Colord44

Superimposed lines - no wobbling, fraying only on one side, and it looks like your lines got better as you went along. You also included optional curved lines, which is a plus. Well done.

Ghosted lines - not entirely accurate, you're meant to set your pen on one of the dots, start from there and then connect it to another. You also tend to overshoot by quite a bit. Nonetheless, your lines are straight and there is no wavering.

Ghosted planes - these are good, although you still tend to go past the edges and corners with intersecting lines.

Tables of ellipses - drawn twice, no empty spaces, smooth linework. Well done.

Ellipses in planes - you aimed to reach all the edges with your ellipses, and they're evenly shaped. Although you didn't have to create two full new pages of ghosted planes, it's perfectly fine to draw them over your previously finished ghosted planes.

Funnels - ellipses are drawn accurately, but you were supposed to use a ruler for minor and major axis, and something round (like a plate) to create the funnel shape. And your number of ellipses is at times off - they're supposed to have an equal number on both sides. So if you've drawn 4 ellipses on one side of minor axis (the short line going through the funnel), the other side would also need 4 ellipses. Rather than 3 on one side and 4 on the other as in your case.

Plotted perspective - you didn't use a ruler. This exercise has to be done with a ruler, from boxes themselves to extensions connecting edges to vanishing points. Looks like you've used it only for the horizon line. But you have used two vanishing points and the rest of the instructions checks out.

Rough perspective - you've used one vanishing point at the center, front and back faces rectangular for the most part, line extensions applied, and you've used the ghosting method.

Rotated boxes - while you've used a ruler to create the axis, you didn't use it to create the squares at their ends. Additionally, while the whole shape is pretty accurate and contains all the boxes necessary for this exercise, your planes at the back of each box are a bit problematic, lacking the same accuracy and clarity as their top planes.

Organic perspective - you've used the ghosting method, although your foreshortening could be a bit more dramatic.

In conclusion:

That concludes the critique. Please pay closer attention to instructions in the future and be sure they're applied correctly. If you skip past some of them you won't get the most out of the course, even as you complete homework and challenges.

Congratulations on finishing lesson 1. Be sure to read the next steps below.

Here's your critique! If you have any doubts please tell me, grats and good luck on lesson 5!

Hi Pintarmaingame! First off, congratulations on completing this challenge. This challenge is a test of patience and perseverance so you should be proud of yourself for seeing this through until the end. Overall you did a great job. Mark-making is smooth & confident. Convergence is nice and your extending lines are in the correct direction. Here are some pointers that you can work on in future warm-ups:

• Every angle of the initial Y must be greater than 90 degrees. In box 7 for example, one angle is exactly 90 degrees.

• Draw bigger. You go for less than the recommended number of boxes per page (5-6 boxes) and you choose to draw small boxes regardless. This leaves you with a lot of empty space that should have been used for the exercise. I think there are two downsides to drawing smaller boxes: (1) you miss out on a chance to practice drawing longer lines; (2) measuring converging rate becomes less challenging so practice isn't that effective (see this image: https://i.imgur.com/DGV8FgK.png).

• You should start adding line weight and hatching lines. Line weight is a great tool to reinforce a form and make the silhouette appear stronger and more solid (https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/1/lineweight). It's also a great tool to describe overlapping between two objects, which is a tool you will be using a lot in lesson 3 and forward. Hatching is a great practice for ghosting because you have to keep the lines parallel to each other and the distance between them equal, which is more challenging than you may think.

• Add more variety. You should experiment with more kinds of boxes because each variation will pose different difficulties and by trying to solve those different problems you'll get the most out of the challenge. It also makes the monotonous task more exciting to do. Variety in the initial Y (the angle between each leg of the initial Y, the length of each leg, etc.); variety in shapes (pizza boxes, toothpaste boxes, etc.); variety in foreshortening (dramatic vs shallow foreshortening. Most of your boxes already has dramatic foreshortening so you should focus more on shallow foreshortening boxes where you can't even see the vanishing points).

• Back corners. Your back corners look good overall but there's two angles you should be on look out for: (1) converging too sharply with a leg of the initial Y (box 9 - rightwards extending lines), (2) diverging with a leg of the initial Y (box 13 - upwards extending lines). Angle (2) usually creates a mistake that is often referred as "converging in pairs" (see this image for example: https://imgur.com/KSHwTwo). You can see this mistake manifests in box 65 - downwards extending lines.

• Advanced exercises (https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/2). They are entirely optional but I think you would be interested in checking out if you haven't yet. A student who completed this course recommended me to hold off the second exercise (subdividing boxes) until Lesson 6 so you should incorporate the first exercise in your warm-up from time to time.

