Iiiik

Those are some pretty damn good lines, my dude.

I'm reaching my first year of practice now and altough I can draw confident lines if I really focus, it's still something that requires a bit of concentration.

As Scoobyclub said, don't overdo it, build your muscle memory a little at a time. I personally do a page of Ellipses in Planes everyday as a warm-up to keep it in check.

The whole point of Draw a Box is to teach you the good mentality and posture to improve your art, thus why you shouldn't focus entirely on perfecting the exercises it provides you. It's perfectly normal to not nail all of them right off the go. Keep them in mind and practice them from time to time, but avoid grinding them.

Now, an advice I could give you is to remember to rotate the page whenever the need arises. In your video, you never seem to tilt the page at all. I personally draw most of my lines from an angle, I find it easier to bring in the full potential of your shoulder that way. Don't hesitate to try different postures and experiment.

Aight, so I revised your submissions and the issues are entirely different than with the initial analysis I gave, so you can scratch that. I'll just re-do it all over again.

Organic Arrows: Some perspective and confidence issues here and there. But the main logic of the exercise is well-understood. Same remark than with my initial review: Try to work more on your arm movements and you should be fine in no time. Be bolder about the form of your arrows too. Don't hesitate to try unusual patterns, no one will judge you for your mistakes, it's part of learning.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines: I can see two main mistakes listed in the lesson there: Your ellipses don't vary enough in term of degree, and they aren't aligned with the minor axis. Other than that, you drew through your ellipses and the curves hook around, so that's already half of the job done.

Related Issues 1

Related Issues 2

Texture Analysis: There are several issues to review here:

First thing, don't draw through your forms. Remember that we're dealing with shadows rather than forms there, and so your aim shouldn't be to replicate the form of the texture but how light reflects on it.

Second thing, I can see that you tried to simulate the transition from dense to sparse, but instead of doing it gradually, you simply reduced the amount of patterns drawn then ended it abruptly.

Some advices I can give you there:

• Focus on the shadows, not the forms

• Don't think about your textures in term of patterns, you'll very rarely see a texture that has a perfectly consistent set of defined forms to it. So observe instead how it reacts to the light being reflected on it.

• If you wish to use lines as a way to convey a texture, try to do them in one confident stroke, while also thinking about how they relate to other shadows around them. Here in your exercise, they feel loosely placed in space without really giving off the idea that they represent something.

Related Issues 1

Related Issues 2

Dissections: The same remark I talked about in my first review still holds: Plan your patterns. Some of those textures feels a bit random. It's mentioned in the texture analysis exercise but everything has a flow to it. That said, you sometimes did a better attempt at following the curvature of the ellipses with your patterns, so that's already a good thing.

Don't forget to also draw your ellipses in a consistent smooth way, your forms tends to get overly-complicated.

Related Tips

Form Intersections: You seem to have troubles with cubes interracting with each others, but your other forms connects fairly well. There are issues, of course, but this is a tough exercise and you're not expected to nail it right off the bat. You didn't make any of the mistakes listed in it, so it's a pass. That said, do not be shy about making a big pile out of your forms, you probably aligned them in as a stream because it felt more convenient that way, and altough it doesn't count as a mistake, you won't necesseraly improve better that way.

Organic Intersections: Your sausages aren't too complicated there, but they aren't really interacting as if they were piled up on top of each others. For now, you are still looking at your page as if it were a 2D space, and it's mostly noticeable because your sausages doesn't conflict with each others. You probably focused too much on the part of the exercise that asks you to draw the shadows, but not enough on the illusion of form. The page you sent me today is a little bit better, but there are still issues.

• I'd advise you not to draw a big form then add little droplets on top of it. Again, don't be shy, feel free to be bold and draw several big forms piling up. Think about how they conflict with each other in 3D space.

• Don't draw your shadows relatively to the sausages that casts them, but rather on the surface they're being cast on. I know that I've already said that, but your shadows still lacks a real sense of presence. Think about the form they're being cast on, then look at the form creating them and replicate the tip of that form that you think it overlaping the form it's piled on and that should do the trick.

