Dr_Scrapjack

Thank you for the kind words! Unfortunately it's been a busy week and I haven't been able to do the rest of the Promptathon, but I'm very glad you liked my submission :) I also took a peek at your submissions and I really like them, the "ratonaut" is especially cute!

I'd say do as you did up until now. It's true that if you do some "test homework" before corrections become easier, but they also end up masking a bit what is the true level of your current abilities. You could always pick a third way: for multi-page exercises do the first page right after you've read/watched the lesson, try to compare your results with the lesson notes and then do it again, eventually with some "studies" where you try to figure out what can be improved before finishing the exercise. Either way, it's really just a matter of practice. You'll be surprised by how some things will just kind of start make sense to you on their own just through repetition and critically applying the rules of each challenge. In addition to that, lesson 3 is the pivot point where many concepts that have been illustrated will find their application, besides being lots of fun in my opinion.

Nice job, the confidence in your arrows and organic forms has definitely improved. Only thing I'd point out is that in arrow 3 the hatching is on the wrong sides of the ribbon, making it seem that your arrow is not in perspective but diverging (here's a concrete example of what I mean: https://imgur.com/uclExCh). You textures are mostly ok, but I will point out again that one of them, specifically the tulip, is not really a texture but a geometric component of the flower (you will see more on this point in lesson 3). Regarding your difficulty with texture I'd say don't be discouraged by unsatisfactory results. This may be an unfamiliar problem to you and there's no guarantee that we will be good at new problems from the get go (in fact, that's almost never the case). Don't worry if you make mistakes or you results don't look good to you, making mistakes is part of our learning experience and in the long run ends up actually enriching you. You should think about your mistakes the same spirit of this famous quote attributed to Edison: "I didn't fail 10000 times to create a lightbulb, I simply found 10000 ways it doesn't work". You will surely benefit from looking at external sources, but in the end I think it's all a matter of training your eye at identifying detail, and that will come with practice and careful study of what you are trying to reproduce. For this reason, you may want to try and slowly tackle the 25 texture challenge along with the main course work (if you do, don't try and complete it in one go, it's meant to be a companion content for the other lessons).

I will go on and mark your lesson as complete. Hope lesson 3 will be as enjoyable to you as it was to me. Good luck and good work!

Very well done! I can see you definitely put a lot of thought and effort in your revisions, and your results show this clearly. I will proceed to mark your lesson as complete. Hope you will have fun with lesson 3!

Hi 37Champion, and good job making it through lesson 2! First of all, let me answer your questions: since our warmups consist in exercises from the course, while it wouldn't be strictly necessary I advise you to use your fine liner for them too. Second, all exercises that we do can be incorporated in the warmup routine, so by all means feel free to incorporate exercises from lesson 2. That being said, I will handle your critique by dividing it into sections where I will give you my thoughts on each exercise.

Organic arrows

Your arrows look quite wobbly and unconfident in places where you use line weight, probably due to trying to use the technique to correct unsatisfactory marks rather than to enhance the solidity of your form, since in places where you didn't apply line-weight your form is otherwise solid and fluent. Remember that in this course we always privilege confidence over accuracy, and that tools like line-weight are not supposed to be used as a way to correct ourselves. Moreover, being overtly concerned with a precise mark can in fact lead us in the opposite direction, as you drawing shows: a slow long mark will more often than not produce a wobbly, unconfident line. The ghosting method serves precisely as a tool to aid our precision without sacrificing accuracy too much, and it applies to all our lines, including line-weight. Moreover, we should apply line-weight with parsimony, picking carefully where and when to apply it. In the case of our arrows, a good rule of thumb for when to apply it is to look at the points where the ribbons curves, and apply it on the side that is obstructing part of the ribbon. Regarding your perspective, it looks generally believable, with ribbons growing in width as they approach the viewer.

