DIO

Grand Conqueror

The Indomitable (Summer 2025)

Joined 5 years ago

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dio's Sketchbook

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    10:26 AM, Friday March 21st 2025

    Hello Chieftang,

    I saw boxbot's post in #lesson-6 and wanted to give you a prompt response. You've certainly gotten plenty of feedback over on discord as well as given plenty of valuable feedback yourself. Therefore, there's no doubt in my mind that you've expertly understood what this lesson is getting at (spoilers). So instead of a lengthy breakdown of each specific object, we'll be focusing on what you've done well for this lesson and how you can apply these concepts to your drawings going forward. Accordingly, I'll try to keep this brief! (EDIT: I was not, in fact, brief)

    Starting with your form intersections, there's nothing about your decisions that strike me here as wrong, or at least wrong enough to warrant a draw-over. This is something you can expect to continuously improve on as you keep doing this exercise for your warmups. The feedback you've given others on this exercise is similarly great, so it's safe to say you understand this concept. One note on the readability of the image is lineweight. You've used very thick lines for the intersections, but did you know you can also use these for form edges that overlap? Like the arrows in lesson2, if an edge goes over another edge, you can draw over that edge once of twice to give it more weight and signify that it is in front of the other edge. There are some cases, usually for the circles or cylinders, where you've gone over those forms a few more times than the boxes covering them. Because of this, the thicker edge of the circle or cylinder (specifically the ellipse) look like it should be in front of the thinner edge of the box.

    This technique is really handy for those especially cluttered bits of your form intersections where you have a lot of forms overlapping. I find this technique helpful for understanding where everything sits in relation to one another, but it's not a strict requirement. In fact, you've done a good job of giving your constructed objects a stronger outline over the background detail which really reinforces its solidity. Applying this technique to form intersections can aid in that solidity too. Overall this could also be interpreted as an aesthetic consideration as the purpose of this exercise is primarily to decide where the forms intersect. Adding lineweight outside of that is part, yes, but not where the meat of this exercise is.

    tldr; line weight cool, not required.

    Now for the real part of the lesson, the objects! Breaking down the intent of this lesson (as I understand it at least), what we focus on here is organizing, planing, and understanding. It is in these three areas that your efforts really shine through, so let's zero in on what you've done so well.

    Organizing is, admittedly, not an official part of lesson 6. However, I give out so much pointers about organizing that I might as well indulge this topic. Organizational skills are important here because of the nature of the lesson's subject. Man made objects nowadays are often manufactured by machines, thus they have very precise proportions and features that need to be accounted for when constructing. If you don't keep these features in order, you'll veer into the uncanny valley for objects. This is something that comes up in lesson 7 moreso than in lesson 6 because the design language of cars is much less varied (to an extent), and so it's beneficial to start acquiring these skills here in lesson 6. Furthermore, organizational skill, I find, help us be more conscious about the lines we put down by making us think about them in context with everything else in the drawing beforehand. You end up thinking not just about what you're doing but why you're doing it.

    Ultimately, this leads to a lot of subdividing which can very quickly turn into line salad with a line vinaigrette dressing. You've done a good job of using labels and different pen colors in your later constructions to keep track of everything, especially for your radio and iron constructions. Going forward, using these techniques in an explicit manner will help ingrain them into your thought processes. Eventually, you'll be able to keep track of things more easily and the speed at which you construct will increase. It's kind of like the extension lines for the box challenge when you think about it: making a deliberate correction choice in order to internalize a concept over time.

    Moving on, planning and understanding are the two most important aspects of this lesson, and perhaps drawabox as a whole. Starting with planning, you've done an excellent job of utilizing your orthographic studies. Not only do you use your orthos to decide how the object is constructed, but you also do great acting on your orthos. Orthos are like a more complicated form of the two dots you place on the page for the ghosted lines exercise. They are a statement of your intention before you act and function to spread out the drawing process over as many steps as possible. Essentially, you offload all the hard thinking and measuring to your orthos, freeing up your brain to tackle the construction later. It's very tempting to want to adjust after observing your reference and believe me, I'm guilty of this too. However, acting on the plan we set out beforehand and seeing it through to completion will yield more for our confidence, rather than second guessing ourselves at every step of the process.

