Kazz

I legit forgot this website existed. Bruh.

But I saw the revision. I think it's good enough, they are smoother and more confident than before so you got the gist of it. Good luck ahead, if you are still there.

I was on the conversation with you on discord here regarding the redo here: https://discord.com/channels/365036548820959242/368870697742630912/899061193921163264

With this: http://imgur.com/a/dvPIMdP being your submission.

What I will say is that you did much better now drawing through your ellipses and they are both symmetrical and angled properly. Now, you still need to work on that confidence so it is important that in your warm-ups you work on that confidence. But, this is enough to get you ready for the next lesson. Since you did the 250-box challenge, then I recommend you wait for a critique there and do any necessary redos form it before continuing lesson 2 like how we discussed in the discord chat. I will mark your lesson as complete here so you can move on. Don't forget the pinned message!

It appears you were not given the next steps explicitly, so there was some confusion here. Don't worry too much about it, though, I'll go over some points here. For your lines, do focus on that confidence like the fellow said before. Remember that the point of ghosting is to allow your arm to move on its own after building enough muscle memory because giving this task to your conscious brain will result in wobbling. So it is important that you let go of that control and let your arm do the work for you after guiding it with the ghosting method.

Next, your ellipses, I will ask you to redo one page of table of ellipses since you did not draw through them twice, this is to help you get more comfortable with them later on as they become really important in lesson 3, so developing that confidence now will help you out. Don't forget, just like with your lines, you ghost these and build muscle memory. Refer to the ellipses exercise here and highly recommend you watch the videos as well. Take your time reading the instructions.

Your grasp of perspective needs some time and practice to develop, but this is fine in my opinion, just follow the advice that was provided by the fellow before me and do them in your warm-ups. As I said before on the discord, focus on the rotated boxes a bit more in your warm-ups for now, you don't have to do the whole exercise, simply do the best you can and stop once the timer reaches 0 to move on.

Good job on completing your first lesson for Draw a Box. I will be reviewing your work today.

Your lines are showing a strong start with little to now wobbling, showcasing confidence over accuracy in your mark making. Your superimposed lines even show a great level of confidence, plus there is a clear starting point with only wavering on one end for your straight lines. Where a lot of your confidence seems to suffer is on your curved superimposed lines, these being a lot harder to pull off, but still regarded a mistake. You could practice on these a bit more, as curved lines will become present in lesson 2 and onwards. That confidence is transferred over into the ghosted lines and planes exercises, you are getting used to the ghosting method and relying mostly on muscle memory to mark the line you put down. I will mention the slight bending near the ends of some of your lines here, there are a result of you slowing down your pen to hit the endpoint, breaking the continuity of your mark. It is best to never slowdown as you are marking down any mark to avoid this, so keep the speed consistent through. One downside of this is the possibility of overshooting your line, and it is better than undershooting or ending up with wobbling, but to ameliorate it you can lift your pen off the page as soon as it reaches the end point of your mark.

Your ellipses are done well with confidence over accuracy. The looseness you see is normal early on and not at all a mistake, it will go away with time as the ellipses get tighter with practice. The table of ellipses exercise is done correctly, with each cell containing a set of ellipses snugged up against one another and within the bounds of the established boundaries of the cell, and a consistent angle and degree through it. Same in your ellipses in planes exercise, they are all tangent to the planes edges and oriented in the direction of it as well. There is a slight issue with the second draw through of many of your ellipses, that is that you are not finishing your second ellipse after drawing the first in most cases, ending midway without fully enclosing them. You can work on this by simply marking your ellipse for just a bit longer to fully enclose them, try drawing through two times and over shoot a little, this could help with that issue. The funnels are great, but there are a few issues that I would like to point out. The ellipses are not aligned to the minor axis of the funnel, an issue that can be worked on later in warm-ups. The exercise puts emphasis on the minor axis here, so while you practice, try to focus on aligning them as much as you can. There are also moments that the ellipses are not snugged against one another and are separated from the rest. This is simply an accuracy issue that you will improve upon.

