IarinaM

1. Lines: There is a fair bit of fraying at the end on the superimposed lines but the lines are straight and confident. The Ghosted Planes are pretty accurate.

2. Ellipses: The ellipses start pretty rough on the first page of Ellipses Table, with lumps and the looping around overshooting, but they improve massively with each new page. By the time they get tot he Funnel the are smooth and second pass overlaps the first nicely.

3. Perspective: Plotted Perspective is fine. With the Rough Perspective and Rotate Boxes, while the perspective part is fine, the actual lines are rather wobbly, which is odd becasue the lines nice and straight in Line exercise. The Organic Perspective is works really well. Even if not all the boxes are perfect (they never are) the 3D flow comes across really well.

Hey Solidstate,

Well done on completing Lesson 1, here are my thoughts:

Superimposed Lines Lines are fraying and there is some wobble. This will improve with practice. These type of lines will be important later on in adding line weight.

Ghosted Lines there is some wobble. Maybe you're getting to self conscious while drawing. It is important to ghost the line a couple of times before you draw it and once you're ready just commit to it, even if it fails. And keep in mind to draw from your shoulder.

Table of Ellipses are somewhat chaotic. The wobble is my main concern. Same as with the ghosted lines. Ghost them a few times and just commit, even if it fails. Don't be afraid to mess up some ellipses, it will work out in the end.

Ellipses in Planes same problems here. Apart from ghosting your drawings beforehand don't forget to rotate the page to find the right angle each time you draw a line or ellipse. It goes a long way to find a suitable setting to perfect and then extend your comfort zone, instead of trying to get good at each angle from the start.

Maybe allow yourself some(just a little) elbow support, so your hand isn't completely in air, but also not fully fixed. This might make your lines more consistent. Maybe also try drawing on a tilted surface.

Funnels Your funnels look really good.

Rought Perspective The lines are plotted nicely towards their vanishing points, but the lines themselves still wobble. Draw confidently and from your shoulder. This is very important to keep in mind.

Rotated boxes The line wobble is still concerning, but you got the idea. The perspective on your boxes furthest out should've been rotated further, but you'll get more practice in the 250 box challenge. Overall this one was hard and you clearly understood the exercise. It's alright.

Organic Perspective The last page has by far the best line work I've seen from you. It's crucial to take enough time for EACH line. Haste is the opposite of speed. Give each line the time it deserves (tilting the page, ghosting the line - making sure the ghosting goes from point A to B, then, and only then drawing the line - each line should take you around 15 seconds, with practice you will be able to speed it up a little)

Hello, Elstree:

Let's begin with the critique!

I don't see anything problematic on the lines exercises. There were some fraying on the superimposed lines, but that's common if it's present only on one end. There were pretty confident strokes, even when they were covering large distances. I wouldn't worry about accuracy because it will take some time. You are on the right path, nice work.

I think you struggle a bit with ellipses. They were less confident compared to your straight lines, but that's normal. I would try to change the speed you are using to draw them. Play around increasing and decreasing the speed you need to draw a smooth ellipse, and work from there to improve the accuracy. Remember, it doesn't matter the exercise, smoothness and confidence is always first, then you can look for accuracy.

This made your ellipses bumpy when drawn on the planes, it was because you focused on touching the sides of the plane. It's is more important that you first do smooth ellipses and then try to reach the boundaries of the planes in the ghosting phase.

Your ellipses on the funnels exercise were better because of the same reason. You were focusing less on the accuracy and that improved the smoothness and confidence.

Now, let's enter the tough topic... boxes.

The plotted and rough perspective were good. It's not expected to match the vanishing point and you will improve that kind of estimations over time. You did well by doing the complete process for each line, mark, ghost and draw. Don't forget it, it's the base from now on.

The rotated box exercise has some mistakes that are important to point out and for you to understand so if I don't explain properly, for your own sake, ask for clarification. I recommend you to re-read the exercise description too because you could have missed the details on the exercise description.

The square feeling you can see it's because of the convergence and vanishing points. Neighbour boxes should have some set of lines similar, but other sets should be different. Let's have the horizontal row as example. They are rotating along the vertical axis, so the vertical lines should have the same vanishing point and as consequence be almos parallel between them. The horizontal lines, in the other hand, should be converging towards a moving vanishing point and diverging towards the other. It is well explained on this gif

The organic perspective was great as well. You did improve a lot through this lesson, congratulations. You can move on towards the 250 box challenge. I recommend you to take a daily goal (5-10 boxes per day) to not rush and let the muscular memory to sink in. Remember to warm up before each session mixing up some exercises from this lesson you have completed

Hello Yoshi_saur:

Welcome to drawabox community!

