Castur__

1. Lines

Superimposed Lines:

• What I said here can be applied to your entire submission because every page has the same critical mistake: wobbly lines. Make sure to engage your shoulder and lock on your lower arm while drawing. Ensure to increase your speed when executing your mark as well. If you are drawing slowly, go at a faster speed. If you are already drawing fast, crank it up even higher. The speed will carry your arm through the motion and it doesn't have a chance to get shaky, hence less wobbly lines. Remember to rotate your page until you find the most comfortable angle to draw as well.

Ghosted Lines & Ghosted Planes:

• Same as before, the wobbliness of your lines is noticeable. Remember the three levels of mark-making: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/levels. You must nail the previous level in order to progress to the next, not the other way around. Your lines show accuracy (you connect two points together) but lack smoothness, which is the complete opposite of what you should prioritize: smoothness over accuracy. Think of it as a trade-off: (1) a line with smoothness but offshoot all over the place or (2) a line with accuracy but wobbly and shaky. The two types of line have both an upside and a downside, the question now is: which upside is much more favorable that we are willing to accept the downside? In this course, we choose upside (1).

• When drawing a line with ghosting method, there are three steps: 1. Planning (where to place your dots) 2. Preparation (do ghosting to familiar yourself with the motion) 3. Execution (draw the mark on the paper). There's a quote that correlates to what I'm about to say and you should keep this mentality in mind when applying the ghosting method: "Give Me Six Hours To Chop Down A Tree, And I Will Spend The First Four Sharpening The Axe." In the first two step, you must take as much time as you need to. Only in the final step when you actually put down a mark, that you must go at plunging speed as I mention previously. I figure I should put this paragraph here in case you read what I said in Superimposed Lines section and misunderstand that: "Ah hah, I must do everything as fast as I can" when in fact this applies when you execute a mark only.

2. Ellipses

Tables of Ellipses:

• Most ellipses come out pretty nice. They are somewhat wobbly but in an acceptable range. Some bigger ellipses are a bit warped but they are harder to draw than smaller ellipses, which in turn are much harder to draw than a straight line so it is not an issue for now. With enough practice, you will be able to draw a smooth line with confident and that practice will carry over ellipses as well.

Ellipses in Planes:

• You are trying too hard to get your ellipses reaching all four edges. This results in two effects: (1) wobbly & uneven strokes, as you strive for accuracy over smoothness and (2) deformed, egg-shaped looking ellipses. I talked about this in another critique as well but the point can still be applied here (see the 3rd image): https://imgur.com/a/6PmCm1M.

Funnels:

• You shouldn't draw the arcs freehand. They can be drawn using circular objects around your house, a dish or cookie tins for example, just like you draw the frame for tables of ellipses with rulers. Besides that, good job getting most ellipses align properly to the minor axis. Only some ellipses of the funnel in the bottom-right corner really caught my eyes. Solid job overall!

3. Boxes

• In this section, I mention height lines and depth lines a couple of times, if you are unsure what I'm referring to, check out this video around 1:57 to 2:53 minute mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhDWiPARouY. The papers of your box submission aren't rotated properly so I have to rotate them 90 degree clockwise. I reference some boxes using this orientation so you should do the same to follow along.

Plotted Perspective:

• Some height lines are slanted, for example, frame 1: the right-most bottom box, frame 2: the left-most box, frame 3: the right-most box. Some edges do not converge to the vanishing point as well, most noticeably are the edges that go towards the left VP of the frame 3 box I mentioned. Always make sure the height lines run perpendicular to the horizon line and other lines converge towards their corresponding VP.

Rough Perspective:

• I'm confused as to how you draw the colored lines for checking. The way to check is drawing colored lines along the depth lines of your boxes until they reach the horizon line. The left-most bottom box in page 2, first frame is good. Another good example is the 3rd frame of the same page, the left-most bottom box as well.

Rotated Boxes:

• Congratulation on finishing one of the most terrifying exercise! I will not dive in too much about this exercise as students aren't expected to nail this exercise the first time. I just want to point out only one thing: Some boxes aren't rotated properly. One rule of thumb is when you look directly at the front plane of a cube, it will be completely square. As you rotate said cube, the front plane will be slanted. In this exericse, you only look directly at the front plane of the cube in the center, other cubes rotate as they move away from it. The 8 boxes surrounding your center box have the front plane appear as a square, implying they do not rotate at all. Don't worry if it doesn't click with you now as this understanding will come with time and practice.