Your boxes are good, you have a strong grasp of perspective this early on, with your weakness being rotation. I will get into that later. Nothing wrong with your plotted perspective exercise. Rough perspective has some issues with line confidence and repeating lines. It is best to simply stick with whatever line you mark down no matter how off it comes out as this will be regarded a mistake, so don’t go over them. Aside from that, the exercise is done well, your accuracy with guesses are good. They are still off from the vanishing point, but perspective that is good enough is enough to work with, so this is ok. You certainly struggled with the rotated boxes exercises. On the left side, there seems to be a common issue of not rotation your boxes, especially at the bottom where the plane has no rotation and ends up flat on the page. You can think of the bottom planes as the top planes shifted down. For your next attempt with the rotated boxes, make sure you keep the boxes closer to one another to use the neighboring boxes as clues for the one you are building next to them, and draw bigger boxes to help you tackle this spatial problem better. As the exercise states, this is to get you to think about perspective using your surroundings. This is a great attempt still, the concept is now introduced, so it is ok if the end result doesn’t turn out well. Finally, the organic perspective exercise. Almost no issues with this one, there is depth to the scene and the boxes are all shallow with not much foreshortening as instructed. Always remember to keep the initial Y’s angles greater than 90 degrees to avoid any distortion.

You did well on lesson 1 and show that you are indeed ready to tackle the 250 box challenge. (Though, apparently you have already started :p) So far, all the issues I pointed out can be worked on through warm-ups, so don’t forget to do them for 10-15 minutes for all the previously done exercises from this lesson. Congratulations on completing lesson 1, I will be marking your work as complete.

Hello!

Seeing these extra 20 boxes, you gave dramatic foreshortening a shot and to the best of your ability. I think that while you do need some more practice, you got the framework down to improve on it further in your warm-ups. I can suggest to draw boxes that are more dramatic than the ones here even; make them converge really fast. But aside from that, I feel you are good to move on to lesson two. Don't forget to revisit them in your warm-ups and read the image showcasing the relationship between lines. Congratulations Phobic, you have completed the 250-box challenge, a big milestone on your Draw A Box journey. I will be marking you submission as complete. Good luck and have a great day!

It appears Rivgar has already given you a critique righ after I have finished mine, I'll post it anyway in case you are interested in reading it, lucky, you get two instead of one! :p

I also noticed that there is some conflicting information between both, so take at heart the critique that you believe has the issues covered. Specifically, the funnels exercise, I do not think the issue with the minor axis is truly present, as I do believe you did managed to, although imperfectly, align them. But again, up to you on this one. Take care and good luck on the box challenge!

{Start of critique}

Congratulations on getting through lesson 1. I will be the one reviewing your work today and provide some feedback on each individual exercise.

Your lines exercises show that you are getting comfortable with the ghosting method and are utilizing your whole arm to draw your marks. Using your whole arm will yield smoother, more consistent line-work by relying on muscle memory alone. Your superimposed lines exercise shows a good start of this, with most of your lines being kept mostly continuous and drawn confidently without much wobbling. There is a clear starting point with fraying only on one end of the line, something that will lessen over time with enough practice. The ghosted lines exercise is done well with not much wobbling aside from some flukes. The thing that I do notice is the small wobbling at the end of your mark, this is happening because you are slowing down right before you are about to hit the end mark. If over shooting is your main concern, you can try to lift the pen up from the page without any slowdown to ensure that the wobbling at the end doesn’t happen, and you ameliorate the overshooting. Just remember to not slow down your pace while you are drawing your line. The same applies to your ghosted planes exercise. Please note that you should never prioritize accuracy over confidence in your mark making as this is considered a mistake, this wobbling is present subtly but visibly in your exercise. Keep this in mind for your warm-ups later on.