    This is something I have no doubt you understand well. You don't get it perfectly all the time (for example, you missed the indent on top of you fabreeze plug-in that was in your orthos), but you've shown a good commitment to your decisions that should be spotlighted here. For the cars, I would definitely recommend putting the orthos on a separate page. I know you had some trouble keeping everything on one page, so spreading the orthos out onto a second page will give you more room to breathe.

    Finally, we arrive at understanding. This boils down to our knowledge of how the objects exists in 3d space and how much this sense has developed over the course of drawabox. Your work here shows a strong understanding of how your objects exist in 3d space. By drawing through the objects, even for the parts we can't see, we craft a more complete picture of the object in our head and more thoroughly develop our sense of spatial reasoning. I'm especially pleased to see you drawing through your forms in the bluetooth speaker, coffee machine, chair, and oil diffuser! I think the iron, as messy as you think it might be, demonstrates a great understanding of how a curvy object is constructed. There's no doubt that you understand how these objects sit in 3d space, and it shows. Honestly, there's not much more I can say on this topic that you don't already know, so I guess I'll wrap it up here.

    Overall, the work you've shown here and the feedback you've given for this lesson over on discord show an outstanding grasp of this lesson and its contents. I look forward to seeing what you come up with for the cars. But first, you must tackle the rubber cylinders upon which they stand. If you need me, I'll be in the corner looking up the definition of "brief." Congratulations!

    Next Steps:

    Move on to the 25 Wheel Challenge.

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    8:48 PM, Saturday March 1st 2025

    Hi there, I saw you were having your post added to the queue, so I figured I'd get in there quick and take a look at your work. Obviously we've been chatting a bit in Discord, so I've already seen a few of these, but I'll try and give you a fair evaluation.

    Before we dive in, I just wanted to address your statement about not getting the lesson by the end. That's okay. This is what I would consider the final component of what will become your spatial awareness toolkit. Not to say that there isn't anything new to learn in the lessons beyond of course, simply that those new tools and methods all build on what we've been working on up to this stage in the scope of DAB. It may help to think of our studies as a venture into problem-solving, as what we're here to do is figure out just how to portray these dimensional beings on a flat plane. Anecdotally, I wasn't quite "getting it" until I worked through lesson 5, and even then, I'm still gaining insights as I continue to help others in these older lessons. Of course, if there's any specific questions you have, let me know in a reply and I'll try my best to answer them. I'm not as knowledgable as a TA, but I may at least point you in the right direction.

    Okay, with that taken care of, let's get to it. This isn't going to be a long review, as your work is pretty solid! There's a couple things to point out, but all in all I think your work here is good. So without further ado:

    Organic Forms with Contours. Okay, these aren't too bad! Your linework is pretty confident, not too many wobbles, and I see you're trying to make sure your contours narrow and widen logically. I'm happy to see this in your work, as these contours are such a critical facet of our constructions. Because our eyes are looking for consistencies amid our tangles of lines, we have to be extra vigiliant in the way we approach these.

    So there's a couple things to watch out for. The first is to make sure your contours are aligned to the minor axis. This is by itself a small error, but as you continue to follow the contours shifting in space, it begins to accumulate into a noticeable error. I marked such an example here to demonstrate how the contours should appear on the path that you marked here. As with most things, this gets easier with practice™. I mostly just wanted to mark that minor axis to show how I see it when I set up my own contours. It may help to ghost a perpendicular line across the axis when you get ready to form your elliptical curve, but if you have your own method of setting up ellipses, it may help to experiment to find what works for you.

    The other thing I wanted to point out here is a simple observation. Not an obvious one, but an observation that is simply small in stature, and quite easy to miss. The ellipse we use to mark the closest end of our sausages is a contour ellipse. What this means is that when we set up our order of ellipses, we must also include that mark in our preparation. I used your first page here to add a diagram here in the hopes that it will show you what I mean.