Let's begin with your feedback:

Lines

I can see you have improved as expected with the lesson. I see some wobbling on your lines. Try to ghost as much as you need. Always having in mind the grind rule, ghost enough (about 8 times) until you can do smooth and accurate lines with less ghosting (it will improve, I promise).

Superimposed lines were good, don't worry about curves we are going to focus on straight lines first. You can improve them in warm ups if you want. That could be handy for lesson 2.

In ghosted lines you sacrificed smoothness over accuracy. Keep in mind always smoothness > accuracy. It's better a smooth straight line that missed its end mark by a bit, than a bumpy wobbling line that join both ends. If you want more accuracy you can ghost more, it will improve with time and sometimes you will get accurate lines anyways just because of pure luck. Smoothness in the other hand, depends only on your confidence while drawing so if you reserve some time to evaluate if the line is going good or not and to correct it midway, you will have to take that pause (also know as doubt).

The moment your pen touches the paper you should not correct the line. You should be able to draw it even with your eyes closed (i'm exaggerating a bit here).

Remember, placing marks it's the planning phase. Ghosting is the accuracy phase. Draw is the smoothness phase. Don't try to fix anything in a phase that is not responsible. If you placed a mark badly, remark. If you miss the marks while ghosting, reghost it. And sorry, but you can't redraw things without making a mess in the process, so try to be confident while executing the draw you were practicing in the ghosting phase.

Ghosted planes are good overall. They have the same mistakes I have already mentioned. You have improved in confidence here so these mistakes are less common now. Nice work!

Ellipses

All exercises here are pretty good. I can see some lack of confidence in your strokes though. This could be misleading because ellipses are common to be problematic when starting. If you are drawing them too fast, you could be shooting yourself in the foot. Because any correction (even if little) is going to affect a lot to your ellipse. Try different speeds with your ellipses and find which one suits you best.

You can mix some ellipses exercises between 250 boxes challenge sessions so you can prepare this curvy strokes before reaching lesson 2.

Boxes

Pretty good job here. Don't worry about missing the vanishing points on plotted perspective you will have a lot of room to explore how to improve in that with the 250 box challenge. It's important that you do the complete process for each line, even when the exercise don't specify it, you did a good job here placing your marks and ghosting over them. Nice work!

Rotated boxes and organic perspective were good too. They are tough and are not meant to be perfect in your first attempt. Even with practice these are difficult exercises to do freehanded. You can improve the convergence of the lines while rotating the boxes and using the neighbour as reference you can keep the same rotation as one of them too. Combining this techniques you can achieve a better result.

Try to do this exercise between sessions until you complete it again, because you can get a lot of it. As you are rotating a box in one axis, the vanishing points on that axis should be moving, if they are not, the box doesn't rotate. Keep that in mind, because some of the boxes you drew don't rotate and it's because that. Convergence should be increasing as you continue rotating towards the 90 degree turn.

Congratulations. You made it through the first lesson! Now prepare for the 250 box challenge. And keep in mind the recommendations I gave you (the warm up exercises), because you could be struggling in lesson 2 without them.

I recommend you to approach the 250 challenge with a daily goal (5 - 10 boxes per day) to let the muscular memory fall in place. Don't rush over it because the grind won't pay off as much as if you take your time with each box. I have spent 1 hour for each 5 boxes, it's tough so your perseverance is going to be tested. Good luck with it, and if you have any question i will be glad to help.

Hi,

I couldn't be sure if you were doing pen&paper or digital, given this sentence: "I decided that I make my drawings through Adobe Photoshop since digital art is not my best skills.", so, obligatory warning below.

For the purposes of this course, homework should be done with felt tip pens(or ball-point as a last resort, only on Lesson 1) on A4(or similar size) paper. The reasons are explained here:

https://drawabox.com/article/ink

https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/5/

On the work itself:

2p Superimposed Lines

On both pages, I see some fraying on the starting dots, although this seems to get better on the second page. Placing the pen carefully at the starting dot is important.

On page 1, there are some curvy line endings, which you could get rid of by lifting the pen up(perpendicular to the page) at the end of the line instead of having it leave the page while curving up and down.

