Allipses

Thank you for the advice, cast shadows were something I avoided post the organic intersections exercise entirely either out of not considering them or just not having such a pen as you mentioned

This lesson was stretched across almost two years with massive hiatuses inbetween so most of it is either me having to get myself reoriented with the skills the lesson teaches at points I return (all my drawings have dates labeled to check) or a slow gradual pointing myself in the right direction with each constructional drawing

those sketchbook drawings are massively old but I do draw on my own time and always do warmups before starting my lesson-work; I've even started taking longer time on said warm ups to help me lock into the main course better.

Hello, I'll be doing your Lesson 3 critiques, congrats on making it through this far, you've already taken the first step in the second half of this course!

Organic Arrows

You're following the instructions pretty well, your arrows fly into space and compress/decompress accordingly! But I do notice that when it comes to drawing your curves confidently, you start to get wobbly in some places. Remember to ghost your lines until you're fully confident in what you're putting down, you have all the time in the world to work on your marks.

Some things you can try to help is slowing your ghosting to a crawl to help your arm practice the mark easier on both straight lines and curves, or try purposefully ghosting your lines far off course a few times and stop prematurely before the dot so that you can figure out where your arm should not be going just as much as it should (these can help immensely especially when ghosting tiny lines). Point being, just make sure you're always absolutely confident in the mark you're making before you execute.

Leaves

Similarly to the Organic Arrows you're understanding how to make them flow within the confines of a 3D space, but when it comes to construction you seem to be skipping steps it looks like. Remember to fully construct your forms which includes both sides of the leaves you draw (just because something is hidden by something else in front of it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist!)

Branches

Your segments are starting to connect pretty well and flow enough to follow the core flow-line, but you still have lines trailing off between ellipses. I already lectured you on it, but just remember to ghost till you both are confident and understand the line you're trying to make. This is a natural mistake you're meant to make, so don't feel too hard about it.

Plant Constructions

Make sure you're constructing your petals with flow lines just as you do with the leaves, they're both built on the same fundamental concept after all. Your texturing and detail is coming out smoothly, you understand how to transition from dense to sparse pretty well.

Hi I'll be critiquing your 250 boxes today

First thing is I noticed popping up is the way you went about making your boxes. You tended to make a lot of them parallel or diverging when it came to vanishing points and convergences. When drawing boxes in 3 point perspective, remember that all sets of lines must be converging together, they're all traveling to a vanishing point in 3 perspectives.

Your extensions can sometimes go in the wrong direction such as box 21 (which is also a box with convergence problems). Remember, when extending our lines for correction we want them to go Away from us in order to find how the box converges in space.

Your hatching is something I notice aswell in your boxes, even all the way to the end. They come off rushed compared to the actual boxes and their own marks. When hatching, remember to take your time making your marks. You have the ghosting method for a reason, to plan and execute your marks with confidence, this goes for details such as hatching the outer side of a box.

Your inner corners to your boxes could use some work, but that's not entirely on your fault. It's just something that everyone trips up with when tackling boxes. The very best thing to do about it is to worry about it last when drawing your boxes, it is a symptom of how you're drawing the rest of the box and can distract you from the more important marks you'd be making.

Besides those three, you did a decent enough job throughout the challenge; your main marks for your boxes comprising the outline of the box are all confident which is already a good step forward, and your box orientations are pretty varied. Your lineweight could be slightly more prominent, but that's a minor thing in the grand scheme of the challenge.

Hello, I'm here to teach you on what you can improve and critique your work.

Starting off with our line exercises, you are not planning enough to make your marks cleanly and confidently as you should, and thus they're coming out wobbly. When Ghosting, you're allowed to Take as much time as you personally need until you're comfortable with the line you're making through both muscle memory and your shoulder. You can ghost the mark at whatever speed is most comfortable to you, all that matters is that you're able to put your pen to paper and push through knowing you're able to tackle the mark infront of you. Accuracy is always secondary to making your line clean, so don't worry about it as your priority when executing marks.

When it comes to the ellipses, make sure that you're drawing them tightly within the boundries they're in such as in the table of ellipses exercise, avoid empty negative spaces in your boxes. Secondly, you should make sure more to draw through your ellipses, drawing them 2 or 3 times rather than the single time when you put your pen to paper.

When it comes to your Rotated boxes, you did a good job lining them up but when it comes to actual perspective you seem to be placing your boxes vertically and horizontally past the first rotation on the same vanishing point instead of actually rotating them. Remember that when a box rotates the convergence either shrinks or grows depending on how far from the vanishing point it is. This diagram should give you a better understanding on the topic to keep in the pocket.

Oh and include your Table of ellipses too, I didn't notice you forgot that homework too and that's my mistake.

I'll be doing your critique today

You should be drawing your lines with more confidence, both your lines and ellipses are all wobbly. Remember when ghosting and preparing to make your mark you're allowed to take all the time you need and go at the speed that best lets you get comfortable with the stroke you're making. That way when it comes to actually putting your pen to paper you have the confidence to push forward and understanding of the mark you're making.

You have a pretty good understanding of perspective looking at the organic perspective and rough perspective exercises, but there's always room for improvement. Don't worry about it too much right now though, you'll improve at it with the coming challenges given to you to overcome. Just always review remember the principles of perspective to keep in your back pocket. Nothing wrong with reviewing theory when you need a refresh.

You also completely forgot to do your table of ellipses OR rotated boxes, which is one of the pieces of homework assigned to you. Remember to include and complete ALL of the work you're asked before submitting for critique. None of this course is a race, it's a personal marathon, all of it will still be here when you finish and you won't be done at all once you submit your work anyways. taking a very long time is much more preferred than rushing yourself and doing worse work than you're capable of.