    Incidentally, I think most of the errors I've noticed in your insect constructions have to do with contours to some extent, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

    Insect Construction. Okay, as I said in the beginning, I think these look pretty good, if not outright solid. Again, very clear effort to use the tools we've been given in order to draw these insects to the best of your ability, and it really shows. The central contour of your louse, the abdomen of your first bee, nicely done. I also thought your bee that was on its belly was also very well-executed! That's not an easy pose, and you nailed it! I'm also happy to see you using sausages consistently for your constructions. In the reviews I've done for lesson 4, this is surprisingly less common than you'd expect. The idea of course, is that these sausages, when linked by the joints, will form an armature from which we craft our leg forms. Organic forms, with tasteful application, can do wonders as far as closing the gaps caused by the sausage intersections, and filling out any of the strange forms we see on our insects. I don't think I saw any constructions as complex as this(which is fine!), but Comfy's ant leg construction is a great example showing just what can be done before we even think about texture.

    Now as far as pointing out areas to improve, I'd like to revisit that bee on its back. For the abdomen, I see you used the contours as the carapace as it wraps around that form. The problem here those is that as contours, they don't really show how that layer rests above the base form itself, and so it reads as being flat shape on the page. Comfy actually touches on this a bit in the informal demos sections here, but I went ahead and applied the same thing to your bee's abdomen in this demo and your mantis. In cases like this, we want to extend that segmentation beyond the silhouette of the base form, as it helps reinforce the idea that it's dimensional. I'm kind of speculating with a thought I just had here, but it seems like anytime a form or line is added to a base form, it will try to reinforce that dimensionality in some way. I could be wrong on that, but I wanted to put that down somewhere to think about later.

    Now the next thing I wanted to touch on is intersections on the legs. I looked like you were a bit inconsistent on these, as some constructions had them, and others didn't. You'll want to make sure that you draw those intersections every time. And believe it or not, those intersection lines are also contour lines that can help inform the dimensionality of the form as it moves through space.

    Finally, I wanted to touch on your stabby spider. As I mentioned before, there's a fair bit of problem-solving that goes into constructions like these, and I like the way you were thinking dynamically in your constructions. I never thought to use a box form like you used on your ant head, and even your use of the ball here on the spider was an interesting approach. The problem here is that without extending past the silhouettes of the forms around it, that front part reads kind of flat. I think the secret may lie in how the spikes are attached to the carapace of the spider. Here's an attempt that shows how I layered the forms, starting with the big piece, then the front shell, adding the spikes, then using small forms at their base, and then finishing with small cast shadows to help reinforce some of the overlapping lines.

    All in all, you really did quite well. Make sure to give more attention to your contours and ellipses, and try to keep them aligned to the minor axis as closely as possible. Take advantage of the silhouette when adding forms, and don't forget the intersection lines when you combine sausages. ... I think that's about it from me, I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Again, if you have any specific questions about the lesson, you can post them in a reply and I'll try and answer it if I can.

    Next Steps:

    Go ahead and move onto Lesson 5 if you haven't already done so. Don't forget to take advantage of the informal demo sections of lessons 3-5 as they'll be very useful in the lesson ahead.

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    9:14 AM, Sunday February 23rd 2025

    Hello Tawny_Owl, Congratulations on finishing lesson 4. I'll be giving you feedback, pointing out mistakes you've made as well as thing you did good.

    Organic forms

    • The lines look good. The sausage shapes are drawn in one continuous stroke and the contour lines fit snugly against the edges of your forms.

    • The contour lines have a very similar orientation. Shifting this orientation as illustrated in this diagram allows for more movement in the shapes you are drawing.

    Insect construction

    • You’ve done a very good job with these. You’re abiding by the principles of construction by starting with simple solid forms and building up complexity gradually, piece by piece. You’re demonstrating a good grasp of how your forms sit in 3D space and you often connect them together with specific 3D relationships that help reinforce the solidity of the construction as a whole. The proportions of your insects also look very good with no appendages being much too big of small. have just a couple of pieces of advice for you to keep in mind.

    • At some points you still use chicken scratches for your linework where we want smooth confident lines. This is most obvious on the head and pincers of the hercules beetle and the back of the spiny weevil. I believe this happens because when drawing those lines you are not sure yet what that shape is going to look like. This can be helped by adding construction geometry to dictate the shapes. You could draw a branch or sausage shape for the hercules beetle pincer and cones for the spikes on the weevil.