Your ellipses are coming along well with smoothly draw ones and drawn through on most of your exercises, and with a good understanding of the ellipses minor axis, keeping them symmetrical on both sides where it folds the ellipse. For your table of ellipses there are a few problems, you have not drawn through your ellipses through in a few occasions, stopping midway or not drawing through at all. Keep in mind that to get smoothly draw ellipses with confidence, we must draw through them at least twice to maintain that confidence, and don’t draw through more than 3 times to avoid a messy one. Throughout the cell, you kept the angle consistent and kept them within bounds of it. You should avoid what you did on the cell at the second page on the fourth row, first column, you are not utilizing the entire cell’s space and ignoring its boundaries. You have done well in the ellipses in planes exercise with keeping them tangent to the plane’s edges and ensuring that they remain smoothly drawn. Same with your funnels, you have managed to keep them within the bounds of each funnel, snugged against one another, and also aligned well with the minor axis. I see very issues present, all that is needed is practice. If you are having troubles with symmetry and are struggling to remove some bends or tips from the major axis, you can try to draw your ellipses starting and ending on the minor axis, being this vastly more important than the major, you can try focusing on it more this way to ensure you construct two symmetrical halves.

For your boxes, you have a strong understanding of perspective early on, which will be refined even further on the upcoming box challenge. Your plotter perspective is done well, nothing else to state here. Your rough perspective is starting out strong, with a good amount of accuracy on your guesses for each line converging towards the vanishing point. The thing to mention is the subtle wobbling and bending on your lines, so what I said in the lines exercises applies here as well. If you are having troubles with arcing lines, you can try consciously bending them in the opposite direction to cancel it out. You have done an excellent job on your rotated boxes, keeping them close to the neighboring boxes with a good deal of rotation on all, you have taken advantage of the surroundings to nail down the perspective. There are some minor mistakes like not much rotation in your upper left corner, but with practice, this will become easier to manage. Finally, your organic perspective is done well, there is depth to the scene and plenty of different orientations on your boxes. Keep the angles of the initial Y greater than 90 degree to avoid distortion, don’t worry if these boxes are a little wonky, you will have plenty to practice with on the 250 box challenge.

Very good on your first lesson, you have shown a strong grasp of the concepts and overall this is a good submission. I believe you are prepared to begin the 250 box challenge with all the knowledge you have gained from lesson 1. Congratulations on completing lesson 1 and best of luck on the challenge ahead. I will be marking your lesson as complete.

Good job on completing the box challenge. It is far more work than most people expect, and its completion is a big milestone on your draw a box journey. I would like to cover the knowledge learned that you applied well, as well as things to work on for the future.

I will first mention the things you did well here regarding knowledge learned in lesson 1; line work here has improved over time with both smoothness and accuracy, seeing less wobbling or bending that was present in the beginning, showing you took your time with each line with the ghosting method to rely on muscle memory alone while making your mark. You are experimenting with different rotations, this is good to see, playing around with rotations will help you better understand spacial problems. You have also done well in solving the divergence issue you had at the beginning of your challenge, with no sets fully diverging away from the vanishing point. Lastly, I would like to mention that you are applying hatching and superimposed lines for line-weight. It is good to see that you started out practicing with these tools early on in the challenge, as they are powerful tools important in future lessons.

I would like to now mention the things you can work on and some recurring mistakes. I will start with the aforementioned hatching and line-weight. While you did begin to practice with them early on, it appears both are rushed and not much care was given to them. For example, even near the end of the box challenge, the superimposed line ends up wobbling a lot still, plus you have a tendency to draw them multiple times when you are only required to draw it once. It could be that you are correcting your lines, which should be avoided, and I encourage you to stick to your original mark no matter how far off the end point it is. Remember that fraying is not really an issue, since that will go away with practice on your warm-ups. Your hatching could also do with some extra time, most of the lines here appear bent or sometimes wobbling. I suspect that you didn’t take the time to ghost each, they should be treated with the same amount of respect you have for the box’s line. So remember to take as much time as you need with each hatching line there on the plane. The other issue that is quite common is the convergence in pairs that often appear through the challenge, as well as the issue with the back corner of the box that seems to diverge away from the rest of the set, which is normal, because all of your previous mistakes accumulate there on the back making it hard nearly impossible to find a spot where the back corner goes. One way to work on this issue is to look at how the angles of your lines relate to one another, here is a helpful image that can give you a better grasp of this: https://i.imgur.com/8PqQLE0.png This here shows that the lines of the front corner and back have a very similar angle in degree, so you can roughly estimate the convergence of each, looking at their relationship will also help you avoid the convergence in pairs issue over time. So in essence, moving the vanishing point closer to the box will create more dramatic foreshortening, making the whole set of lines converge faster, while moving it further away will make the lines converge less but never diverge from the vanishing point. One final mistake I would like to mention, keep the degrees of the initial Y’s angles greater than 90 degrees to prevent any distortion in your boxes.