Organic forms

Your sausage forms look nice and simple and consistent in form. However, you have used repeated lines to draw through them like we usually do with ellipses. I'd discourage you to do so since our sausage forms will often serve as the base for constructing more complex shapes in later lessons, and repeated lines that don't make up line-weight can end up hurting the solidity of the construction. Your ellipses and contour lines also show visible wobbling, and here I'd encourage you again to privilege confidence over accuracy, since these contour lines are a tool that we use to communicate the curving shape of our objects, and a wobbly and precise line does the job less well than a smooth but a little less precise one. Otherwise, the orientation of the spine and the alignment of the contour curves looks fairly good aside from a couple of cases, so not much to comment on that aspect.

Texture analysis

It's hard to judge the specific types of texture you have chosen here without some reference image to compare them to, so I will limit myself to a few simple observations. I think you did a fair enough job with your crumpled paper and facial mask textures, making your cast shadows thinner and thinner proceeding from left to right in a believable way. However, the apparent lack of finer detail in your textures, while not hurting your first two too much, ends up being detrimental in your paper decor texture, where the presence of finer detail like rough spots and small creases and other eventual "fine structure" elements of the texture could help a lot in making our gradients more smooth and the image less flat, as it is often the case with textures formed by simple repeating patterns, the crescent moon shapes in this case. Also, note that the transition from light to dark is very flat in your third image due to the fact that you initial black bar is not fully incorporated in the cast shadows.

Dissections

First of all, a mistake that jumps immediately to the eye is the presence of forms that do not constitute texture, specifically the jelly and lettuce. Broadly speaking, the marks that form a drawing can be roughly divided in two categories: construction+form outlines and texture. Lines that belong to the first category are what makes the large scale geometry of a drawing, what makes the shapes. Once we have all figured out, texture is added to the shape to give a better idea of what kind of material the shape is made of, what is the small scale geometry of our object, etc. The important thing is, under no circumstance the small scale geometry of the texture modifies the underlying large scale geometry of the shape. If we look at the lettuce, it is clearly evident that this is not a texture that is wrapping around a sausage form but an entirely different shape, whose underlying form resembles more a ribbon (you will learn more about this in lesson 3). Similarly, the jelly is in its large scale structure is basically a truncated cone. What you should have done with these textures was instead identifying the small scale detail (like the creases in the lettuce leaf and the bumps in the jelly) and imagine them wrapping around a sausage shape (like we were wrapping a lettuce leaf around it or making a sausage shaped jelly). In some forms you also don't break much the silhouette (see the leaf, sea shell and strawberry) or don't properly wrap the texture around the shape making it look flat (see the silk hair ring and corn). Finally, especially in your cross sections you tend to explicitly outline details instead of using cast shadows (see peas and mangosteen): remember, our goal here is to use cast shadows and cast shadows only, and unfortunately some textures cannot be communicated well with this tool alone, so if you ever find yourself in this situation in this course it's better to drop the texture entirely and do another instead. Ending on a positive note this section, your eye for fine structure and use of implied texturing seems to have improved from the texture analysis. I particularly like the use of implied texture in your corn, tree bark and broccoli, where the dark to light gradient is very well done in my opinion.

Form intersections

I will probably be brief here since this exercise at this level is thought to be more of an exercise in building a consistent-looking composition of 3d objects more than the actual intersection themselves. You manage to do this decently in your last 3 pages, less so in your boxes-only page, where many boxes have a quite accentuated foreshortening compared to the others, making the illusion harder to sell. A thing to I would advise you to do the next times you try this exercise is to try to vary more the orientation of your various shapes, especially the boxes. Regarding your intersections, I will briefly say that while many of them are fine, I'd encourage you to think a bit more about certain aspects of this, especially how flat and curved objects intersect, since for instance intersection 8 in page 3 is geometrically impossible (a cylinder with its axis parallel to the sides of a box like the one you did should have either a portion completely contained in the box or be sliced by the corner of the box).

