your ellipses in planes, you've actually done quite well here. A lot of students get caught deforming their ellipses to fit the awkward plane (similarly to the one you labelled as "weird shape" but for the most part, your ellipses came out maintaining their elliptical shape.
Jumping ahead to your rough perspective, you're doing quite well, and I'm pleased to see that you're generally keeping an eye on the relationships between your horizontals/verticals and the horizon line (that is, keeping the horizontals parallel to it and the verticals perpendicular to it). I'm also glad that you're applying the line extension method here to identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift. What you're seeing here is completely normal, and the point of the exercise is as much to reveal to the student that this tends to happen (and is a point to continually work towards improving).
That's ultimately why we extend our lines - so we can become aware of these tendencies, and identify the patterns there. What this shows us here is that you need to exaggerate the angles of your lines as they go further and further out.
Your work on the rotated boxes is solid - you're keeping your boxes well structured with narrow, consistent gaps between them to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, and you're doing a pretty good job of covering the full 180 degree range of rotation on each axis. One thing I did notice was that on your second attempt there, I think the box to the immediate left of the center was rotated a little too dramatically, causing its neighbour to the left to have much less room to further distinguish its orientation. Aside from that though, they're extremely well done.
This exercise, along with the next one, are really about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered. As such, you've pushed beyond my expectations here. Your organic perspective boxes are coming along pretty well too, but these are more in line with what I'd expect to see. That is, there is still plenty of room for improvement here, especially in keeping your sets of parallel lines converging more consistently towards their shared vanishing points.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next, as it provides some focused and targeted exercises on developing your ability to judge those convergences.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"
2019-01-19 20:45
Very nice work! You're doing quite well throughout, and are applying the concepts covered in the lesson to great effect. There are a few little hiccups here and there that I'll address, but you're overall capturing the illusion of flow for your leaves quite well, and are leveraging contour lines to convey the volumes of forms nicely.
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I'm assuming that since this was early on and you seem to have been doing it correctly after this point, this was something you noticed on your own but I'll address it anyway. The leaf on the left-middle of this page shows detail being added subtractively (you're cutting back into the leaf). While this is a valid approach, it's also generally more difficult to make it look good and should be avoided whenever possible. It's not that difficult things should always be avoided, it's more that there are better solutions, the main one being working additively, building out from those forms you've already put down. Like I said though, you are showing an understanding of this through much of the lesson.
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Your branches are definitely coming along well, but keep working on getting those edge segments to flow smoothly into one another. Letting your lines run further (rather than stopping them very soon after the last ellipse), even halfway towards the next ellipse can certainly help, as it gives you more opportunity to align them correctly. The way they are now, we can see a pretty stiff transition from ellipse to ellipse and segment to segment.
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In this daisy, I'm loving the fact that you've drawn the flow lines with little arrow heads. Don't forget to strive to have your petals actually touch the end of that line though. It's not always easy to achieve this, but upon looking at your results here it does look like you may have been intentionally trying to leave that gap between the end of the flow line and the end of the petal.
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You are definitely cutting back/working subtractively here, so as mentioned above, try to focus more on building on top of established forms instead).
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Great forms and intersections on this cactus. Two things though - firstly, while I'm not looking at the reference right now, the arrangement of each little bud/protrusion seems a little too even. It may actually be that way, but this is probably a good time to point out the importance of studying even how things are spread out across a surface in your reference. Secondly, you definitely missed a great opportunity to focus on the shadows these forms were casting onto the cactus itself.
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Another place where working additively would have been better. You're also letting those edges zigzag back and forth, rather than drawing each ripple individually as you have done elsewhere, and as is discussed in these notes.
I can definitely see why you've grown so fond of mushrooms - I think they're one of the best subject matter to get one's first introduction into really solid form-based constructions, and they're a blast to apply texture to. Ultimately however, when it comes to any kind of texture or detail, the key is taking the time to really look at your reference up close and study the arrangement of the forms that are present, the little details and to get in the habit of taking only a moment to transfer one or two specific marks that relate to particular features you're observing before looking back at your reference to refresh your memory. Memory is really faulty and will strive to oversimplify everything we see, making it very difficult to work for long periods of time without looking back at it. This is especially problematic with leaves because they have so much going on, but our brains insist to us, "no you just need to put down a couple marks".