    • You make good use of texture to convey the curvature of the surfaces and in combination with the line thickness you create a clear order which parts of the insect are in the foreground and deserve attention and which are in the background. However you do use hatching on dark parts. We want to avoid this as it flattens out the surface it is used on. It is fine to use hatching on back legs to push them to the background but it is no substitute for texture.

    • In your wasp moth drawing you have put the plant it's standing on beneath its feet for context which is nice to see. I would suggest to draw a bit more of the plant though. As now it looks like only the three right legs are grounded and the other half of the insect is floating. You don't need much more than an outline or simple construction geometry to achieve a lot more solidity.

      I think that just about covers it, overall very good work. I'll go ahead and send you off to Lesson 5.

    Next Steps:

    • Continue to lesson 5
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    1:15 PM, Monday February 17th 2025

    Organic Arrows

    Lines look confident, arrows get bigger the closer they get to the viewer.

    They look 3d, nice variety, good job!

    Organic forms

    Nice, even sausage forms, no pinching or excessive swelling. I like how you varied the angle of the ellipses.

    Remember though that the angle change is relative to the viewer (we see less of the ellipses that are perpendicular to the viewer's line of sight - I'm referring to this image from the lesson)

    Texture Analysis

    Nice work, it looks great. :)

    Dissections

    A little blurry, but the dissections look good. I don't see any random lines/scribbling and the textures wrap around the forms. I like the fact that you let the texture come outside of the border or the sausage; it helps sell the idea of a 3d form in space.

    One thing you can practice in the future is to try and gradate the texture around the form, darker towards the edges and lighter, it would make it look even more 3d (hope the way I worded it makes sense)

    Intersections

    The forms are well done, they look like they belong in the same space. While drawing the actual intersections is optional, I will give my two cents since you added them.

    Without a difference in line weight, it's a bit hard to distinguish which form is in front of the other. I have, however, drawn a bit over your work (sorry!) to show how I would've approached it. It's not the only correct way, merely one solution.

    here are the few I looked at

    Something to note: Intersections between two curved surfaces or between a sphere and other forms cannot be a straight line. Also, intersections between shapes without curves cannot be curvy. (referring to page two, the intersection between a pyramid and the flat edge of the cylinder)

    Organic intersections

    Great job here, forms look like they are laying on top of each other. The cast shadow looks correctly drawn too.

    Next Steps:

    You can continue with Lesson 3! :)

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    5:02 AM, Friday January 10th 2025

    Hey there, im Gran and i'll be critiquing your lesson 2 homework. congrats on making it this far, It's not an easy task and requires quite a bit of dedication! Now onto your homework:

    Organic Arrows:

    Your linework on the arrows is looking smooth. There is no stretching or pinching in your arrows, which helps reinforce their solidity. One thing I want to point out is that as the arrow moves further away from the viewer, it not only gets smaller. but the space between each crest gets smaller as well. Link

    Also, try adding lineweight where there is overlap, to show which side is in front. Link You don't have to make it too thick, just a little bit subtle lineweight does the trick.

    Organic ellipses and contours

    This section is looking nicely done, the sausages are simple, which is really important to keep them looking solid and not look flabby. The ellipse contours snugly fit inside the sausage, and their degree is varying as well. Contours are also hooking nicely.

    Texture analysis

    You've done a good job on this section as well, though maybe you can try pushing the gradient further by making darks stronger and the lights lighter. This isn't wholly required, and your homework is fine as is, but it's a good idea to see how farther you can really push your textures.

    Organic Disections

    Well done on studying your textures and applying their cast shadows. A lot of people tend to slip back into drawing their outlines. I have a few points to make on this sections:

    • Brick does not count as a texture. While you have done quite a well job on drawing it, It is ultimately a pattern. The ture ON the bricks however, does count as a texture i.e the holes and pocks on the brick itself.

    • some of your textures are flattening out, and are not wrapping around the sausage pieces. Link This is a common mistakes many students make at first when doing this exercise as they're focusing a lot on conveying the texture, and the idea that they must convey this texture on a rounded surface escapes them. I see this on your fishscales.strawberry, and grid scale pattern. You have, however, converyed the rounded texture on your raspberry one. When your texture approaches the edges, if it an elliptical one, slant the ellipse (make it thinner, instead of a more rounded circle) to give the illusion of a curved surface.