Organic intersections

Aside from what I've said above about your sausage forms, there are a few things to look out for here: first of all, in your first page the sausages in the middle are laying almost parallel on top of your bottom sausage. Since, among other things, we are trying to convey a sense of stability in our composition, parallel sausages don't do the job too well, since from our own daily experience we know that piling objects like that leads to a very unstable configuration. For this reason, all sausages we pile on top of another should lay parallel to the cross section of the underlying form, allowing for the weight on both ends to balance out. This leads to my second observation, that unless the sausage is very small compared to the size of the one it stands on top of, part of its rear end, and possibly up to even almost half of it depending on the case, should be obstructed by the curvature of the sausage beneath. By contrast, look at the top sausage in your first page, which is completely visible despite its quite accentuated curving, making it look like it's floating. Lastly, I'd say that the shadows look mostly okay, but I'd probably make them stick a bit less to the figure that is casting the shadow and a bit more to the underlying figure.

Conclusion

Overall, despite the mistakes and imprecisions I pointed out I think yours is a good submission, but there are a few things I'd like you to do before moving on to lesson 3. First of all, since as you will see they will play a central role in plant construction, I will assign you an additional page of organic arrows. Second, I'd like you to do a page of organic forms, half with contour ellipses and half with contour curves, and then on the ones with ellipses do some texture dissections (I encourage you to try and redo some textures you already did, keeping in mind what you should correct). Take all the time you need and when you are done, reply here with your revisions. Good luck and good work!

Thank you for your time and patience! You are right about the ellipses, I still struggle a bit with them, especially the smaller ones when trying to draw them from the shoulder, I will definitely try to pay more attention to them. Thank you again!

No worries, we are all here to learn and help eachother along the way, everyone is bound to make some mistakes from time to time. Anyway, I see some definite improvement on the alignment of your ellipses. Also good job on making those boxes more varied in position and length. I will go on and mark your lesson as complete. Remember to include all of these exercises in your future warmup routines. Good luck!

Hi Elvenstar207, and good job completing lesson 2! I will handle your critique by dividing my thoughts on each exercise in corresponding sections.

Organic arrows

First, the good news: your arrows show a nice fluidity in their shapes, with generally confident curves flowing quite smoothly through the page. Fluidity is an important feature of all objects whose construction starts from a ribbon, so it's a good thing that yours start already with a fairly good sense for it. As a minor note, some ribbons tend to get a bit "fat" on their curves, likely resulting from your mark getting a bit too deviated from your first curved line. One way you could improve this is by, instead of ghosting the second line in its entirety, dividing your work in smaller portions by ghosting the individual curved "segments" between each turn, paying of course attention to making your segments overlap. This way, following the profile of your initial line becomes generally easier. On the other hand, there are important aspects of this exercise which I feel you should work on more. First off, the perspective: for curved ribbons like these, perspective makes their far end look smaller and their near end look bigger, with the width more or less increasing uniformly from near to far, and the more the difference in width is stark, the more the ribbon will seem long. Some of your arrows do show this effect, the top 3 in the first page for instance. However, some others do show the opposite effect, starting shorter on the near side and getting wider on the far side, as it is happening in the top 2 arrows at the bottom of the first page. I suspect that, more than to an incomprehension happening during construction, this is due to an incorrect placement of hatching lines. Since the hatching is a tool that we use here to clarify which face is behind, placing it incorrectly can make the difference between a convincing arrow in perspective and an arrow that is diverging. Here's a concrete example of what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/QgMx88o

Another important thing to note here is that many of your arrows do not simply go towards or away from the viewer, but twist and spiral like a helix (see for instance the bottom left arrow in the first page and the two at the top of the second page). While drawing spiraling and twisted ribbon may be a good exercise to test one's sense of geometric intuition once they have an advanced enough understanding, it's a good idea at an early stage to stick to simple forms: when we are learning we should always try to operate on the simple, straightforward cases and only then start to add complexity.