Alright, that's it. Sorry again for my clumsiness with sending you the wrong review, and also about the fact that I may have sound harsh in this review, but I did my best to follow the official issues listed in the lessons while providing you with my own methods to avoid them.

I'd like for you to move on lesson 3, but I think there are still some issues that needs to be reviewed. Since I gave you the wrong review first, I also gave you the wrong revisions (since your issues lies elsewhere). Therefore, I'll mark the lesson as complete but I'll give you some assignments that you're entirely free to do but that I think would be beneficial to you.

Good continuation to you on DrawABox!

I'm sorry, I just noticed that I corrected the wrong submission, that'll teach me to work on two things at the same time.

I'll leave a new correction for you later on today since there are different issues from the lesson I was supposed to correct, but feel free to take inspiration to what I may have advised there!

Hi, ILOVEIRISDRAWING!

I've had a look at your work and will try my best to provide you my own modest critique of your results.

First thing first, I'd like to precise that my explanations may suffer a bit from the fact that I don't speak english perfectly well, but I'll try to make myself as understandable as humanly possible.

Organic Arrows: Lookin' good. You didn't forget about applying the perspective to your arrows nor are they flats, so it's a pass. The logic of the exercise is overall well understood. The only thing you could have added would have been some line weight to support the illusion of form in your arrows.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines: Same as before, you avoided making any basic mistake, so it's a pass. That said, you may want to work a bit on your line confidence to improve the smoothness of your lines. Some of the sausages you drew got wobbly near their end, clearly showing a lack of confidence in your arm's movement.

My personal advice there would be for you to practice the Ghosted Plane + Ellipses exercise on a daily basis. A page a day is enough, it's personally become a ritual before each of my drawing sessions and I improved the quality of my lines greatly thanks to it.

Texture Analysis: You didn't scribble nor did you draw the form of your textures so those are already good points and I can see that you tried your best to simulate the transition from dense to sparse. My advice there would be to avoid big shadows the brighter your texture is supposed to be. It is particularly noticeable in the first and third textures you did (Crumpled paper and Tree Bark) where I think the shadow should have been less showy near the right-end of the frame.

In the same vein, you should try to add more weight to the shadows near the left-end border of the frame were they are supposed to be really dense and compact.

Don't forget that information is key. Your drawings may not be perfectly realist, but as long as you can provide the necessary informations to transmit your ideas, you'll have achieved your main objective -> Meaning that you shouldn't try too hard to replicate the exact form of the texture, but rather focus on how the shadows evolves on your page, and how you can "play" with them to make the public understand the transition from dense to sparse.

Dissections: I don't feel like you didn't understand the requirements of the exercise there ; since it's clear that you tried your best to break the silhouette of your ellipses and eventually to follow their curvature ; but rather that you perhaps still have some issues about picturing your forms in 3D space.

What I mean is that some of your textures, such as the Wood Slides or the Shingles (for instance) feels very flat on the page, and I actually did have the same issue with a texture I once tried to do, thus why I know the main reason why that sort of thing happen : A simple lack of planning. I just drew the pattern without really thinking about the ellipse's form, and ended up with a distorted mess that wasn't consistent.

Two advices that I learned from my own failures and that I can give to you:

* Plan your patterns, think in advance about the space you need to allocate to every form you're gonna draw so that it'll feel consistent in the end.

* Go crazier with the 3D effects of your forms. I think that you stayed too close to the texture mimicking aspect of the exercise and not enough to the illusion of form.

That said, you did try to achieve it and succesfully managed to do it several times here and there (The Scales feels like they have a 3D form), and so I'll still consider the lesson as a pass, also because the next one will help you developing the tools to understand all of that better.

Form Intersections: I don't have much to say there. The logic of the exercise is well understood and you made none of the mistakes mentioned in the lesson, therefore it's a pass. Good job!