Hey @Abeanberry,

Thought I would drop in with a quick critique.

ARROWS

I liked how smooth and consistent your line work was. You really nailed the two parallel lines for each arrow component of the drawings so well done. Take notice of how your arrows are moving in perspective. A few got smaller as they come towards us which breaks the illusion. Several of the arrows are quite flat as well. You've made some very elongated by increasing the gap between S swoops. Some of the straighter arrows without many bends look really sharp (page 1 right middle).

CONTOUR SAUSAGES

Looking pretty good. A few times you drew very straight contour lines which gives the impression of flatness. ALso noticed some of the ellipses were not quite touching the edge which is an important piece to nail for a successful effect. Overall the ellipses look very tight, smooth and consistent.

TEXTURE ANALYSIS

No hatching! The HW guidelines say to avoid hatching for the sake of shading. In your crumpled paper texture you used lines to shade the dark areas. Every mark you make should be denoting something on the form. The effect looks alright but keep in mind the lesson guidlines. The bricks and the basketweave are very nice.

TEXTURED SHAPE

I can see how much attention and time you put into covering all the surfaces of the object. They're very nicely done. One thing to consider is the application of the gradient technique on your forms. This both saves time and also gives the viewer the opportunity to fill in their own details. Remember you don't need to draw every texture on the form. You can simply elude to them. Also, same with the texture analysis, try to avoid hatching and scribbling for the texture. Focus on the unique shadow shapes you see and do more of a two value contrast study. Later you can add in midtones with marker. Alternatively, used a toned piece of paper for the midtones and pick out highlights with a white gel pen or Posca paint pen.

Please take the critique of the shape textures for what they are. Overall the work is beautiful and you give the impression of the subject matter quite well. Really liked the pine cone!

SHAPE INTERSECTIONS

These look neat and tidy. The only things I noticed of issue were the cone points and the ellipse where they intersect a form. These two didn't match up well so I would recommend trying to place the ellipse within the two converging lines of the cone to achieve the effect. Also, some of your boxes had the convergence of the liens off kilter so try and make them all aim towards their VPs.

ORGANIC INTERSECTIONS

I think you went too far on trying to have the sausages concave or have irregular surfaces. These kinda look like they are made of jelly with how much the surface contours. Think about when you lay a sausage on top of another sausage. It will bend, but it has a solid interior structure so there isn't this oozing effect that most of your have.

That's all for now. Good work and keep going :)

Congrats on finishing the cylinder challenge! I'll do my best to give you advice so that you can improve.

Starting with your cylinders around arbitrary minor axes, you've done a great job. Not only are you consistently executing straight lines that are smooth and consistent, and ellipses that are evenly shaped (suggesting solid use of the ghosting method), you're also checking your alignments fastidiously, identifying even small deviations - the sort of thing that can cause a student to plateau as they get into the "close enough" territory, if missed.

One thing to note however, some of your cylinders ended up parallel (99, 77, 33) which isn't a huge problem as it's only present in a handful of them but it's still best to explain why that isn't possible. The thing is, we do not actually control where the vanishing points should be. Rather, we control how our edges in 3D space are oriented, and it is that which controls the location of the vanishing points. Specifically, a vanishing point would only go to infinity if the edges it governs run perpendicular to the angle at which the viewer looks out into the world - basically, where those edges do not slant towards or away from them through the depth of the scene. Since we're rotating our cylinders randomly throughout this challenge, the chances that they'd align so perfectly is small enough to be avoided altogether - so in the future, if you aren't fully intentionally aligning a set of edges that specifically, be sure to include some visible convergence, even if it's only very slight.

Moving on to your cylinders in boxes, unfortunately there is a major error in the way you've applied the error checking method. If you take a look at this https://drawabox.com/lesson/250cylinders/1/stage2check you will see that there are 6/7 lines that extend from each side of the box. If some of the line extensions are neglected, it undermines the purpose of the entire error analysis, and thus the exercise as a whole. This exercise is really all about helping develop students' understanding of how to construct boxes which feature two opposite faces which are proportionally square, regardless of how the form is oriented in space. We do this not by memorizing every possible configuration, but rather by continuing to develop your subconscious understanding of space through repetition, and through analysis (by way of the line extensions).

Where the box challenge's line extensions helped to develop a stronger sense of how to achieve more consistent convergences in our lines, here we add three more lines for each ellipse: the minor axis, and the two contact point lines. In checking how far off these are from converging towards the box's own vanishing points, we can see how far off we were from having the ellipse represent a circle in 3D space, and in turn how far off we were from having the plane that encloses it from representing a square.