The revised content for lesson 2 contains fairly detailed notes on the subject of texture, and even includes an extra exercise on it that you may be interested in.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2019-01-19 20:18
Congratulations on getting through all of them! I can definitely see improvement over the set, but there are a few things worth pointing out:
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You demonstrate here a tendency to get confused as to which side of the box is pointing towards the viewer and which is pointing away. Generally we use the single face with hatching lines to represent a face pointing towards us, but based on this assumption, you have many cases where your lines are extended in the wrong direction. These lines should always be extended away from the viewer, so we can identify how they converge towards their implied vanishing point.
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When it comes to improving your convergences, your progress certainly is a little slow, which suggests to me that you may not be reflecting enough on what these extensions actually tell you. The goal is of course always to work towards getting these sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards the same point. We can work towards achieving this by looking at the mistakes we tend to make, and considering them as we draw our lines.
When going to draw a line as part of a box, some students will think about the other lines with which that one shares a corner, or the ones with which it shares a plane. Instead of doing this, always think instead about the lines with which it shares a vanishing point - all the other lines to which it is parallel, and ignore the rest. While doing this, think about the angles at which these lines leave the VP - that is, the angles between them. Those with very small angles separating them will end up running virtually parallel to one another once they reach the box, which makes for a very useful hint to keep in mind. I explain this further in these notes.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. I'd recommend that you continue working a few boxes at a time into your warmup routines, mixing them up with the previous exercises you've encountered and picking two or three at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes. Aside from that, feel free to move onto lesson 2.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-19 20:04
Pretty well done overall! You start off fairly well. You approach the super imposed lines with a good degree of confidence, mostly keeping your strokes smooth rather than fussing overmuch with accuracy. Your ghosted lines are similar - a touch of hesitation here and there that results in a bit of stiffness, but by and large you're heading in the right direction and are pushing through with a fair bit of confidence to keep things smooth and maintain consistent trajectories. Keep pushing yourself to commit to each stroke the moment your pen touches the page (and accept that any opportunity to avoid mistakes will have passed at this moment, so there's no sense in doing anything but pushing forwards).
Your ellipses are very much the same - there's a touch of hesitation, but overall your confident strokes are helping you to maintain an even shape for each one. You're particularly good with the narrower degrees, so you may want to focus more of your focus with these to your wider, more circular ellipses (which you do seem to have been doing, so that's great).
Jumping forward to your rough perspective boxes, you're doing a good job of keeping your horizontals fairly parallel to the horizon line, and your verticals perpendicular to it. I'm also very pleased to see that you're extending your lines back towards your vanishing point to identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.
What you do need to be more aware of is the fact that here we can see that your lines wobble and waver much more than they did in the earlier section. This suggests to me that you're not applying as much care or investing as much time as you were, and your use of the ghosting method is either lacking, or it simply is more rushed. Always remember that every single mark you put down should apply this method, and that regardless of what you're drawing, each mark should be given as much time as is needed to execute it to the best of your ability. This means putting that time towards the planning and preparation phases, before executing it with a confident, persistent pace.
Despite intentionally having been assigned to challenge and push students, with the focus being on exposing them to a kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered, your attempt at the rotated boxes came out quite well and conveys a well developing grasp of 3D space. You kept your boxes well structured with minimal, consistent gaps between them to eliminate unnecessary guesswork, and did a good job of covering the 180 degree arc of rotation on each axis.
The organic perspective boxes do certainly have more room for improvement, but as I said, neither of these last two are intended to be done well at this point. You've made a good start here, and we'll continue to work on your ability to maintain consistent convergences for your sets of parallel lines towards their shared vanishing points.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-18 20:58
Nope, you did just fine! Both on the submission, and on the work it contains. You've done an excellent job applying the concepts covered in the lesson, especially when it comes to drawing lines that are smooth and confident, focusing on achieving a consistent flow and trajectory. You're not demonstrating any hesitation or wobbling, and instead are clearly investing your time into the planning and preparation phases, so as to continue maintaining your control without letting your brain control your hand as you draw.
This carries over into your ellipses where you're drawing them to be evenly shaped - both these straight lines and evenly shaped ellipses are the bedrock of solid construction, so you're off to an excellent start.