Organic Intersections: Your sausages are good. Some confidence issues but nothing out of the ordinary. You avoided making complicated forms, which is good. That said, some of your shadows are sticking too close to the forms they're related to, and doesn't feel like they are being cast on another surface. When drawing a shadow, it may sound silly, but don't think first about how it relates to the form that creates it but rather to the surface it's being cast on.

I'd like for you to try and perfect this notion a bit by re-trying this specific notion.

Overall, it's a good run. Most of the requirements are set your most common mistakes are simple confidence issues that are perfectly understandable for any student at that point of the DrawABox experience.

I'll give you some small revisions to do to perfect your weak points which I'll correct as soon as you complete them so that you can advance to lesson 3.

In the meantime, feel free to have a look at my work for lesson 2 and 3 ; that have yet to be validated ; if you wish.

Thanks you for your reply!

About the missing page, I have no idea why it "disappeared" from the album but I added it again.

It's been a while since I've completed this exercise and so I've had the occasion to work on several of the issues that you've been noticing, but I've got to admit that your accuracy is on point on the issues I've been training to avoid the most since then.

Again, thank you for taking the time of reviewing this lesson!

Happy new year and good continuation to you!

I'll do a review for each exercise, not because I think there is one or several mistakes every time (which is actually quite far from being the case), but because I think that commenting on what's been done well is equally interesting and constructive, especially to keep good habits on the long run, but also to comment on ways to improve the use of your arm so that you can attain smoother and confident lines faster.

Superimposed lines:

• The logic of the exercise is well understood

• The lines are drawn with the shoulder

• There's fraying on both end - Take your time to put your pen exactly where you want it before tracing a line.

Ghosted Lines:

• The logic of the exercise is well understood

• The lines are drawn with the shoulder

Tips: Inaccuracy issues will solve themselves with practice, so no need to worry about that right now. That said, one advice from my personnal experience would be to think of your arm as a ruler when tracing your lines, meaning that you must really focus on locking your wrist when moving your shoulder so that your arm will more easily follow a straight line, as if there was a ruler on top of your pen. It's just a personal thinking process that I've gone through during the exercises but it really helped me to straighten my lines by just thinking about it.

Ghosted Planes:

• The logic of the exercise is well understood

• The lines are drawn with the shoulder

Table of Ellipses:

• The logic of the exercise is well understood

Tips: One method I use when drawing circles and ellipses is to think about the momentum, aka the speed at which my arm needs to move to achieve a smooth transition between the minor and major axis. I usually starts off "slow" (it must still be in a smooth and confident motion to avoid wobbly lines) then speed up when reaching the tip of my ellipse, drawing the opposite part of the minor axis much faster. While I'm no professional artist, controling the speed of my ellipses that way helped me a great deal, and it might be worth a try i you feel like it.

Ellipses in Planes:

• The logic of the exercise is well understood

Funnels:

• The logic of the exercise is well understood

Plotted Perspective:

• The logic of the exercise is well understood

Rough Perspective:

• The logic of the exercise is well understood

Rotated Boxes:

• The logic of the exercise is well understood

Tips: I'm actually impressed by how well you managed to reproduce the correct form for the whole structure. Which is something I had quite a few struggles with. The only advice I could give would be to think more how your structure constructs itself around the X and Y axis, and not only around itself. Basically: The form is excellent, but its position in space can be improved.

Organic Perspective:

• The logic of the exercise is well understood

General Conclusion: You've got a good understanding of 3D forms and how they constructs themselves in space. With a bit of practice on your arm's movements, you'll do great!

Thanks a lot for the constructive answer!

About that, as I said in a note linked to my submission, I redid those exercices at some point, and during the second run, I did wavy and arcing lines, but sadly lost the sheets. And while I thought about re-doing these, I thought it wouldn't be very representative of my progress on the long-run.

But this is a perfectly understandable and normal remark so thank you for noticing that.

PS: Sure, this is the slighest I can do in return.