Niels

HA!

Glad to hear from you again and godspeed with your art journey!

Hi and no worries for late reply. And splendid, your lines and ellipses have improved quite a lot, great work.

Happy to help, and I looked at your paintings, they are done really nice! I like all of them, especially the mining at aberdeen doodle

Happy to be of help, Godspeed to your journey!

Hello, and a splendid work, the lines and ellipses are confident! My best wishes for your journey now, and all I can say is, 250 boxes will take time, but it is a great opportunity to set a schedule for your art sessions, a dedicated time frame not only helps us stay consistent but also makes the day less chaotic haha(coming from personal experience), and it will benefit for future lessons as well. Good luck.

Hello, my heartfelt gratitude towards you for taking your precious time and providing a valuable critique, I really appreciate this gesture.

I will take good care of things you mentioned, especially the point about converging lines, I will go through the section of lesson again that emphasise on this matter.

And I should mention this, that it is indeed a fineliner and not ball point pen, the local store had only this variant of fineliner available, I asked about it in reddit and Uncomfortable said that colour will not be an issue so I continued with it. But I will make sure to get the black ink one asap.

Thank you again, have a great time ahead!

Hello Alice578, firstly congratulations on finishing lesson one.

Before I take a look at your submission, let me just say, using instagram to post homework can be little tedious, as firstly, there is a limit to how much you can upload in one post(which can be really daunting for huge challenges such as 250 boxes), secondly on some devices it is impossible to zoom in to the uploaded pics which can limit the quality of critiques, I am not sure if its due to Insta upload or the pics were like that only but in some cases I can see that some part of page is cropped out from the pic but I am not sure if its due to IG or it being the pic like that so theres that, further the community critiquers might be a little hesitant as well to log into their IG account, so you might not even receive a proper audience as you are supposed to, so in my opinion, do try using Imgur, it is community favourite, easy to learn and you won't even have to create an account for it, if for some reason that is not working, do try google drive or anything else that lets people to atleast zoom in the images, but if nothing else works, then indeed Instagram is also a viable option if that's the only option you have, hope you will understand!

Now lets have a look at your attempt.

Lines:

In your Superimposed lines, we can see that in most cases there is little to no fraying, so that is a good thing to start with, further there is slight bit of wobble in some lines, that can mean not drawing from shoulders or having hesitation while performing or trying to correct the trajectory, so do take care of that, as for now our main objective is to get a smooth confident stroke rather than an accurate line, do give a read to this paragraph a go. As for fraying at end, do not worry for now, accuracy will improve over time with deliberate regular warmups.

Your Ghosted lines have a nice smooth confident stroke, so a great work there, and again do not worry about undershooting, overshooting or missing the trajectory for now, with proper ghosting and practice, it will improve over time.

Same goes for your Ghosted Planes exercise, most marks are smooth and confident, so another nice attempt, but I can see you have either missed placing the marks or dots for the lines going through the middle of the planes or they are too small to notice. If you have missed them, and executed those middle lines freehandedly, then let me remind you, Placing those start and end dots are a necessary step for planning, properly ghosting and executing marks, we are aiming for a well planned mark in here instead of arbitrary lines, so do take care of this in future.

Ellipses:

Your Table of Ellipses contains good confident ellipses as well which are drawn through at least twice, and you have taken good care to keep most of the ellipses in each section to have similar or same degree of openness and angle of orientation, for future you can also try incorporating ellipses with different degrees of openness as well and you have also tried to take good care of keeping most of the ellipses within bounds, that is they are touching the borders as well adjacent ellipses(mostly), there are gaps in some sections but do not worry a little bit of deviation is acceptable as the accuracy will improve over time, so another good attempt.

Your Funnels exercise also contains good confident strokes, some ellipses are being bisected by the minor axis equally as well, but others are not, so do take care that the minor axis(middle line) is supposed to bisect "each" ellipse into two equal parts, it is difficult at first as it relies heavily on accuracy, but don't worry for now, with enough deliberate practice that will also improve over time. What you can do for now is to try keeping the minor axis right in the middle of funnel, then try drawing ellipses over it, further if you want you can also try varied degree of openness of ellipses, being the narrowest ellipse emerging from centre and they gets more open as you move towards the end points.

The Ellipses in Ghosted planes adds another level of difficulty, but you have done great to keep most of your ellipses smooth and confident while also going over them atleast twice, which again is a nice attempt.

Boxes:

The boxes are difficult to attempt at first if you are not used to them, so again kudos for attending them nonetheless. And apart from things mentioned above:

In your plotted, hmm it seems you have tried to do them freehandedly, which totally goes against the instruction of the exercise which specifically states to use ruler for everything, including the boxes butI will accept it as it is, as it seems you have gotten the gist of good markmaking principles for the lesson, but in future, DO TAKE CARE to follow the instructions of an exercise, exactly as they are mentioned in the exercise page, and if you have questions regarding those instructions or a confusion about them, then do not hesitate to ask in the Discord channels or in here at the questions tab as well.