Organic Perspective:

• You will practice with perspective a lot in the 250 box challenge so I don't say much here. Keep in mind of what I said in Lines section to ensure smooth and straight lines. That's all.

If you have any questions about this critique, feel free to ask me. I'll answer them as best as I can.

Super Imposed Lines

• Looks fine! Lots of fraying at the end of the line, one thing that's helped me with this was to get the eye movement down in order to help focus my lines in one direction. Try a page of these now that you've finished the whole lesson and the ghosted practices, should be much better!

Ghosted Lines

• These look great. A bit of wobbling, but some more focus on the shoulder movement and practice over time will smooth it out. Try going a bit faster once you solidify your movement through ghosting. Everyone's comfortable/consistent line speed will be different.

Table of Ellipses

• Love these. No notes besides the basic keeping up practice and honing those ellipses in!

Ghosted Planes/Ellipses

• Same with these, most of the ellipses touching each edge relatively even, further practice will hone these in.

Funnels

• Looks great, minor axis is consistent.

Plotted/Rough Perspective

• Plotted perspective looks great.

• Rough perspective is fine! Convergences are generally pretty good, just make sure you're definitely focusing on each line converging at the same points.

• The back edges are on the rougher side but thats to be expect as they're effected by every small overall mistake, so they're tough to perfect. What helps me is focusing in on the other edges that are parallel to the corresponding back edge, as focusing on the point on the horizon line can get confusing. I think the 250 boxes exercise will make this a lot more consistent.

• Last note on the Rough Perspective, make sure you're taking your time with ghosting each edge. This'll become more apparent and natural with the 250 boxes, you'll get a lot of practice with that, but make sure you're confident with each stroke you do and full-sending it once you commit to the ghosted movement.

Rotated Boxes

• These are great. You're sidestepping the issue of focusing on the same point and not actually rotating the boxes, so nice one!

Organic Perspective

• These look good, a chunk of them share a similar perspective. Page 1 Section 3 shows this the most, might be purposeful but would be useful to keep an eye out so you get a wide range of rotation on these boxes. Keep an eye out for that Axis Tool on the 250 boxes challenge, it'll get you out of your comfort zone!

Overall looks good. Make sure to add some of these to your practice rotation. The 250 boxes challenge will fix a lot of these issues. Have fun!

1. Your ellipses seem pretty tight and consistent, especially in the funnel exercise, so good job on that.

2. Many of your lines seem striaght and confident, not overshooting or undershooting often, and with minimal self correcting (an impulse I struggle with). A few lines curve inward at the beggining or end of their placement in the Rouph Perspective. I don't know what causes this for you, but you could be overthinking when to stop and focus less on a clean stroke. A curve at the beginning for me usually happens when I place my pen down after ghosting, and my arm has to shift a little to allow the pen tip to actually hit the page. Again, this could likely be different for you. It's not extreme, and I wouldn't worry about it too much, more drawing any kind will help iron that out. I'm hard pressed to find any obviouse wobbly lines in your work, which is good!

3. For plotted perspective, I'm pretty sure you were supposed to do everything with a ruler. You probably shouldn't break the method of the lesson. There are reasons why the lessons are set up in the way they are, Drawabox is trying to get you to think of a certain aspect of drawing boxes before you move on to plotting them without a ruler. I don't think going over those boxes again is necessary, but keep that in mind when doing lessons from here on out.

4. By far the weakest out of your work was the Organic Perspective, which makes sense because that is a hard one. It doesn't seem like you planned out your perspective correctly for a chunk of them. It got stronger by the end, but there are still boxes that are foreshortened too much or in impossible ways. Make sure when trying to imagine or plan your next line, that you're not placing its vanishing point too close.

   I also failed at plenty of boxes on that exercise, but one method I found with that exersice that helped was taking one of those first three lines that you draw when makeing the box, and imagining that it points to an imaginary vanishing point. You can even use the edge of your paper, or a smudge on your desk as the vanishing point. I keep a rough Idea of where that was, and draw that lines sibling toward that same destination. And, I'd make sure that the VP I'm imagining is some distance from the box so I don't apply to much forshortening and have them look skewed.

   However I don't know what your thought process is when tackling the boxes, if you still don't have a good grasp then you can ask questions on the lesson 1 discord channel to get specific methods and advice on it.

   Any mistakes you've made aren't unique, and these are the exact problems everyone else has, including me.