    • A few of your sausages are missing texture. these are lost oppotunities for more study. If you left these because you were getting tired, stop, take a break, and then come back to thes exercise. It's also possible that you may have spent the entirity of your time studying the testure (Which is all too common) and did not make any marks. You can always come back tommorow, whenever you have the time to do so. Try not to leave anything undone next time, sometimes it's simply not feasible to do a whole page in one session, especially when it comes to textures.

    Form Intersections

    Your form intersections are looking pretty good, when you practice these as warmups later on, try not to use a different coloured pen to mark your intersections. This will train your brain to see through, even when there are a lot of marks on the page. As for your self critique on page two, you're correct, due to the rotation of the boxes, such an tersection is not possible. You could instead and made it similar, or maybe even a bigger of an intersection as you did with the middle box the box adjacent to it.

    Organic intersections

    While the second page of your organic intersections are pretty solid, your first page has some mistakes i'd like to point out. First of all, the overlapping sausages seem like they're about to fall over. Try curling them around one another, make them really hug one another, this will balance them. As for your own self-critique on the page, you're right, though if you had slumped the midsection of the sausage on the main one, it would have helped make it look believable. Look at this image, Note how the sausage aren't as the same as you drew in contour/ellipse homework? This is because that now, you have to make them fit together cohesively and make them really interact with one another. While your homework isn't exactly wrong, but doing the following step I have listed will really make them look better.

    That's all I have to say. Don't be afraid to ask questions or if you'd like any clarifications. :)

    Next Steps:

    Move onto Lesson 3

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    4:09 PM, Friday December 6th 2024

    Hello I'm Simon and will be reviewing your Lesson :)

    First of all congrats on completing the 250 Boxes challenge! It's a really hard part of the course and having completed it Lesson 2 will feel much easier so have fun with it!

    First some general notes on your exercise:

    You did a good job of extending your lines in the right direction everytime well done :) Great job on not having any diverging or parallel lines with your boxes that can be a really tough thing to achieve especially for the shallower foreshortening! No wobbly lines in sight good job. Good job on varying the orientation of all your boxes! That helps you improve much faster and you did well to do it! Most of your back corners aren't perfect but don't worry! that's completely okay and you'll have time to improve on it at your pace, If I can recommend something to improve on that it was to think of each line in the relation of the 4 others even the ones that aren't drawn yet that helped me, for some people drawing the boxes by starting with the 'hidden sides' helps them a great deal so feel free to try these techniques :) You started using hatching on your boxes that's a good habit to start having so keep practicing that on the next lessons when you can but that will already give you a little head start :) For your next boxes in your warmups I recommend you start using lineweigh to emphasize on the weight and volumes of the boxes and to bring them to the next level, it's a good skill to have that will come in useful in later lessons!

    First 50

    All your lines are really sharp and confident good job on that!

    Next 50

    You really quickly started doing boxes with not that shallow of a foreshortening. Some even having their vp on the page, that's fine sometimes but I recommend for your next warmups you focus on those really shallow foreshortening, close but not quite parallel, they're tough to do that's why working on them is important!

    Last 150

    Great job! I'll just add a little thing, on the page of the n°158-155 i can see a drawing on the other side of the page, if you can afford it use new pages and only draw on one side you'll be happy to have all of them on clean pages (and you'll be especially happy to have your cool drawings without random boxes on the other side) so if you can be careful with that for the next lessons, and keep doing your 50 percent that's great!

    Overall great job! You pushed through this exercise and came out of the other side having improved a great deal, looking forward to seeing your next lessons with how clean your lines are ! don't hesitate to answer to the critique when you finish L2 (or the even later ones) when you finish them I'll be happy to review them!

    Also I strongly encourage you to go review some submissions on the website :) You can easily review some lessons 1 and if you feel like it can review 250 boxes or wait until you completed lesson 2! Don't hesitate to do a review every so often. It really benefits you so you don't forget the point of the previous exercises and helps other people who are waiting on a review :)

    Good luck with the rest!