Organic forms

Your forms look for the most part good. You have kept your sausage shape nice and simple. The axis of the sausage is placed quite precisely, pointing well the direction of the flow of the "spine" of the shape. Both the silhouette of the sausages and the axis are smooth and very confident, resulting overall in mostly nice and clean shapes. You also aligned quite well the ellipses and contour lines to the spine, and changed the foreshortening of each curve/ellipse along the length of the spine, enhancing the feeling of depth. A thing that I'd critique here is the presence of some subtle but noticeable wobbling in the ellipses and in some of the contour lines, which clashes with the clean curves of the sausages. Remember that here we will always try to privilege confidence over accuracy: even if you may be less precise at first, always try to draw your curves with (moderately) rapid marks and, if you are struggling with precision, ghosting longer will help.

Texture analysis

You did a quite nice job here. You picked some textures that could be conveyed effectively through the use of cast shadows. I particularly like what you did in your mushroom texture, where you picked and reproduced a subject that clearly showcases two different scales of details, a greater one formed by the lamellae (the "gills" of the shroom) and a smaller one given by the granular and fuzzy contour structure. Your shadow gradients are also quite smooth. The only thing I'd criticize is your corn texture, where you tended to simplify the shape of the kernels into rectangles, as opposed to your observation that shows a richer, less regular structure.

Dissections

I want to preface that, in my opinion, your textures here are for the most part looking great. I like the way you handle detail with a thought out use of shadow and irregular marks that convey the bumps, creases, pores and dents of your surfaces, such as in your brick texture. You also break well the form your sausage, conveying better the feeling that we are looking at a shape made from a specific material. That being said, our main aim here is not to necessarily make pleasing-looking drawings, but to study and acquire specific skills, and on this matter, I think that there are some aspects of this exercise you should have handled in a different way. One problem in some of your sausage cuts, such as in the same brick one, the bark and the honeycomb, is that the texture doesn't follow the geometry of the shape, i.e. the detail doesn't wrap around the sausage. It's especially evident in the brick texture, where the brick outlines look like they are laying flat on a bean shaped cut of a wall. The effect we should be looking for is instead that of a curved wall that is wrapping around the sausage shape, so that while each individual brick is flat, the way they are disposed follows imaginary contour lines on the shape. Other textures however do have detail that actually follows the curving of the surface. Another critical aspect in many of your shapes is that you often use explicit outlining of the texture instead of implicit (I'll point back to the lesson 2 material for the detailed explanation of the difference: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/2/homework). The key point is that, while most your textures usually don't suffer from this, overtly relying on explicit textures can cause visual cluttering and confusion, which in my opinion does indeed happen in 2 of your textures (the strawberry and honeycomb specifically). Implicit textures are a tool that is both pleasing and useful for saving time, so while your ability to make explicit texture seems already quite solid I think it will be worth to train your ability to use implicit. The way you'd want your sausages to come out in this exercise is not unlike a panel form the texture analysis, with your texture forming a smooth gradient from silhouette to center. I'd also note that in some cases you incorporated elements that constitute part of the broader geometry of a shape instead of the "fine structure" that makes the texture, such as in the mangosteen, which is a bit the opposite of the purpose of the exercise, since texture is broadly speaking part of what we add once we have defined through construction the geometry of our objects. Lastly, I will point out that in some texture you have used form shading and hatching to convey shadows and shadow gradients. While these are techniques that are perfectly valid and can be used to achieve stunning visuals, they fall outside the purpose of our exercise, since we should use cast shadows only and refrain from adding marks that do not communicate either contour or irregularities of the surface. While you are absolutely free to use such techniques in your 50% rule work (and I encourage you to do so, since you seem to have quite the eye for it), you should refrain from using them as you did in the tentacle, jeans and sprayed water textures since, again, our goal here is furthering our understanding of 3d objects, not necessarily making pleasing drawings.

Form intersections

Aside from the fact that the boxes could have probably been done with a bit more care, the exercise looks for the most part well done. The shapes look indeed like they belong into the same picture by having a consistent degree foreshortening, giving the composition a nice sense of harmony. You also definitely did not pick the lazy route and instead packed your page with as many shapes as you could, which is good. Your intersections also do look quite believable, showing that you already may have a good eye for how shapes interact with each other. Not much else to say here, you did well.