Edit: I forgot to mention, you should try to draw bigger boxes, much bigger than the ones you have here. Drawing big also helps a lot with tackling spatial problems and has the added benefit of helping you improve your line quality.

One of the things that seem to be holding you back at the moment is that you have not practiced dramatic foreshortening much in the challenge, with the only doing so was near the end it seems. This is an issue because for you to develop a stronger comprehension of space and tackle these types of problems, you have to experiment with the rates through the entire challenge. For this reason, I would like you to submit a few extra boxes, practicing it. I’ll give you some details below.

He he, looks like someone picked up this submission while I was critiquing and already. Submitted mine anyway. :p

Anyway, good luck on the 250 challenge again fellow.

Hello and great job completing lesson 1, I will be taking a look at your submission.

For your lines exercise, your superimposed lines have a clear starting point at one end, with fraying at the other. The thing you seem to struggle with is keeping the line continuous on the page, especially on the longer lines with all their shakiness, but they will improve over time as you get used to drawing from your shoulder. Your curved superimposed lines are, however, draw unconfidently, so always draw continuously without any deviations. The ghosted lines and ghosted planes are done well with smoothly drawn lines with a fair amount of accuracy, something that will develop over time as you practice with the ghosting method on your warm-ups. One little thing that seems to be of issue here is the slight arcing, caused by either not really drawing from your shoulder or by a natural habit of yours. If the latter, all it takes is to consciously bend the line in the opposite direction to cancel out the bending there. So far, you understood the purpose of these exercises, that is to introduce you to drawing from your shoulder and drawing confidently.

Your ellipses have some problems with both symmetry and wobbling. Early on, an ellipse will be loose as you draw through it, so it is normal to see and will close down with time and practice. However, it appears you are instead thinking about keeping the ellipse accurate withing the cell, and snugged up. This is causing conscious intervention creating all the little deviations you see there and kills both the smoothness and symmetry of your ellipse. For one, an ellipse must be cut in two symmetrical halves through the minor axis, that being the narrowest span of the ellipse. It is of great importance that you ensure this symmetry by drawing them confidently and through them at least twice or three times, so do not prioritize accuracy, as that will undermine it. So far, for your table of ellipses you did well, keeping the angle and degree consistent through the cell and. The *ellipses in planes** also were done well, with you striving to keep them bound to the edges of the planes. Finally, your funnels are done well but can be improved with practice, seeing as you are having trouble keeping the ellipses snugged against one another, but you did get the idea to align the ellipses with the minor axis, which was the point of the exercise. You should practice these exercises in your warm-ups and ensure that you draw your ellipses confidently with no wobbling.

Boxes are a great form to think about perspective, with its lines obeying the vanishing points they point towards. The plotted perspective gets you used to the vanishing points, so they are a great introductory exercise. Yours was done well, and I see no problems with it. All the lines were guessed using your intuition on the rough perspective exercise, so it is normal to see accuracy being quite lacking early on. But not something you should be concerned about right now, you have tons of boxes to practice with. Mayor thing I would like to point out is your line quality, it appears you are prioritizing accuracy and redoing your lines that were off the end point. Avoid redoing your lines no matter how off they come out and make sure you draw confidently, remember that accuracy is not something you can control when drawing smoothly. Rotated boxes are done well with, you kept the boxes close to one another and this helped you better guess how they would rotate in space by looking out for its surroundings as clues. There are very little issues I can find here, other than forgetting to draw the outer corners of the sphere. One bit of advice I can give is to draw bigger boxes when rotating to make it easier to tackle the exercise. Finally, your organic perspective exercise is done quite well, with your boxes rotating freely in space and decreasing in size to create the illusion of depth. You have some more practicing with your box construction, but already you are off to a great start. One thing to keep in mind is to ensure that the initial Y’s angles need to be greater than 90 degrees to prevent some wonky-ness you see. Don’t worry about that too much, this is a really hard exercise, and you did very well for your first attempt.