Your plotted perspective is fine, though this is pretty normal. The rough perspective boxes are coming along well too - I'm pleased to see that you're applying the line extension method to check your estimation of perspective. You're also doing a good job of keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon line, and your verticals perpendicular to it.
This is about the point where the exercises students should be able to manage ends - now we get into the tough stuff, where the exercises are less about having students do perfect work, and more about exposing them to spatial problems they may not have otherwise considered.
In your rotated boxes, you did a good job of keeping the boxes well structured, maintaining narrow, consistent gaps between them so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork. I do think however that the boxes immediately beside the central one were rotated a little too dramatically relative to it, leaving you with very little further rotation to accomplish on the boxes further out. This resulted in those outer two layers running close to parallel with one another, in an issue similar to what's described here. You probably could have squeezed some extra rotation out of the boxes that were furthest out, but ultimately it did put you in a tricky position.
Your organic perspective boxes show that your understanding of 3D space is coming along very well. There's still room for growth, as is expected, specifically in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but you're making great headway here and are heading in the right direction. We'll continue to focus on this particular kind of thing next.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2019-01-18 20:31
Nice work! The solidity of your boxes and the consistency of their construction improves a fair bit over the set. Initially they feel a little less certain, like you're not entirely sure of why you're drawing certain lines over others, but your overall approach comes together as you push through and you appear to be more sure of yourself.
There is still room for improvement in terms of getting the sets of parallel lines to converge consistently, but you're making considerable progress all the same. One important thing to keep in mind is that when you go to draw a line, don't think about the other lines with which it shares a corner, or those with which it shares a plane. Focus instead on all the other lines that run parallel to it - both those that have been drawn and those that have yet to be. Think about how they converge towards the same vanishing point, and the angle at which they leave that point. As shown here, lines with small angles between them at this far off point will run virtually parallel to one another as they reach the box, which is quite a useful thing to realize.
I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"
2019-01-17 22:10
Though you mentioned that the album's order is not chronological, I definitely can see considerable improvement from the beginning to the end. By and large you're doing fairly well, though there are some issues that I want to address.
To start with, in your leaves I can see that you have a tendency to work subtractively when adding detail - that is, you cut back into your leaves. This is technically a valid approach, but one that is much more difficult to do successfully, and is something I avoid whenever possible (and in most cases it is entirely possible). Instead, strive to work additively - building off an existing form you've placed in space rather than trying to cut pieces of it away.
This is covered in the second half of this point.
Your branches are steadily getting better as you continue to practice them, though keep working on getting those segments to come out smooth and consistent - there's some wavering there that undermines the solidity of the resulting form. I'm not sure if you're applying additional line weight or if the process of overlapping segments is just accomplishing the same effect, but if you are doing the former then make sure you draw those marks with the same kind of confidence as you would with any mark you put down. Don't draw them slowly in favour of maintaining control, because this will cause you will end up making a wobblier line that will undermine your form's solidity. In general, line weight can and should be applied more to key areas that require clarification of overlaps, so usually you don't need to add weight to longer sections where drawing confidently becomes a problem. Aaaand if you do, then you can always apply the same overlapping segment technique, as long as you take care to ensure that they flow seamlessly into one another.
A minor note about this drawing - don't be afraid to draw the internal parts of your flower pots (or whatever objects). In this case, you really would have benefitted from actually drawing the full ellipse that defines the soil inside the pot. In general, this flower pot construction was missing a number of additional ellipses that would have made the form much more solid. Also, draw all your lines with the ghosting method - including the line you used for your minor axis there, which was something of an after thought from the look of it.
For your cactus, don't neglect to define where the forms intersect with each other. In this case, I specifically mean where the cactus intersects with the soil inside of the pot. Leaving these edges open and uncapped causes the form as a whole to flatten out. You do seem to have a habit here of neglecting to draw your flower pots with the same kind of focus or interest as you would for the rest of your objects. Everything you draw should be constructed in full.
As we hit the mushroom you drew along with the newer demo, you definitely start to show a much better understanding of form and construction, and capture the flowing nature of your leaves and petals more fluidly. There is still room for improvement, but you're showing marked growth through this set because of these later pages.