Organic intersections

Your sausage forms remain confident and smooth, and the confidence of your contour lines seems to have improved as well. Your shadows more often than not wrap around the underlying shapes in a believable way, giving your composition a more solid feeling. However, there are a couple of things to note: first, your forms, while feeling solid also feel quite stiff like a rigid bean shape, while the feeling we are trying to convey is that of a fluid shape that's sagging under its weight, like a balloon filled with water. This is particularly evident in the top left form in the second page, where the sausage is even arching upwards instead of downwards. Another thing to look out for is the relative placement of the sausages, which sometimes makes it rather seem like some sausages are frozen in an unstable position or even floating on top of each other, instead of looking balanced on top of each other under the pressure of their own weight. Here I'm talking about shapes like the right bean at the center of the composition in page 1 and the central bean in page 2: in both cases the beans are not completely stacked on top of the lower ones, but instead their rear end is kind of floating. These are 2 things to keep in mind in the future.

Conclusion

You did a mostly good lesson, but before moving on there are a couple of things I'd like you to work on a little more. First, I will assign you another page of organic arrows, where I'd like you to keep your forms nice and simple, without twisting and spiraling, just simples ribbons with multiple curves, and also I'd like you to try and push your perspective a little bit further, with more accentuated feeling of depth. Second, I'd like you to do another page of organic forms, half of them with ellipses and half of them with contour curves: draw your ellipses and contour lines with the same confidence as your sausage outlines. When you are done, pick a sausage with ellipses, possibly a big one, and do a dissection. You should try to use only cast shadows and implicit texturing. You can (and in fact I'd encourage you to) pick some of the textures from your original exercise and redo them according to these instructions. Take all the time you need and when you are done reply here with your homework. Good luck and good work!

All right then, now that we have all of our boxes I can mark your lesson as complete. Make sure to keep exercising your perspective, boxes in 3d are a fundamental tool of this course, and for understanding how to represent space in general really. In fact, as you will see, there will be another box related exercise right in lesson 2. Good luck!

Hi Ivangamngo, and congrats on completing your first lesson of the course! I will handle this critique, and I will give you my thoughts in the following sections corresponding to each exercise.

Superimposed lines

I have some difficulty identifying clearly the finer details of the image because of its blurriness, but from what I see your lines look for the most part smooth and confident (there seems to be visible wobbling in the set of horizontal lines at the top of the second page, but the others look fine). There's also fraying on one end only, which is good.

Ghosted lines

Here as well your line work stays smooth and confident. Your lines are also quite precise, with little deviation and overshooting. One thing to note is that in quite a few lines there seems to be a subtle arching, nothing too dramatic but it's there. It happens quite often to students in lesson one to have some degree of arching in their straight lines, usually due to a bit of stiffness in the joints due to not being used to draw from the shoulder. This is something that normally adjusts by itself through practice, but if you ever find yourself struggling when making straight lines try to subtly arch your line in the opposite direction to compensate, and over time you will find yourself naturally adjusting your precision without even thinking.

Ghosted planes

Most of what I said above applies here as well. Additionally, your tendency to subtly arch seems to have improved by itself. Also, good job not shying away from fitting as many planes as you could in the page, it gave you the occasion of getting the most out of this exercise.

Tables of ellipses

For the most part your ellipses look smooth and fairly symmetrical. The ellipses remain tight-packed and fit well between each other. You seem to have prioritized the fluidity of gesture over precision of the shape, and you were right to do so: if this course had a motto, it would likely be "confidence over accuracy". Since your ellipses look already quite fluid, you could probably start focusing more on keeping your repeated lines less loose and on trying to keep better your shapes between your established boundaries, in this case keeping them inside the panel (quite frequently your ellipses overshoot a bit). Another thing you may want to change is the amount of repeated lines you use. While the exercise allows for a maximum of three repeated lines, as you tend to do, it could be a good idea to try and progressively reduce the repeated lines to 2, as ellipses will play an important role starting from lesson 2, so working on making them less messy from now on could be useful for the future.