If however you neglect, one, two, or half of the lines that we're extending, then you leave places for those errors to hide and go unnoticed. Thus, the growth and improvement we seek to gain in the assigned work, specifically in honing our estimation of those proportions, is limited at best.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason - and that may be something for you to reflect upon and identify - you did not follow the instructions here as closely and as carefully as you should have. I would guess that given the repetitive nature of the challenge, you may not have gone back to review the instructions, to make sure you were applying everything correctly, and may have gone into auto-pilot as a result of the monotony. Even I've done it while I was doing the challenge.

In addition to this, there are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page (apart from the last 2 pages). It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.

Finally as with the cylinders around a random axis, you have some boxes that have sides that are either isometric (not converging) or diverging (207, 225, 247) similarly to the cylinders they aren't that common but always remember that lines parallel lines are always converging towards a vanishing point

Therefore, I'll be assigning a revision of 50 cylinders in boxes. With these 50 make sure you properly check the ellipses inside the box in addition to the minor axis + sides of the cylinder which you've done. If you have any questions or need clarification on anything don't hesitate to ask!

Hey there! I'll be reviewing your Lesson 2 submission.

Organic Arrows: These arrows look pretty confident. There are a few things you can continue to work on. Keep track of where you place your hatching. On many of your arrows, they are very inconsistent, sometimes falling in areas where hatching isn't necessary. One thing to keep in mind is that hatching is supposed the represent the shadow of the part of the arrow crossing over itself. If one part has another part overlapping it, the part being overlapped needs the hatching. I would recommend practicing this as a warm up.

Organic Forms with Contours: You seem to understand how ellipses and contour lines should be drawn, but not how they conform inside the sausage. In several instances, the ellipses are drawn with similar degrees, which wouldn't accurate represent what it would look like to cut through one of these sausages. The contour lines are a little better, but they still run into the same problem of having similar degrees. One thing I noticed is that your sausages are either elongates or sharply curved. In Uncomfortable's lesson, he wanted us to draw sausages that were equal length throughout so we could better understand how to draw the ellipses. Click this to see what I'm talking about, as well as what is not recommended. I would recommend redoing one sheet of organic forms with contours, but mostly focusing on redoing the ellipses section. I think the contour lines can be practiced with during warm ups.

Texture Analysis: Well done on this section. You managed to capture the shadows well implicitly. The only thing I'll add is to make sure that the dark side blends in smoothly. You managed to do this with the paper texture and the bark texture, but the cheese texture could be a little smoother in the transition.

Dissections: These were excellently done. You not only continued to convey textures implicitly, but you allowed them to pop off the sausage to make them feel more 3D. I have nothing more to add.

Form Intersections: You did well in drawing the shapes confidently, as well as with your intersections. There were a few places where you struggled, but overall, you grasped how the forms interact with each other. One thing I'll add that only popped up once in your drawings: make sure to only hatch the bottom part of the cone and not the rest of its surface.

Organic Intersections: Once again, good forms on all of these. The contours look well-placed and sell the idea that they are 3D. The sausages also seem to conform well to each other. None look stiff or out-of-place. (There was that one sausage on the second page, but it's alright.) Plus, the shadows were placed well. You kept in mind what surface they were falling on and made sure to convey that.

Overall, nicely done. I would like for you to redo the organic forms with contour ellipses for one more page before I approve you to move on.

Hello allipses!

Starting with the organic forms you're doing a pretty good job drawing confident lines and drawing the forms consistently, the only issue I can see is that sometimes you draw some of the ends of the sausages a bit bigger than the other ends, the width of the sausage needs to be consistent, so keep an eye on that.

Now into the insects, you're overall doing a great job on making them look solid and believable! The main thingy I've found you're having trouble with is the leg forms, which you are already making a pretty good job on them, but sometimes they are a bit different, like on this one on the grasshopper, so keep an eye on that on lesson 5.

Second thing is that you aren't drawing the intersections between forms which is pretty important, so don't forget you do it on future drawings. Here are some examples on the beetle

Last thing I wanted to comment on is that sometimes there are some additional forms you aren't drawing, which is fine since the important part are the basic forms, but it's good to practice them as well. Some examples too on the beetle

Other than that you're doing a pretty good job, don't forget to ask any questions you may have, keep up the good work and good luck on lesson 5!

Bruh I wrote an entire critique but my brother deleted my tab so now i have to do this again -

Good job on finishing Lesson one! Overall, you did a pretty good job so I think your ready to move on to the 250 box challenge but now let's start the critique (again ;-;) so you can see where exactly you messed up.