The last thing I want to mention is in regards to how you've approached the detail on this flower's petals. When you add detail or texture, don't just loosely put marks down. If you want to put detail down, take the time to observe your reference carefully and actually identify what is going on with the surface of that object. Put down only a mark or two to transfer very specific elements and features that you see in your reference before looking back at the image and refreshing your memory. Do not attempt to hold a great deal of information in your memory, because the moment you look away your brain will go to work simplifying it and throwing away critical information. If we look at the details you've drawn here, there's actually nothing there that really communicates any qualities of the flower petal you were working from - by and large they're just arbitrary lines that don't contribute anything.
You'll find more information on handling texture in the newly rewritten lesson 2.
Anyway! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I do strongly recommend that you give all the new material on lesson 2 a read, as there are concepts there that weren't being communicated quite as well in the previous version of the lesson. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, but keep what I've mentioned here in mind as you do so.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-17 21:31
Congratulations on completing the challenge. You did a good job keeping them structured together, minimizing their gaps and eliminating any unnecessary guesswork. You did still struggle with that same issue as before of keeping your boxes fairly parallel to one another rather than rotating them, so that is definitely something you're going to want to work on as you continue to move forwards.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you can go ahead and move onto the 250 box challenge.
As for your question, I do feel the approach you should be using to construct your boxes is covered pretty thoroughly in the video provided on the 250 box challenge page ("How to Draw a Box").
It describes a similar method, but it focuses on the importance of drawing "through" your box - that is, drawing the lines on the opposite side of it as well, as though you have x-ray vision. So you draw the 3 lines, one from each set of parallel lines, then repeat this until you have drawn all 4 lines from each of the 3 sets (a total of 12 lines).
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-17 21:25
Nice work! You're definitely pushing through with some excellent linework - there's a lot of confidence there, and very little hesitation or wavering, so your lines maintain a fairly consistent, smooth trajectory. There's certainly still room for improvement, but you're coming along pretty well.
Your ellipses continue on with this sense of confidence, and I can see a clear improvement in this area in particular between your earlier draft and your latest one. You're managing to maintain smooth, even shapes that feel both fluid and reasonably well controlled. Your earlier set were definitely a little bit on the loose side, but you've managed to tighten things up here.
Your narrower ellipses tend to be your strongest - there is a touch of stiffness here and there with your wider ones (mostly the full circles), so that's where you'll likely want to focus your efforts.
Jumping ahead to your boxes, your plotted perspective is solid. Your rough perspective is coming along well, though I can see here that your linework isn't quite as strong here as it was earlier. This isn't uncommon, but it does suggest that when you're going through the process of drawing something more complex, that you're either devoting a little less time to each individual line than you could, or that you're allowing the additional challenge to overwhelm you slightly. In essence, they're really the same issue - make sure that with each line, that you're allotting the time necessary to draw it to the best of your ability with full application of the ghosting method - that is, investing all your time in the planning/preparation phases before pushing through the stroke with full confidence and no hesitation. Mind you, I am nitpicking somewhat - the lines are still decent, they're just weaker than what I know you to be capable of.
Your rotated boxes are looking pretty well done. By and large this exercise is more about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered, so they start thinking about how forms can be manipulated in 3D space, rather than expecting any manner of perfect work. Most students struggle with this, but all things considered you've done a pretty good job. You've kept your boxes well structured with narrow, consistent gaps between them to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, and you've managed to cover the full range of rotation across the horizontal axis. The vertical axis however does fall somewhat short of the full 180 degree arc we're looking to achieve, however.
Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a good start, though much like the previous exercise, they are intended to be quite difficult. As such, you do have plenty of room for improvement - especially when it comes to getting those sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points. That will be the focus of our next step.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're welcome to move onto the 250 box challenge as your next step, as this should help further develop your grasp of 3D space.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-17 21:03
You've got a good start here, though there are a few adjustments I'm going to identify that should help you as you continue to move forwards.
Your super imposed lines are looking pretty good - the longer lines have some wavering to them which is not remotely surprising, but by and large you're drawing these lines quite well with a good deal of confidence.
Your ghosted lines are alright, though this is where that confidence definitely needs to be maintained. Currently I'm seeing more hesitation as you execute your marks, which results in more wavering and wobbling along the way. Remember that the ghosting method's purpose is to split the process of making marks into distinct steps with distinct concerns and responsibilities. When it comes to accuracy, the planning and preparation phases where you put down your points (you may want to draw these a little smaller by the way) and where you ghost through the motion are where this is a major focus. You're training your arm to make a specific mark between two specific points, following a specific trajectory.