Ellipses in planes

Most of what said above applies here too. Some of your ellipses end up looking quite asymmetrical in trying to make them fit into the planes, usually the most distorted ones. One thing you could have done in those cases was to try and make ellipses with a higher degree of eccentricity (i.e. the amount of "thinness" of the curve) and aligning them to one of the diagonals instead of one of the two bisection lines (the lines that cut in half the sides of the plane).

Funnels

In this exercise you seem to struggle with keeping the minor axis of your ellipses aligned to the major symmetry axis of the funnel. As a result your ellipses are slanted, while they should follow the symmetry of the shape that contains them. You should think of these shapes as a sort of glass tubes around which some rings have been painted. The ellipses we draw are then nothing more than how we see the contour of these rings through the transparent glass. As a consequence, these ellipses should be aligned with the funnel and get broader in proportion the more we move away from the waist of the funnel. This thing is also lacking in your exercise, as the ellipses more or less get bigger while retaining essentially the same shape in your images.

Plotted perspective

As this is an introductory exercise to perspective and vanishing points, there is not much of note to say here. Your horizontals correctly converge towards the established VPs, and your verticals remain parallel according to the rules of 2 point perspective. The only thing I want to note here is that more care should be used in applying your hatching lines, since there's some very noticeable overshooting, especially in the center-right box in the second page.

Rough perspective

Your linework is very clean and precise, and you show a good understanding of convergence in 1 point perspective, as your line extensions show. However, it should be noted that you have made things perhaps a bit too easy for you by keeping your boxes mostly close to the VP and by making your boxes very long in depth, both things that, while resulting in technically correct boxes, represent a limited variety of possible cases. You could have probably benefited more from experimenting with a wider variety of box shapes and positions, even if the eyeballed convergence may be a little worse at first.

Rotated boxes

This exercise and the next are notoriously harder than the rest, and are worth revisiting later on in the course. Anyway, you did quite well here: the central "cross" of boxes is rotated quite well, and all of the boxes are kept closely packed. As a whole, your composition verges more on the stocky side rather than the desired "ball" shape, but this will undoubtedly improve when you will revisit this exercise during later lessons.

Organic perspective

Your curves flow nicely through the page and the boxes follow them closely, getting bigger and bigger the closer they come to the viewer. You also didn't shy away from having overlapping boxes. The only thing I want to criticize here is that there are a couple of instances of boxes with repeated lines that look quite messy. Remember that repeated lines are not a tool to correct an unsatisfactory mark, and more often than not in results in less solid shapes when used this way. Instead, repeated lines are a tool that we should use with care to reinforce the solidity of our shapes: as such, we use repeated line only to apply line weight, and we do this only on the silhouette of the box and with a single, confident overlapping mark traced with the ghosting method.

Conclusion

While I think you did an overall quite good job for your first lesson, before moving on the 250 box challenge there are a couple of things I'd like you to exercise a bit more. For this reason, I will assign you 1 additional page of funnels and 1 page of rough perspective. In your funnels page I'd like you to try and pay extra care in keeping all of your ellipses aligned. This is the thing I'd like you to pay attention to the most. As secondary aspects, try to pay also attention to keep your ellipses a bit better within the funnels and, if you feel confident enough, try to reduce your repeated lines from 2 to 3. Lastly, I'd like you to try and vary the degree of foreshortening (the rotundness of your ellipse) the further you go away from the waist of the funnel. For your rough perspective page, try to not to make all of your boxes extra long and close to the vp. Don't get discouraged if your precision will seem diminished a bit at first. Your page should look for reference a bit like the ones from the examples in the exercise description: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/roughperspective

Also, if possible, I'd ask if you can upload images with a better resolution in the future, as some pages were quite hard to distinguish. Take all the time you need and don't rush things. Good luck and good work!