Lines:

super imposed lines:

I see some fraying on both sides. Don't rush, and know where exactly your pen should be starting from. I like how the lengths of you lines varied, when you do this exarcise again, practice drawing longer lines because I noticed that you struggle a lot with that. Also, why didn't you draw any curvy lines? It's not mandatory but it would have benefited you in the long run, so make sure to draw some curvy lines in your warm up. The good news is that I saw your lines were much more precise on the second page than the first page, which means improvement!

ghosted lines:

There was still a lot of space that you could have used up, so next time you do this exercise, try to use up as much space as possible. I also noticed that the lines that were accurate were wobbly. Remember, focus on getting a smooth and confident stroke and sooner or later your accuracy will build up over time. Also draw with your shoulders and use the ghosting method, if you haven't already.

ghosted planes:

This exercise is similar to the ghosted lines exercise so I'll just be repeating a lot of things I've already said haha. You used up a decent amount of space this time and drew a variety of planes so good job. Your lines were bit wobbly, just remember to prioritize confident and smooth lines over accuracy.

Ellipses:

tables of ellipses:

You did a very good job on this one. You kept the ellipses close together and made an effort to go past or under that boundaries. There's a little bit of overshooting but what's more surprising is that I only saw 1 instance where you undershot!

That's impressive, well done.

ellipses in ghosted planes:

Your ellipses were a bit wobbly at first but over time it became much more smoother. You tried not to go past the boundaries so good job.

funnels:

I'm speechless. There's nothing I can say except, this is amazing. Well done.

bonus:

I think ellipses are your strong forte.

Boxes:

plotted perspective:

You did a good job on this exercise, but i noticed that some of your lines were drawn repeatedly. Confident strokes aren't drawing as fast as you can, but being fully prepared to draw a line knowing you can't make any changes, so if you ever did make a mistake don't draw another line, just leave it as it is and use it as a reminder not to repeat the same mistake.

rough perspective:

Your lines were a bit wobbly, just relax and be confident in your strokes, you can use the ghosting method as many times as you can until you feel confident that you can draw the line.

rotated boxes:

You did a good job here, however, the 3 rows in the middle had a smaller convergence compared to the rows ate the top and bottom, which is why it looked a bit square-ish. Still, this exercise was above your current level yet you did it well, good job.

organic perspective:

You did welll in this exercise as well but your boxes had some inconsistencies in their sizes. The purpose of this exercise is to trick the viewer into think that the boxes are the same size but some are just far away while the others are closer, and we do this by drawing the boxes small and gradually increasing its size. The small boxes are the ones that will be far away while the big boxes are the ones closer to you. Some of your boxes had a bit of inconsistencies in its size which broke the illusion, for example, some of your boxes were drawn the same size with no increase or decrease, or, your boxes would go from small to big then back to small again, and finally, there wasn't any exaggeration of size in your boxes. The boxes far away are only a tiny bit smaller than the boxes closer, when in fact there should be a huge difference. So next time you do this exercise in your warm ups, keep everything I've said in mind.

And we're done. I should've have finished this earlier but life's unfair like that lol. You did a good job so I think your ready for the 250 box challenge :>

Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 4 homework.

Organic Forms

-Starting with the organic forms I think that you got confused and did one page of contour ellipses when the homework asked for two pages of contour curves. When it comes to the shape of your sausages they are moving in the right direction, as most of them are equally sized on both ends and you have done your best to avoid any pinching or scratching through their length. Of course there is still room for improvement so keep practicing, when it comes to the contour ellipses I can see that you are aware of how they change degree as they move through space, but I can see that you have a much harder time with the contour curves, there are some sausages where they look consistent as they move through space, but I can see that they are moving in the right direction in many ways.

Just keep in mind that contour curves are a useful tool to describe how a form sits in 3D space but they can easily work against us by fattening our drawing, the best strategy is to use the ghosting method to think about each individual mark’s purpose purpose and how you are going to achieve it best, this way you will avoid drawing any mark that do not add any useful information to the drawing

Insects

-Moving to the insects you are moving in the right direction too, you are using the constructional approach well to break everything into smaller and simpler steps rather than trying to capture many things at a time.

-One of the things that you are doing well is the leg construction, you are laying a chain of sausages that captures well the fluidity of these limbs, but you are not pushing it as far as you could, in many cases you are not defining the intersection between the sausages which may seem like a small detail but it is super important to sell the illusion that they are actually 3D forms.