Once your pen touches the page however, and you move onto the final phase - the execution of the stroke - all opportunities to maintain accuracy and avoid mistakes are over. All you can do is push through and execute a smooth, consistent stroke. Mistakes may happen, but at the end of the day, even if your mark misses its target slightly, as long as it is smooth and consistent, it will still be workable. If you slow down and try to guide your hand with your conscious brain or your eyes however, that line will waver and wobble, and won't be good for much.
Jumping ahead to your ellipses, you're actually demonstrating a good deal of confidence here through the first couple exercises, and as a result your ellipses come out looking smooth and evenly shaped, which is great. You do waver a little when you hit the ellipses in planes, where you're hit with the challenge of getting the ellipses to fit snugly within these awkward planes. It's pretty normal to see students to struggle with that. Always keep in mind that the flow and shape integrity of your ellipse is the main priority - accuracy is important, but only once that flow has been achieved.
Moving on, you've done a great job with the plotted perspective boxes and are demonstrating a good grasp on the basics of perspective. Your rough perspective boxes are coming along decently, and I'm glad to see that you're applying the double checking method here.
One thing worth mentioning however is that I'm noticing that some of your horizontals aren't quite parallel to the horizon line, and some of your verticals aren't quite perpendicular to it. They have a tendency to slant slightly - keep this in mind, and do your best in this exercise to maintain those relationships with the horizon. This issue is further discussed (though in a more exaggerated fashion) in these notes.
You definitely struggled with the rotated boxes exercise. This is entirely normal. I assign this exercise, as well as the organic perspective one with the full expectation that most students are not yet ready to tackle this with any expectation of success. Ultimately, not all exercises come with that expectation. This one is instead more focused on exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered, to get them to start thinking about that sort of thing.
For the most part, you did do a good job, especially towards the center, of keeping your boxes well structured with narrow, consistent gaps between them. As you reached further out towards the extremities, this started to fall apart somewhat, with the gaps becoming less consistent - so that's something to keep in mind. As soon as those gaps start falling apart, we're forced to rely more and more on guesswork when positioning our boxes in space.
You actually did a pretty good job of achieving a full range of rotations across both axes, but you weren't quite able to maintain them as you moved out towards the corners, where the rotations diminished.
That said, the attempt was still solid, and accomplished what I was looking for.
Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a good start, but there's plenty of room for improvement, especially on getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points. This is what we're going to focus on next.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge, both to work on further developing your grasp of 3D space and forms that are rotated freely within it, as well as to work on your use of the ghosting method to achieve smooth, confident lines.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-17 20:50
Pretty nice work! There are a couple things that I want to bring to your attention, but by and large you're doing quite well.
To start with, through your super imposed lines, you're demonstrating quite a bit of confidence behind each of your marks, which helps to keep them smooth and their trajectories consistent. I don't see much in the way of hesitation or wobbling, so that's fantastic. This holds through into the ghosted lines exercise, where you're applying the technique on top of that confidence to improve the overall control and accuracy without losing those smooth lines.
Now when you hit the ghosted planes exercise, I'm noticing that you start to hit a bit of a hurdle. From the looks of it, you may not be spending quite as much time with each individual line - the quality drops a little, we see more wavering and the lines become less straight. My guess is that when you're faced with the challenge of these lines becoming part of something larger and more complex (like where a plane is made up of several lines), you find it a little more daunting, or perhaps you try to move through it a little more quickly. Remember that a line is always a line - whether it exists on its own, or as part of a larger object, there should be no difference in the time and effort you put towards each individual one.
Your ellipses are looking pretty good - the confidence of your strokes is keeping them evenly shaped, and while you'll continue to tighten them up through practice, I am pleased that you're drawing through each and every one.
Your plotted perspective boxes are fine. The rough perspective is well done too, aside form the line quality I addressed earlier. I am also pleased that you're applying the line extension method to identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.
You've done a pretty good job with the rotated boxes. Again, line quality is an issue, but by and large you've kept the boxes well structured together with narrow, consistent gaps so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, and you've done a good job of covering the full range of rotation on both axes.