Especially with the curvy lines on page 2, I see some wobbly lines. Be careful about not going too slowly, and make sure you use your shoulder to drive the movement. It'll feel awkward, and thinking of a fastish movement while trying to trace a curvy line will make you feel like you'll make big mistakes. However, confidence and shoulder movement are more important than drawing perfectly.

Also, with the longer lines, I see some arching. I still get this with lines longer than I have practiced before, and the suggestion I read on the side is

1. pay attention to using shoulder while the wrist is frozen and the elbow only compensates. (https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/3/)

2. try to consciously arch in the opposite direction to compensate.

1p Ghosted Lines

• minor arching on some lines and wobbling on only a few.

• only major problem I see here is some lines ending in little hooks, as I referred to above.

• One potential mistake is ghosting too quickly before making the mark, which happens tome especially if I'm listening to high BPM music. Slower motions where you pay attention to how your shoulder feels helps with this.

• Also, the instructions tell you to do only one page of Ghosted lines. (https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/4)

2p Ghosted Planes

*Although it's counter-intuitive, it's necessary to draw only one line between two points. When you make a mistake, don't try to correct it with other lines drawn over it.

This is similar to letting go of trying to have the last word in an argument, but the line must be abandoned once it is drawn.

*I'm not seeing your dots for the non-corner lines. All lines must have their endpoints marked.

2p Tables of Ellipses

*I'm seeing some wobbly lines here as well. Confidence is more important than accuracy, as mentioned above.

*Take care to draw through each ellipse only 2 or 3 times, despite what your instincts may incline you to.

The ellipses seem to be staying within bounds though, which is great.

2p Ellipses in Planes

• wobbliness and excess draw-throughs

1p Funnels

looks good and mostly symmetrical around the minor axis, other than some excess draw-throughs and some indication of not-entirely-loose-and-confident-shoulder-drawn-movement

1p Plotted Perspective

looks all good, with just a few lines overshooting their endpoints.

2p Rough Perspective

I saw only one pair of width lines that weren't parallel to the horizon: leftmost middle box on the first page of rough perspective.

1p Rotated Boxes

looks pretty good. but a bunch of lines are missing. (e.g,the superior-posterior side of the box above the center box)

check out this page for superior and posterior.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/ap1x94x1/chapter/anatomical-orientation-and-directions/

all lines of all boxes need to be drawn, including the lines that are behind the box or behind other boxes.

Also, boxes need to be kept close, but their sides cannot overlap.

2p Organic Perspective

looks good, be careful not to repeat lines (unless you were trying to superimpose lines just to add weight to the contour)

Alright After looking at your Lesson Submission. Your Superimposed lines have no problems , but your ghosted lines have problems of overshooting again this isn't a problem as a beginner since accuracy will build over time.

Elipses in planes have problems I noticed that you are having trouble with fitting them snuggly in the planes and it also looks that whenever you're drawing over them a second time they steer off trajectory and you stop drawing them. The solution to this would be to draw through them even if you lost track of your trajectory. Also the requirement was two pages not three Please try to keep to the recommended number of exercises and don't grind.

Tables of Elipses nothing wrong there you are doing okay.

Elipses in funnels are okay except the part where you drew a straight line without arcing lines and the line in the middle. Please try to follow the instructions exactly as they are written. Moving on to RoughPerspective everything is okay there is nothing to comment about that there.

You are clearly struggling with rotated boxes by keeping them neatly aligned to each other , you're clearly not using the neighbouring forms that help us keep everything snuggly rotated. Try to think more about perspective how the vertical line runs perpendicular to the horizon and how the horizontal runs parallel. The second Page is better than the first , but this exercise only recommended 1 pages of rotated boxes. This exercise is meant to come out horribly the first time you do this so don't worry if It's not perfect.

In organic perspective you're using dramatic and shallow foreshortening in the wrong places try to read more about perspective in the adittional notes https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/7.

Overall This Lesson Is complete But i recommend you to only do the number of homework that is required.