    Next Steps:

    Move on to Lesson 2

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    6:54 AM, Sunday October 6th 2024

    Hi there, I saw your submission so I figured I'd take a look. This is my first lesson 3 review, but I hope I can be of some help, so let's get started:

    Organic Arrows.

    Your arrows look pretty good. I see real effort to keep them consistent and dynamic. As a suggestion, add some lineweight to the dominant side of the ribbon to help sell the bend. I have an examplehere. The other thing to watch out for is to keep your shadows oriented correctly. Once your arrow is complete, be sure to go over the arrow just once or so before you start adding any shadows.

    Organic Leaves.

    I think your leaves look pretty good here. They're not particularly different types of leaves, but using simpler leaves to understand the intent of the exercise is more important than demonstrating every different type of leave there can be. What you show here shows the leaves in different positions in space, and it looks good.

    Branches.

    Branches really aren't too bad. Your ellipses, for the most part, align correctly, and you're overlapping without too many errant threads. It looked like you had some trouble connecting branches I noticed. In case you missed it, comfy lays out a method for that here

    Plant Construction.

    Okay, the meat of the assignment! From what I see here, you make good use of DAB's construction guides to make your drawings. I especially like your mushroom examples, which really benefit from your control on cast shadows. I'd say once again, the branches are erroneously constructed, and they are the most observable feature on the lily of the valley drawing. That said, the last page of plants had branches that still ended up looking pretty good, as you had better control of your ellipses on that page.

    Then there's the part where the assignment evaluation gets technical. It calls for 8 pages of plants, and here you've submitted 7. You do have a good number of plants here, about 12 usable constructions in total. I think it would be excessively insistent to ask for an 8th page here.

    ..... I personally believe that requisite of 8 pages is for students on the official track. As I've stated up to this point, I think your work is sound, and that you understand the intent of the exercises and have used them effectively in your constructions, so I wouldn't require additional revisions. I would however, encourage you to draw some more plants as an exercise when you have some free time, if only to practice branches and leaf construction. I think you have a good handle on the concepts of this lesson, and that should guide you on a steady path of improvement.

    Next Steps:

    Good work, I think you're ready for lesson 4. Make sure you review the informal demos of lesson 3 and 4 as you go, as they have tons of good information that might not be obviously stated in the lesson videos. Good luck to you!

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    8:30 PM, Monday September 23rd 2024

    Hello, my name is PizzaPlease and I am here to critique your Lesson 2 submission. Congratulations on getting through the lesson.

    Your Organic Arrows pages are ghosted well and you have applied line weight correctly, but I would recommend pushing your exploration of depth more in the future. They look quite flat (https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/4/perspective). Exaggerate the variation of width more and try having more switchbacks in your arrows with narrower space between strips the further back they are (https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/4/step2). It's a minor note, but your hatching is also quite thick and you occasionally incorrectly place it on the closer plane.

    Your Organic Forms aren't bad, but have room for improvement. You did well respecting the minor axis of the sausages and while I can see good understanding behind the forms of the sausages, they look tense. Remember to ghost these and execute them with a confident, continuous line. Your ellipses should vary more in their degree, right now they are all quite similar (https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/degree). I would also recommend reviewing the circles in perspective section from Lesson 1 (https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/5/circles). Some of your ellipse degrees are contradictory.

    Your Texture Analysis page looks pretty good. There are some areas where it looks like you have fallen into the trap of symbol drawing and relying on closed shapes (https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/6/drawingforms). Without seeing the references you used, I may be mistaken and please correct me if so. I can see you have studied these textures.

    Your Dissections pages are pretty good, but have similar issues. Even though you aren't drawing them, pay close attention to the form and imagine it wrapping around the sausage. These cast shadows should look natural. The snake scales, the rim of the passion fruit, and the bacon all have massive areas of black which I think might be local color and don't seem to reflect cast shadows which would exist on form's surface. Some, like the nut, moon, and sponge, look better studied. Remember to take your time and observe very closely.