Both this exercise and the organic perspective one are intentionally meant to be challenging, and perhaps more difficult than most students can manage right now. It's more about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered, so they start thinking about it.
Your organic perspective boxes as such are coming along quite nicely, though there is still room for improvement on getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points. We'll work on this next.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next. This is both to further develop your grasp of 3D space, which is already coming along quite well, and perhaps more importantly to fix the linework issues and your use of the ghosting method.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 5: Drawing Animals"
2019-01-17 00:21
Sorry about those links - I've updated them with the correct URLs.
Uncomfortable in the post "250 Box Challenge"
2019-01-16 22:35
Congratulations on completing the challenge. I can definitely see that your convergences have certainly improved over the course of this set. There's still room for improvement - and I'll address that in a second, but there's something else I noticed over the course of your 250 boxes that needs to be pointed out.
If you compare the line quality between the first few boxes and your last, the last bunch are noticeably stiffer and wobblier than when you started.
Now, it's been a while since you submitted lesson 1, something line 9 months. I suspect that you may have started the challenge closer to that time, when you were fresh off that material and more familiar with the use of the ghosting method. Your lines weren't perfect at the beginning, and there was a touch of hesitation here and there, but by and large they were coming along well.
After a while, it does seem that you may have stopped using that method altogether, instead investing more of your time in the execution phase of the mark making process, and as a result you stopped executing those marks with the same kind of confidence. It's extremely important that you refamiliarize yourself with the correct use of the ghosting method - every mark you put down for these lessons must make use of it, to ensure that the marks you put down are drawn confidently, without hesitation, so the results are smooth and consistent. Smooth, straight lines are the very bedrock of solid construction.
Now, back to the convergences - you're improving steadily on that front, and the following should help you continue to do so:
When going to draw a line as part of a box, some students will think about the other lines with which that one shares a corner, or the ones with which it shares a plane. Instead of doing this, always think instead about the lines with which it shares a vanishing point - all the other lines to which it is parallel, and ignore the rest. While doing this, think about the angles at which these lines leave the VP - that is, the angles between them. Those with very small angles separating them will end up running virtually parallel to one another once they reach the box, which makes for a very useful hint to keep in mind. I explain this further in these notes.
Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. As you're coming back after quite a while, be sure to review the lesson 1 material, and make sure that you incorporate those exercises into a regular warmup routine (picking 2 or 3 exercises at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes). Also, as you'll probably have noticed, that material has all been rewritten and updated, so you may find it to be somewhat clearer than you remember.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 3: Drawing Plants"
2019-01-16 22:26
So there are a couple major issues that I'm seeing:
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First off, you're not paying the same kind of attention to the simple forms that are involved in some of these constructions. For example, the box in the first drawing is completely misaligned from the plant, and you haven't gone to any lengths to draw through it. You can't be treating any part of your drawing as an afterthought - every form is important. Similarly, the cylindrical flower pot on the third page is really sloppy. You're not drawing through your ellipses, you're not drawing it around a minor axis, and so on. I also guarantee that the flower pot was not just a simple cylinder, that there was much more to it than that.
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Secondly, I can see that you have a tendency to draw things with a faint line, and then follow them up with a thicker line. For example, as we can see on this page, you draw each leaf in its entirety with a very faint, timid mark, and then outline each leaf fully where it would logically be "visible". Don't do this. I don't want you to be worrying about which lines should be drawn lightly or hidden, and I don't want you applying line weight in such a way that the marks are so long that you're drawing slowly and carefully and making everything stiff. When you go to put a mark down, you must consider whether or not it contributes to your understanding of the forms you're constructing, or if it communicates some key element of what you're drawing to the viewer. If the answer to this is yes, then you consider whether the mark you want to put down will accomplish this job well, or if another mark may do so better (or if an existing mark already does). If you determine that this mark should be added to your drawing, then you draw it confidently. You do not worry about what level of priority it has, whether it should be faint or bold, or anything like that. EVERY mark you put down must be drawn with that same confidence in order to ensure that it flows smoothly. Smooth lines are the cornerstone of solid construction.
Looking over this work, it is clear to me that you can do much better, but you're investing your time in the wrong areas. I want you to try these four extra pages again. Before you do however, I'd like you to go back to lesson 2 and reread the lesson in its entirety. It has been rewritten and reorganized (as of December 25th), so what you see there will likely be quite different from what you remember from a month ago. The first page, about "thinking in 3D" is especially important.