But the most important thing to keep in mind is that the sausage method is not about capturing the shape of the sausages precisely as they are, instead it is about laying down a basic structure that captures both the flow and solidity of the limbs in equal measure. Once that structure is in place we can start to build on top of it by adding more masses to better capture the actual shape of the leg. You can see an example of this process in this demo which shows how to construct the leg of an ant, https://imgur.com/7b9rc9e .

-This process of adding masses is worth an explanation of its own, basically whenever we want to add anything or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure - forms with their own fully self-enclosed silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here https://imgur.com/IINKdQA .

This will help us to always work with full forms rather than flat shapes or simple marks. So for example, when you tried to capture the segmentation of the abdomen on your earwig you employed some simple contours, which don’t really help to convey the solidity of these forms.

There are some really good examples of this approach on the informal demos page, like the shrimp demo and the lobster demo, so I highly encourage you to draw along them, as you will use this same exact technique on the next lesson.

-And lastly I want to call out your use of lineweight, there are some cases when you apply it on the silhouette of entire forms and there are other when it is pretty thick, remember to keep it reserved to clarify how forms overlap, avoid applying it on particularly long marks and keep it subtle, if you end up making it too thick you will take the solidity of your forms away and turn them into mere graphic shapes. Here’s an example with some overlapping leaves https://imgur.com/WILCymm .

Okayy that should be about everything I wanted to address, you can keep working on these issues on lesson 5, I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Jumping right in with your organic intersections, nice work - you're doing a great job of laying out these forms such that they maintain a consistent impression of gravity and stability. Your cast shadows are also consistent, and demonstrate a good grasp of how the forms relate to one another in space.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, your work here is definitely showing a good bit of improvement over the set, and as you progress through it, I can see a definite improvement in your observation of your references, and your ability to translate that into your construction to achieve more solid results. That said, I do have a few points of advice to offer to help you continue to make the most out of these constructional drawing exercises.

Firstly, let's talk about how you're designing the silhouettes of your additional masses. at the moment I can see that you are clearly thinking about how you're shaping those silhouettes, but the way in which you engage with it can definitely be improved.

One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette.

Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram.

The big point to focus on here is that there are some places where sharp corners and inward curves are not just allowed - where they're the only correct choice. In your work you do tend to fall back on using rounded, outward curves a lot, which can result in a rather blobby appearance that does not quite establish clear relationship with the existing structure in 3D space. You do tend to add contour lines to try and counteract this, but unfortunately the only contour lines that establish a relationship between forms in space are the ones that define the intersections between them - although in this case, we have forms wrapping around one another, no intersection involved, so we can't use those either. The ones you're using only help to make the forms feel 3D independently, and so they're not of much use to us here, though they can give you the impression that you are doing something to fix the issue (thus discouraging you from spending more time where it is best used, in the initial design of those silhouettes).

Here's what I explained previously about the use of inward curves and corners where they're merited, in action on one of your horses. Note also how I did extend some masses further down along the side to take an opportunity to press them against the shoulder mass. Any opportunity like this is one you should take - the more we can press our masses together, the more reason we have for those kinds of inward curves and sharp corners, and the more everything will generally feel more grounded and solid.

This of course applies to your leg constructions as well - although in addition to that, I noticed that you generally focused the use of those masses there on areas where you'd get a notable impact on the leg's silhouette. Be sure to also consider the "inbetween" forms that don't impact the silhouette - these will fill the gaps between the forms, and again, help to make everything feel more grounded as shown here on another student's work.

On the topic of leg construction, I noticed that you weren't adhering to the specific elements of the sausage method all that closely - namely, I'm seeing you using ellipses for the segments much of the time, and you also neglect to define the joint between the sausages. I do believe I drew your attention to the specific requirements of the sausage method (as shown here on this diagram) in my critique of your Lesson 4 work - be sure to review the feedback I provide periodically so you don't forget important points going forward - having me call out the same issue across multiple lessons is definitely something you want to avoid.

The last thing I wanted to discuss is head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. Given how the course has developed, and how I'm finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems. So not all the approaches shown are equal, but they do have their uses. As it stands, as explained at the top of the tiger demo page (here), the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning, is what you'll find here on the informal demos page.

There are a few key points to this approach:

• The specific shape of the eyesockets - the specific pentagonal shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.

• This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together - no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.

• We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball - working in individual strokes like this (rather than, say, drawing the eyesocket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but with a bit of finagling it can still apply pretty well. To demonstrate this for another student, I found the most banana-headed rhinoceros I could, and threw together this demo.

Anyway, while there are definitely plenty of things for you to work on, I feel that these are all points you can continue to address on your own, and as a whole I'm pleased with your progress. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.