Acro

Hello Greg,

I'm not sure if this is your first time attempting draw a box or not, but you have put together a fine body of work for Lesson 1. Hopefully I can still provide some helpful critique.

Starting with your ghosted and superimposed lines. Your linework shows a strong degree of confidence that comes from ghosting and drawing with your shoulder. Some of your longer lines have a slight arcing tendency near the end of the line, but this is a minor critique for the most part. Same goes for your superimposed lines, your shorter and medium length lines show excellent confidence with minimal fraying. You do have some wavering in your longer lines, but you are able to avoid fraying at both ends of the lines.

Moving on to the ellipses exercises you again show a fine degree of control and confidence in your ellipses. Your ellipses are smooth and drawn through the recommended 2-3 times. You have drawn a good amount of ellipses and are able to nail both the accuracy and confidence of your shapes without having the "pointy ends" which are common to most students.

Your funnels are also well constructed and confident. One thing to keep in mind is that your line should bisect the ellipses into two equal halves. However, I believe this is occuring more due to the lines not being perfectly center rather than a flaw in your ellipse construction as most of your ellipses are well aligned on their minor axis.

Regarding your rough perspective exercise your lines are slightly less confident than shown in your previous exercises. This may be due to focusing on accuracy of your lines for this exercise rather than strictly confidence. Just something to keep in mind when practicing this exercise in the future. You've only done it a couple times, but make sure not to redraw any incorrect lines, despite how badly the mind wants to fix it.

Great job on the rotated boxes! Probably the most challenging Lesson 1 exercise and you have managed to pull off the illusion well. There are some places where line confidence wavers slightly and you have some curvy lines, but overall excellent job.

Lastly your organic exercise is also well done. You have regained the line confidence shown in your early planes and ghosting exercises and have followed the instructions well. Your boxes show depth and you weren't afraid to experiment with overlapping boxes and box sizes.

Again well done, keep up the good work and maintain these exercises as warmups for future Draw a Box sessions. You should be proud of your work thus far and are definitely ready to move on to the 250 box challenge.

TA stands for teaching assistant. There are official draw a box teaching assistants that will critique submissions by people who support draw a box on patreon. They're a bit more trained to offer official critique. I'm just someone going through the program, but I've read quite a few Lesson 1 critiques by now to know what to look out for.

Hello Deutro,

Welcome to draw a box. I'm not an official TA but I'd be glad to offer some critique.

First of all, I'm glad you were able to find a fineliner. Proper line width helps greatly with seeing

the confidence of your line and produces an overall cleaner body of work. Fortunately you only had to

use the sharpie for a few exercises.

Despite being done with sharpie your ghosted lines and planes show good confidence. You seem to be ghosting properly and drawing with your shoulder. There is some wobble here and there, but this is something you will continue to work on and you seem to understand the purpose of the lesson.

Your ellipses show some signs of wavering moreso than your lines do. This is fairly common, but make sure when working on ellipses in the future that you are ghosting as many times as you need to and drawing them confidently. It can be easy to lose that confidence when trying to make your ellipses properly hit the edges of the table or funnels, but confidence (smoothness of the shape) should be prioritzed over accuracy at this stage. You are properly drawing through your ellipses 2-3 times, so that's good. Your funnels show greater confidence than your table of ellipses so this is a good sign of progression.

Your rough perspective exercise looks good for the most part. Make sure you're not drawing the lines more than once, even if they're off or incorrect. This will be an important note to keep in mind for the box challenge. Oftentimes an attempt to fix a mistake will only draw more attention to it.

Organic perspective looks good. You show continuous improvement in your line confidence and you have followed the instructions of the exercise while capturing the allusion of depth within the page. Don't be afraid in the future to experiment more with overlapping the boxes.

Overall I think you did a solid job at executing Lesson 1. I didn't see any egregious misteps in understanding the exercise or following the instructions. Make sure you practice 2-3 of these exercises for a total of 15 minutes when warming up for future draw a box sessions. That will help you keep your skills sharp while learning new things and practicing boxes. I'm going to mark this lesson complete and you should be good to go for moving on to the 250 Box Challenge.