Overall, this is a great attempt, and you did well understanding the purpose of each exercise. The only thing I believe you need to work on is your confidence for both your lines and ellipses. So incorporate them into your warm-ups for 10-15 minutes before tackling any draw a box exercise. You can move on to the 250 box challenge, an important exercise to further develop your spacial reasoning skills, so I encourage you to go through it. I will mark your lesson as complete. Good luck on the challenge and congratulations on completing lesson 1!

Good work on tackling the 250 box challenge. It is certainly a time-consuming and difficult challenge that many people underestimate. I would like to cover the things you did well, those being how well you understood the core concepts of the lesson covered in the article, as well as the application of the previous lesson’s concepts.

One of the best ways to learn and tackle spacial problems is through experimentation. You have done an excellent job experimenting with different orientations, rates of convergence or foreshortening with both dramatic and shallow, and proportions. This helps you understand these concepts on a deeper level, so it is good to see you took into consideration these three main variables. It is thanks to this experimentation that your convergence has become more consistent towards the end of the challenge, proving you have come to grasp them well. Something else to note is the application of hatching lines and line weight. They are great tools to apply later on in future lessons. They take time to get comfortable with, so the challenge is a great place to start practicing both. About your line weight, however, I would like to mention one thing you seem to misunderstand about it, I will go over it in a bit. Finally, you have done a good job keeping your lines smooth towards the end. There is still some occasional shakiness, but they have certainly improved over time, well done applying the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder.

For the things to improve on. Your lines are drawn confidently, but one main issue is that towards the end, you have trouble knowing where it ends. This thought makes you slow down your line marking, resulting in some bending near the end of it. To work on this, make sure you keep the speed consistent throughout the line making process to ensure consistency. This at first will cause you to over shoot, so the way we deal with this is by lifting your pen off the page right as we approach the mark to prevent any slowdown form happening that could compromise your consistency. If you are already doing this but still find some overshooting in your lines, that is fine, over time you will get better with your accuracy. Your hatching looks good, however, I believe you need to spend a little more time with it since at times it appears a bit rushed and shaky. Treat hatching lines like any other line, plan ahead, ghost to build muscle memory and keep a consistent trajectory while drawing from your shoulder. I would like to address your line weight, while good to see that you are applying it, it appears you are not applying it to the rest of the box’s silhouette. Make sure that you apply it to the outer edges of your box, as they will help reinforce the solidity of your form and also help organize your line work. Finally, your convergence still needs some work. One of the most consistent issues I see through your homework is convergence in pairs. The thing to remember is that all lines of a single set must converge towards a single point, no matter how shallow or dramatic the foreshortening, they must obey by this rule. So, here is what can be done to ameliorate this issue: https://imgur.com/8PqQLE0 This image can be hard to understand at first, but it is worth showing to students who struggle with the mistake pointed out before. What it tells us is that there is a relationship between the lines angles for one set. The inner pair of lines will be similar in angle, unless the box is too long, while the outer pair will depend on the location of the vanishing point.

So the key things to remember here is this: each pair of lines will always converge and never diverge from their respective vanishing points, and also never be completely parallel because of how perspective works. Looking through your submission, it appears you are grasping the main concepts well and just need some more work to work on improving them. I highly recommend you incorporate this exercise into your warm-ups with everything stated here in mind, including the image that shows the relationship between the lines. This is overall a solid piece of work and I think you are ready to begin tackling lesson two. Congratulations on completing the 250 box challenge. It is a major hurdle to overcome, so be proud of yourself for persevering.