Hi there! The first thing I notice going through your exercises is that the lines go past their intended point. For example, In your rough and organic perspective exercise, it seems like the boxes have things sticking out of them. I think that this stems from your ghosted lines exercise. I think that your lines aren't as confident or as straight as they could be. I think this lack of stability translates across your other exercises as well. Another thing I notice is the end of every line. The thickness of each line seems to fade at the end. This suggests that you might be flicking the end of every line which could be a factor in the lack intentionally ended lines. Feel free to have a look at mine! I think that by observing others, you can sorta tell what you can improve on more easily for there is a better idea of what these exercises might look like.

shameless plug:

https://drawabox.com/community/submission/LZUSW0L

Considering the number of lines you have drawn and also the fact that it appears you are "flicking" the end of your lines, it almost seems like you are rushing your work.

Hi !

Your lines exercises are very well done. Nothing to comment on those.

Your elipses also look good, maybe try ghosting a little more before drawing them to get a more consistent second pass through each one.

Your rough perspective exercises seem a little rushed, you are not getting strong lines like before. Remember to take your time with each line, ghosting and drawing it strongly and confidenlty. The rest of the boxes exercises are well done, nice job.

I think you are ready to continue to the 250 boxes challenge, but remember to take your time on each line !

I'm going to critique this on a page by page basis:

I can see you've been doing the exercises digitally, while that's allowed, I feel like you would find it far more beneficial and actually easier doing them on paper.

Super-imposed lines

For the most part on the initial superimposed lines it looks pretty good. The fraying is only on one end for almost all the lines except for one. Remember fraying on both ends is a sign you aren't taking enough time to position your pen correctly while fraying on one end (the one your line finishes on) is perfectly fine and will improve over time. Your lines do seem to be arcing a little bit though. This might happen because you are not mostly using the shoulder pivot. But

it can also happen when using the shoulder and in this case it can be fixed by trying to arch consciously to the opposite direction.

Ghosted Planes

Your lines aren't wobbling, they are pretty smooth. Exercises like these you are going to want to be using as a warm up for when you do other more difficult and complex exercises throughout draw-a-box so you will get better over time with hitting both points more consistently.

Ellipses

The overall shape of each ellipse looks pretty good, its something people can struggle with but you seemed to have got it down. However, you do really want to be touching the sides, having the ellipses touch the sides of the space they fit in. You seem to be having just a little bit of trouble with your smaller ellipses, It looks like you might have been rushing them just a bit. Try to keep up your effort with these ellipses too, trying to be just as confident with your lines - ghosting as many times as you need - the same rules apply for these as the bigger ellipses.

Ellipses in planes

The general shape of most of your ellipses look pretty good here. The objective of the exercise is to touch the sides of the shape, not distorted to fit the shape (not an egg), but an ellipse that touches the sides of the plane. Your ellipses do seem to be pretty ellipse shaped only a few distorted ellipses, but most of the time they don't touch the sides.

Funnels

You want all you ellipses to be touching each other and on one of your funnels they aren't aligned. That line that you draw down the middle of each funnel should be able to divide each ellipse symmetrically.

Two Point Perspective

Not much to say on this, looks fine, can't really improve on this one unless you misunderstood something but you seem to understand the idea.

Rough Perspective

You lines seem both slightly better and slightly worse here. I can see a little bit of a wobble to your lines but a lot of them have lost the arc so that's good keep going. You don't hit both points when ghosting but that'll improve its completely normal. You also seem to be getting pretty close to the point so well done!

Rotated Boxes

Looks great, not perfect but really good for a beginner. You'll see after you do the 250 box challenge you'll improve loads on this and you'll get more instructions on how to do this better.

Organic Perspective

Your definitely overlapping which is important. Looks good!

Lines

Your lines are really good. Nothing to point out in them in particular.

Ellipses

Ellipses are good, there is few things I would like to talk about though. You seem to miss the amount of loops you make, one is too little, two is perfect, three is undesired but can happen, four is overkill. You seem to mostly make two loops, but you happen to make single loops, three loops or even four loops ocasionally. You need to remember to strike for making two loops, it is important habit to have for later lessons.

Perspective

Perspective is good, tho I have few objections to rotated boxes. First, you forgot to add hatching on the inside sides of boxes in box sphere, it is part of this exercise. Second, you made the box sphere too small and the whole drawing look small because of it, remember to use the whole page for every DaB exercise, pratice in big scale has huge impact on amount you learn, you can see your mistakes more clearly, you make more moves with your shoulder and you pratice drawing in big scale so small scale will be no problem.

I would advise making a hatching in rotatet boxes exercise, but it is up to you.

Overall great job, proud of you. You can go to 250 box challange, just rember about what I talked above.