Your Rough perspective exercise, the first page is slight blurry but it seems they still contains strong confident strokes and you have taken care to keep the width parallel and the height perpendicular to the horizon which is again a good attempt. But, we can see some additional marks in the exercise, which might be due to correcting the initial trajectory of your first mark, which should be avoided at all cost, you should never try to correct your initial mark, always treat your initial mark as the final one no matter how inaccurate it is, and should move on with it as it was a correct mark.

Your Rotated boxes, you did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps mostly consistent. But these rotations feels like a guesswork, so one pointer for your future attempts so that it does not looks like a guess work, try to keep the gaps between boxes narrow and consistent, that can not only make it easier to give them nice rotations but you will also get a base to further mark your next box. While the rotations here aren't perfect, still this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons or the boxes challenge to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved.

Finally the organic perspective, besides the points mentioned earlier, it is a nice attempt, kudos. And I will again just add this regarding lineweights "Lineweight should be added with confident ghosted lines, and solely to the part of lines to overlap, not to whole lines." for future reference.

With that said, overall it was a nice attempt and kudos to you for finishing it but do take care of the points mentioned for your future warmups, mainly: the correcting the mark one and following the exercise to the word.

Happy to help and Godspeed with the challenge!

Hello SometimesCrab, congratulations on finishing lesson one. Now lets have a look at your attempt, shall we.

Lines:

Your Superimposed lines have a good confident strokes with little to no fraying at beginning in most and you have also given a try to superimposed arches which will further help you to achieve a good markmaking practices so that is a really nice attempt, now as for that slight fraying at the beginning, do not worry much, just focus on putting your pen at the right mark without rushing, as for the fraying at the end and trajectories deviating away from the end points, do not worry about that as well, as the accuracy will improve over time with deliberate practice(or warmups).

Same goes for your Ghosted lines, good confident strokes, the end points are fairly accurate as well, a slight wobble is present here and there but I think you got the gist of confident mark making, and this along with the accuracy will improve over time with deliberate practice as well.

Same goes for your Ghosted planes exercise, good confident strokes, in here we can also see that you have taken good care of placing the end points(dots) for the lines situated in the middle of the planes, which some students miss out, they are crucial part for planning stage and executing, so another good attempt, as usual do not worry about accuracy for now, the slight wobble still persists here and there

Ellipses:.

Your Table of Ellipses contains good confident ellipses as well which are drawn through at least twice, and you have taken good care to keep most of the ellipses in each section to have similar or same degree of openness and angle of orientation, if you want, you can further introduce more variations to different sections of your table to get used to drawing ellipses of varied degrees and openness, you have also tried to take good care of keeping most of the ellipses within bounds, that is they are touching the borders as well adjacent ellipses(mostly), there are gaps in some sections but do not worry a little bit of deviation is acceptable as the accuracy will improve over time, so another good attempt.

Your Funnels exercise also contains confident ellipses which are drawn through atleast twice, and a good amount of ellipses are being bisected equally by the minor axis (the middle line) as well, though even if some ellipses are not fitting that criteria, still I shall point out that the minor axis should divide all the ellipses into two equal parts, it is difficult at first as it relies heavily on accuracy, but don't worry for now, with enough deliberate practice that will also improve over time. What you can do for now is to try keeping the minor axis right in the middle of funnel, then try drawing ellipses over it, further if you want you can also try varied degree of openness of ellipses, being the narrowest ellipse emerging from centre and they gets more open as you move towards the end points.

The Ellipses in Ghosted planes adds another level of difficulty, but you have done great to keep most of your ellipses smooth and confident while also going over them atleast twice, a slight wobble is present here and there so again do not worry about that, deliberate practice will help with those.

Boxes:

The boxes are difficult to attempt at first if you are not used to them, so again kudos for attending them nonetheless. And apart from things mentioned above:

Your Plotted Perspective is done nicely.

Your Rough perspective exercise contains strong confident strokes and you have taken care to keep the width parallel and the height perpendicular to the horizon which is again a good attempt. But, we can see some additional marks in the exercise, which might be due to correcting the initial trajectory of your first mark, which should be avoided at all cost, you should never try to correct your initial mark, always treat your initial mark as the final one no matter how inaccurate it is, and should move on with it.

Your Rotated boxes, it turned out pretty well. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps consistent. While the rotations here aren't perfect still this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons or the boxes challenge to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved.

Finally the Organic perspective, besides the points mentioned earlier, it is a really good attempt, kudos. And I will again just add this regarding lineweights "Lineweight should be added with confident ghosted lines, and solely to the part of lines to overlap, not to whole lines." for future reference.

With that said, it was a good attempt overall. One more note regarding your sketchbook, I have noticed that your sketchbook has some texture to it, which might not be as pleasant as a smooth paper will be, for your fineliner's tip. I have read a lot in the server that how it can damage the tip over time which will result in overall less usage life of your pen. So if possible do try to look into this.