Hello, I'll be doing your Lesson 2 critiques

A reminder first, a big thing I'm noticing is that your line confidence still needs work. Remember that you should always be ghosting every mark you make with your shoulder, and that during ghosting you can take all the time you can until your arm is used to the motion you're preparing to make. You don't have to ghost at any fast speed whatsoever, you can slow down while you plan your line so you get your shoulder used to the motions you have to make; All that matters is that you execute your final stroke with the most confidence you can muster.

Thinking in 3d

looking at your arrows, some of them are flatter than what is ideal, such as in "Arrow 1". Remember that you're allowed (and encouraged) to let your curves and lines overlap; your arrow isn't on a 2D page anymore, it's in a window to a 3D world. Always keep in mind that you're telling a lie so well that even you get fooled when you draw in 3D space. On that note, another more consistent mistake is that you're not compressing the arrows as they Should be. As you go back further, everything in space at a distance shrinks, and everything closer gets gradually bigger. This applies to both distances between curves and the distance between the bands of your arrow in front and behind one another. As is they're either the same size or changing size along the arrow randomly. You should also be paying attention to where your placing your hatching lines. As like with the form intersections, placing hatching tells you exactly how your arrow is orientated when it twists in 3D space, defining which part of the arrow is infront of which.

You're doing a good job maintaining that formula of 2 balls connected by a tube already, and your ellipses are changing degrees in perspective very well. Even then, you still have trouble with placing your sausage ends and keeping your contour curves stuck very tightly to the edges of your sausage. Those curves represent the surface of a solid form, so if they're arbitrarily floating without much adherence to your solid form, you're already selling your 3D world VERY poorly which can hinder your construction going forward. Make sure you understand exactly where you want your marks to be through ghosting and planning before you execute your marks.

Textures

This is a more minor thing, but when uploading your work from here on out and it involves drawing from a reference, please make sure to provide the references you used in your submission albums for anyone else's reference when it comes to analysis and critique, it just makes the job easier. But regardless, looking at both your texture analysis AND dissections it's clear you still interpret and draw them less as cast shadows but still the forms that make up the cast shadows, as evidenced by particularly the octopus suction cup texture on your dissection 1 as an example. Make sure you understand that you're not drawing the forms you see, but rather the shadows those forms cast. You have a good grasp on sticking your textures around your sausage forms, but remember to think about the density of your texture. Sometimes you do good at this and make your texture more implicit as it reaches more light, but other times you make it consistent around the whole curve of the organic form with no change in dense to sparse. We want to be able to control our detail density so that our drawing is clear, readable, and understandable to our audience and ourselves.

While on the topic of implicit and explicit, the first two of your texture analysis exercise in the last box did a pretty good job making the transition from the black bar to the texture seamless, but the final one is completely obvious. Make sure you create a gradient from dark to light, gradually flushing out shadow with light from left to right and flushing out light with shadow in the other direction.

Construction

All I have to really point out here is sometimes in the form intersections your foreshortening became quite much farther than was asked. We don't want extreme perspective in this exercise, our aim is that we're able to make all our forms belong in the same 3D space they're adhering to. Otherwise you did pretty well here, your line confidence is much better, and your organic intersections mostly support one another without floating in the air too much minus some exceptions.

I'll be critiquing your 250 box challenge

The biggest thing you're struggling with is you are making divergences on ATLEAST one axis of your boxes. When making boxes, you want to always make sure they're going TOWARDS the vanashing point, not the oppoisite direction away. You can refer to This image, and This image if you need help understanding how to think about your convergences in space.

Secondly you need to come up with more Foreshortening in your boxes. Now what I mean by this is that MOST of your boxes are basically shallow. You should be trying to play with the perspective more, that goes for your initial Y orientation. You're allowed (and quite frankly encouraged) to make one branch shorter than the other, two of them longer than one, and so on. Here is a chart of all the different possible orientations of boxes. Don't directly copy them, but use them as inspiration to see how you can vary up your orientations. Alternatively this website allows you to randomly generate a Y orientation. Either way, the main thing you should be doing is vary up your orientation.

Other than those you're on a very good track with your boxes. You made marks with confidence, you followed the instructions, MOST of your lines converge despite the problem areas, and you pushed through all the way to the end of the challenge. Most people drop off here, so congrats on making it this far.

Hi, I'll be taking a look at your Lesson 1 submission, so if you don't mind my input:

You're maintaining good confidence already with your marks and strokes, but you're not fully there. I notice in your ellipses in planes that you tend to still wobble slightly and arc your strokes, same for when you're drawing ellipses occasionally. When it comes to drawing strokes, remember that you can take all the time you can while ghosting until you get your arm comfortable with the motion. You don't even have to ghost the motions at a high speed, you can go slow during the preparation stage, only make sure your actual executed line on paper is done with the most confidence you can muster which the ghosting exercise helps you with.

I also notice that in the rotated boxes exercise you did do a good job with perspective... up until the outer ring of boxes. You'll get more practice with the next set of lessons and especially the 250 box challenge, but remember that Convergences become rapid and gradual as a box rotates, see here. This guide can also help you get the idea on what makes the Rotated boxes tick so you can get through it next time.

Hello! It's been awhile since our last meeting all the way back and Janurary. A lot of stuff happened in between then and now leading to me without access to my markers, previous pages and paper, but now I'm back to work, I apologize for the 9 months of silence after you assigned my work. Here is the revisions I went and did that you asked for, I hope I managed to take your words to at least any degree and improve in the time I was gone, thank you for taking the time to critique me once more!