    The forms in your Form Intersections look good, but remember they should be equilateral to each other (https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/8/stretched). Some have distortion from extreme perspective as well. The pages are well-filled with forms. The linework is clean and the weight is applied tastefully. Most of your intersections are inaccurate. While this isn't the focus of the exercise, you may find the Form Intersections First Aid Pack helpful (https://imgur.com/a/6Inx5Bz).

    The Organic Intersections pages have good forms. You were bold with and clearly thought out how the forms laid on top of each other. These sausages were executed more confidently. They don't seem be lying on a flat surface. Some of the shadows are unanchored or don't bend convincingly across the surface they fall upon (https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/9/shadows). Remember, the contour ellipse goes on the side of the ellipse which faces the viewer. If it turns away, the contour ellipse is contradictory.

    Next Steps:

    Lesson 3 is next.

    Don't forget to add the exercises from Lesson 2 to your warmup pool.

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    7:45 PM, Friday June 21st 2024

    Hi there! I figured I'd go through your submission here, so let get to it:

    Lines. I see some of your superimposed lines had fraying on both sides, but I noticed that you corrected that before long. Ghosted lines and planes look pretty decent, all told, although there's noticeable wobbles in the cross-sections of the ghosted planes. These can be tricky, as you know, but these marks are no different from the ghosted line exercise, and as long as you stay confident in your marking, these errors should diminish in time.

    Ellipses. You're making good effort with these, as I see a lot of confident ellipses made in the planes and funnels. The tables.... maybe not as confident, as there's quite a few lopsided ellipses on the page. This particular exercise I still struggle with, truthfully, since we're trying to make a quality mark that won't go beyond the border of the frame or its neighboring ellipse. It's more important, as I understand it, to make a confident ellipse regardless of whether it overlaps its confines, with the expectation that practice will reduce those errors.

    Perspecive. I think you have decent work with the plotted and rough perspective. Your line extensions following through to the horizon correctly, and that accuracy will improve with time. Your organic perspective has a number of boxes that aren't constructed correctly, as some edges lead away from the box and towards the viewer. Make sure you're giving yourself enough time to determine how each edge is converging. Consider that a box in three-point perspective will have three lines that are parallel with the initial "Y" that converge towards that arm's vanishing point, for a total of four lines to a single vanishing point. That said, it wasn't every box, so I think you have your sight on the main idea. It may help to take an extra moment when you set up your lines to make sure that your intended line is converging.

    Rotated Boxes This is a rough one of course, but I think you're on right track. I can see where you started and where you started getting the hang of it on this submission. Good work, keep at and you'll be fine.

    Next Steps:

    All in all, I think you have the right idea of these exercises. Keep them close, as you'll rely on them for warmups as you tackle the 250 box challenge. Best of luck!

    This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete. In order for the student to receive their completion badge, this critique will need 2 agreements from other members of the community.
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    3:32 AM, Wednesday June 19th 2024

    HI there, and welcome back. You were gone so long that the 250 Box Challenge was revamped.

    Things that were done well

    • Good improvement in making the lines converge. It is great to see it get better and better consistently.

    • The face that is hatched is generally the correct one (facing the viewer).

    • Adding line weight to clarify which lines are on top is great.

    Things that could be improved

    • A consistent issue is line quality. Many lines are wobbly, and that caused some issues with how you extended lines (sometimes, they didn't match the original line that was placed). Consider revisiting lesson 1's section on lines if necessary.

      • Also, the hatching lines should be done in the same quality as your other lines.
    • Some of your lines are a little parallel. One of the points of the challenge is to reason about vanishing points and converging lines, so this detracts from the intention. Watch out for this in the future.

    • A few of your boxes are missing back corners and/or line extensions. This was more of a problem in the earlier sections of the pages, and was resolved at the end. Make sure that you have done everything you need to do before moving on, as all parts of box construction are important to learning.

    • There were a few boxes at the end that had malformed Y's, such as box 249. There should be at least a 90 degree angle between all of the lines. This leads to an issue where you have two point perspective as opposed to three point, and boxes in two point perspective defeats the purpose of doing arbitrarily rotated boxes in space (three-point perspective). It was only done a few times, but make sure you can recognize this difference.

    Aside from some of the issues listed, I think this is done. Good work.

    Next Steps:

    Lesson 2

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