PhallicLobotomy

Im glad you found the critique helpful :)

The little blurb you mentioned at the bottom of the page was me suggesting that youve finished this lesson. When other people come to check on this, they have the option to agree with me by clicking a little button. Once two people agree, youll get the credit for finishing this lesson. Dont get discouraged if this takes a while because it might, and in the meantime Id suggest just moving on. Youve done the excersize so having it "officially" recognized just serves as some validation. As for when you've "finished" a lesson, I believe its done as soon as you submit it. The excersizes are designed to be completed and forgotten about. The only exception is the excersizes here in lesson 1 and also lesson 2, which can be done again as a warm up like I suggested you do with the ghosted planes. You dont have to go crazy trying to "finish" these warmups or anything as you wont be submitting them anway, its just a way to get a little extra practice in where you may need it.

Hope that answered your questions

Hi there. Ill go ahead and give what critique I can here.

First off is your lines. They wobble a fair bit, and a lot seem to arc just a little. Luckily we only have to work on one of those things at a time, and we should start with the wobble. My biggest piece of advice would be to try to make the mark faster. Ghost your lines quickly, and once you feel like you have the right angle to make the mark, put the pen down and make the line as fast as you can. With any luck youll have gone from your start point to your finish before your brain even has a chance to tell your arm what to do. Making lines this fast should help you lighten up on your pens too, which will make them last longer. Ultimately you want to feel like your not dragging the pen across the page, but quickly and lightly striking it with your pen. As for your slight arcing, first make sure youre drawing from your shoulder. If you still find your lines arc, youll have to make a consious effort to arc your lines in the opposite direction than what youre naturally producing. This will feel weird for a bit but after a bit youll naturally straighten right up. Of course priority goes to making smooth lines; a smooth arc is better than a straight but wobbly line.

Your elipses are pretty good. Theres a few in your tables that overlap and some in the planes go out of the bounds, so you should still try to practice them a bit, but theyre smooth, which is great.

Your rough perspective and rotated boxes all roughly go to the vanishing point without much issue, which is good. Id like to specifically call out that in just the two pages of rough perspective it looks like your accuracy improved a bit. Six scenes is a vey low sample size so there could have been other factors, but I like to call it as I see it. However on your organic perspective where you dont get a set vanishing point it seems you defaulted to trying to make each set of lines parallel. In reality when you have boxes in 3 point perspective every single line converges towards a vanishing point. It may be a slight convergence, but lines are never parallel and when you try to make them so line can even end up diverging towards a vanishing point instead of converging, which can make for some reeeally weird forms. You also seemed to default to trying to make all the boxes cubes, which might end up costing you some valuable experience if you dont watch out for it. Luckily, theres a simple way to help with both of these issues. First off when you go to do your 250 boxes youll find a link to a Y generator somewhere on the info page. Use that. I think its recommended to not use it past your first 100 boxes, but by then you should be more than comfortable making asymetrical Ys. More importantly, as soon as you have your Ys, plan your vanishing points, even put dots on the page if you need to. Experiment with VPs that are close to your box and others that are far away. This will help you see just how sharply or subtly your lines will converge.

The 250 box challenge is all about tackling the concept of form and depth head on, and thats definately your next step. Id also reccomend when you go to draw boxes for the challenge, you start with a 15 min warmup of ghosted lines and ghosted planes. Practicing making quick, confident lines is a great warmup and should help straighten your lines out. Best of luck with your next step!

Hi, congrats on finishing lesson one! I think this is a great submission, but there are certainly things we can address to help you direct your practice where its really needed.

First off, your lines are a bit wobbly. From early homework peices to the later ones they definately seemed to improve which is great to see, but they still werent perfectly straight. Honestly, straight lines are hard. I think the most important thing is to accept that no matter what you do, your line could very well turn out wrong. Once your pen is on the page, you no longer have any control over where it goes; all you can do is move your arm quickly and smoothly. Your line will likely miss its target, and it might arc a little, but thats totally fine as you can practice working that out later. As of right now though, your #1 priority is a straight, smooth line.

Your elipses are much more smooth. A few here and there are a little misshapen, but that will come with practice. Unfortunately theres not a lot of advice I can give here.

On your rough perspective boxes, a few of the boxes dont have lines that arent perfectly vertical/horizontal. This is a really tricky thing to get right as the mistakes made are usually really subtle. A line might be just a couple degrees off and it will look fine, but once you try to draw the back face of the box its waaay off. The most important thing here is to plot your points. Every line should be planed with points. Picture the line between the points, ghost it a couple times, and picture it again. If it looks off, replot the points. A few stray dots arent going to ruin a box, but wonkey perspective will.

On your rotated boxes, your boxes are tight together which is awesome to see as it helps you use information from neibouring boxes to help. As the boxes get further away from the centre, the far end of the face should shrink more and more. You did great with this on the horizontal and vertical boxes, but the four boxes to the corners of the center box didnt go as well. Its important to remember that on those boxes there are TWO sides that get further and should shrink, so you should end up with a box face that looks more like a diamond than a square.

Finally theres the orgainic perspective which you said you had trouble with. I think you have the opposite problem here as you did in the rough perspective: now that the boxes are in 3 point perspective, a lot of your lines are too paralell. Luckily the solution is the same: plot every single point, ghost every line to that point, and plot again if you need to. Another trick for 3 point boxes is to actually find the vanishing points. There wont be any when you just have the Y, so your first two lines are pretty free so long as they converge a little. But as soon as you have a pair of lines you also have a vanishing point, so follow your lines and find it, and put a dot on it to help you remember what your aiming for. A lot of the times it will be off the page. I put a dot on my right thumbnail (Im left-handed) and keep it where it needs to be.

Your about to grind out 250 boxes, and thats likely all the practice youll need with your perspective. Id suggest doing a bunch of ghosted lines and super-imposing them as a 15 minute warmup whenever you go to draw your boxes. That should help straighten up your lines. Best of luck!

Im hackin away at the 250 boxes too, and I definately had this same problem at first. What helped me was I tried to estimate how much time this is going to take me over all. Im finishing a page of 6 boxes in about 20-30 mins, so that puts me at about 21 hours for this. Its going to take a while and its gunna be a grind, and rushing isnt gunna make it that much shorter. Once I accepted that, I was able to slow things down and focus a little more, and once I did that I started to catch really minor mistakes I was making more often, which made the whole thing a little more fun. I also like to put on a little music or a background video while I draw, especially stuff like this. Ill pick out a long video or an album (roughly an hour) and mix this excersize with my free relaxing time. Thats not everyones favourite thing to do though.

Thanks a ton for the critique. I definately noticed some of those things but some I didnt even think about. Ill definately focus on those excersizes as a warm up from now on. Thanks again.