When you do the 4 pages, focus on drawing every mark confidently, from the shoulder, and don't neglect any part of your constructions. Just because we are focusing on form and construction does not mean that we're blocking things in vaguely - everything we see is made up of form. Texture and detail is really just the last little bit - everything is still entirely discernible and recognizable without it.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Contour Lines, Dissections and Form Intersections"
2019-01-16 22:08
While there's still room for improvement, these are definitely much better than before. A couple things to keep in mind:
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Keep working on getting your curves to hook back around as they come to the edge of the silhouette - if your lines are flying outside of the sausage shape, then you're not curving them enough.
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When one end of the sausage is facing us, then it is fairly natural to have a contour ellipse (basically a contour curve which is completely visible) on that end, as shown on this step. This tends to help a great deal to convey the illusion of 3D form.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, but continue to work towards controlling your marks and applying the ghosting method to every mark you put down.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-16 22:05
Nice work overall! You've made a pretty great start. There are a few things I want to address, but by and large you're doing well.
One thing that stands out to me is that when you're drawing your linework - be it for simple straight lines, curved ones or ellipses - you have a tendency to focus a little too much on the accuracy you're trying to achieve, and as a result you hesitate when you actually move to execute the mark. This hesitation leads to just a little bit of stiffness to your linework, which impedes its flow, and results in a slightly wobbly line at times, or one that simply doesn't feel as smooth as it could.
The key to this is to execute your marks with a confident, persistent pace - to accept that the second your pen touches the page, that any opportunity to avoid a mistake you might make has now passed, and that all is left to do is to commit to your stroke and push forwards. Trust in your arm, not your brain, and let your muscle memory do what it does best.
The ghosting method focuses on this quite a bit, as it allows us to split the process of mark making into distinct stages - we're able to fuss over planning and preparation first, taking our time and doing what we can to give ourselves the best chances, but ultimately once that's over, we execute with that confident, persistent motion that yields a smooth, consistent mark. Even if this mark is not entirely accurate, it is still going to be useful to us.
As this allows us to produce smooth lines, it also helps us to keep our ellipses evenly shaped. Smooth, straight lines and evenly shaped ellipses are the bedrock of solid construction.
Jumping ahead to your boxes, you've done a solid job with your plotted perspective. Your rough perspective does show this general stiff linework as mentioned above, though I can see that you may not have been applying the ghosting method too stringently here - so keep in mind that you need to be applying it to each and every mark you draw for these lessons.
I am pleased to see that you applied the double checking method to your boxes for this exercise, to help identify where your estimation of perspective tends to drift.
Your rotated boxes were a good start - you did a good job of keeping them well structured, maintaining even, narrow, consistent gaps between them so as to limit the amount of unnecessary guesswork. It is worth mentioning however that this exercise and the organic perspective boxes after it are intended to be very challenging for students at this stage. I don't assign them expecting students to be able to complete them without difficulty or mistakes - instead, it's more about exposing those students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered.
In your rotated boxes, I can see one fairly common problem. Aside from those beside the central box, there's actually not much in the way of rotation between your boxes - they all run roughly parallel to one another, sharing similar vanishing points as described here.
You made a solid attempt with the organic perspective boxes, and you've got a good start here. There is however plenty of room for improvement, as I would have expected - specifically in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge consistently towards their shared vanishing points. We will continue to work on that next.
I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next, both to help develop your grasp of 3D space, as well as to get more practice with the use of the ghosting method to execute smooth, consistent lines.
Uncomfortable in the post "Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes"
2019-01-26 04:02
Hours later, I realized I didn't answer your question about rotation. I do, but rarely. I know of a lot of people who've worked rotation comfortably into their workflow, but for me it always feels like it takes me a step out of my process. It's a little easier with touch controls, but it's still not something I'm fond of doing. That said, sometimes it is necessary.
I have found that the general range of angles at which I can draw lines has widened over time. In addition to this, other digital tricks have made rotation something I require fairly infrequently.
Keep in mind that we're primarily rotating our pages while drawing here because we're applying our time as effectively as we can. That range of angles will increase passively, and you certainly can practice it more actively, but there are more important things for us to contend with for now.