SimonP

Hey there! I saw you finally submitted your work for Lesson 2, congrats! This is going to be a quick review, but only because the work here is so well done, there's not much to write about. Nevertheless, we'll press on.

Organic Arrows and Forms. Arrows are pretty fantastic. This is my favorite exercise, particularly because it feels especially good to get those parallel lines moving in space without any uneven spots. You take great care here, making sure that your arrows explore the space as much as they can, and line weight is applied well here where lines overlap.

Organic Forms and Contours. These are also quite well done. You keep the forms uniform on both pages, and the ellipses here follow the minor axis and expand/contract in a logical fashion. Typically this exercise can juke students when the time comes to draw the contours without the ellipse shape to help them, but I believe you have the right idea with these. As you end up making more sausages in the future, through warmups or necessity, it may help to experiment with more orientations, as those contours will also change. Here's a few different ways that sausages can be twisted. But other than that, I think these are great!

Intro to Texture. Okay! Another great section this lesson. I think your analysis page looks nearly perfect, to say nothing of your dissections. I'd say your observational skills are quite advanced, and it definitely pays off here. In fact, I remember seeing some of these in discord, and I was especially intrigued by that shizophyllum mushroom you shared. All of your textures here look great, and you employ the silhouette well to convey the forms that might otherwise appear flat. They also distort as the texture accelerates towards the back of the forms, and they adhere nicely to the contours.

Intersections. If I had to guess by looking through these, it might've been the hardest section for you. This is a guess, because a fair number of these intersections are small. That said, it's only a guess, and with the skill you've demonstrated up to this point, those could easily be deliberate. The intersections, while small, are varied and numerous, as you threw many forms on each page, building up from six large boxes, to four hundred and thirty six on the fourth(not really that many, but there's a lot on there).

Now the organic intersections here are also nicely done here. The forms are consistently done, and don't seem to fall into the trap of cutting into the forms around them. The second page is particularly noteworthy here, as the alternating orientation of the forms keep them from reading as parallel, which is cautioned against here. But as it stands, you do a great job of perpetuating the illusion of three dimensional space with these.

So with all said and done, I believe this lesson is as officially complete as a community critique can be. Nicely done!

Hey Pie, just finished lesson 1 as well and ill keep it quick. remember this is feedback from another learner so take what i say with a grain of salt.

Starting off, when looking at your superimposed lines you do an excelent job of marking lines confidently. They for the most part have a consistent path and dont wobble. there is some fraying at the end of the lines but that is something that we both will get better with as we do more warmups over time. i did notice some fraying at the beginning, so just remember to slow your process down a hair and match the start of the line for each stroke.

Ghosted lines look great, some small bowing and missing points, again this will grow as we get more practice.

Ghosted plans also look fairly good

With the table of ellipses, you do a pretty good job of getting the ellipes to touch the edges of others and the box, with minor misses that will be improved over time. They are consistent ellipses with most of them being symmetrical. Refrain from drawing too many lines with the ellipses, as for many you went over 2 lines.

The tables of ellipses have a couple of deformed ellipses but you do a good job of touching the ellipses to the edges to the best of your ability, again try not to draw too many lines over the ellipses.

the funnels of ellipses exercise was done pretty well, they are touching the sides and while some are off, are very close to alligning correctly on the center minor axis line. I actually believe you're doing pretty good with them, if nothing else maybe give me some critique on my ellipses (if you feel up to it, no pressure).

your plotted perspective is actually solid, some verticals are a hair slanted but it looks good and frankly almost unnoticeable unless youre looking hard for it.

you continue with rough perspective and do a very good job of ghosting the lines, keeping it close to the vanishing point

ill just finish off, youre doing very well, and the rest of your exercises look very good to me. you do a good job of ghosting and executing your lines and you seem to have a decent grasp of the basic perspective were working with, ill let the rest up to someone with more knowledge than myself continue if they have anything to say. If you would, I would appreciate the critique of my own lesson 1 if you have the time. again no pressure, just wanted to ask. thank you for your time and keep working hard

Hi there, my name is it0 and I'll try to give you some feedback. Overall I've to say you've done a very good job, so congratulations on your work.

Your superimposed lines exercise looks very good, there's some fraying at the end of the line going on. Also at some points you can see that you try to correct the trajectory of your lines and therefore there's a bit of woobling but overall your line looks confident so practicing over and over as part of your warm-up exercises will improve your results with time.

On the ghosted lines I can see confident lines, smooth and consistent with no arcs. In most of them it misses the mark at least on the end point, so there's still improvement to move from level to and reach level three. Make sure you ghost the line from the beginning until the end and stop exactly where you want it to finish. Once you've ghosted it several times, draw it with confidence in a single stroke. This can also be seen on your ghosted planes exercise where the lines are confident and smooth but you can see some lines overshooting the end point.

For the ellipses tables there's room for improvement since you can see that usually your first pass differs from the second, again take your time to ghost the ellipse and place with a confident stroke. Practice this exercise to develop the muscle memory for further exercises in the upcoming lessons. This can also be seen on your ellipses funnel are well done. But overall both exercises are well done, your lines are confident which makes your ellipses smooth and consistent. Repeat this exercise over and over to develop your muscle memory to connect those two passes.

For the ellipses funnel the only recommendation I would suggest is to increase the degree of your ellipses as they move far from the center. There's some of it going on the exercise, but I would suggest for you to exaggerate it, specially on the edges ellipses. You can see an example of this exaggeration here.

Entering the boxes realm, I've nothing to say on the first exercise, your verticals are vertical and you're correctly moving your horizontal lines to the vanishing points. Thanks for shadowing the faces and impossing the edge of the box (I would suggest to imposed those lines without using a ruler, but you'll do this on the box challenge multiple times).

On the rough perspective your horizontals and verticals are not that confident and straight. Remember that your verticals should be perpendicular to the horizon line, and your horizontals should be parallel. As in the previous exercises, remember to ghost those lines before commiting them into the paper, use your whole arm to draw them instead of using only your wrist. When drawing boxes it's important to start and finish the line at the points you marked on the paper. You're doing a great job extending the lines to the vanishing point. As you can see some of those estimations were quite off, but again, there's a challenge in front of you that will help you on this.

Your rotated boxes perspective has come out pretty well. You've followed the exercise basis by establishing the vertical and horizontal axis, the spaces between your boxes are spaced consistently which can be seen with the hatched planes. Your boxes are rotating since you're moving your vp's accordingly and as far as I can see, all the boxes have been drawn, including the corners ones. Moving into the upcoming lessons your spatial thinking will improve, so it's a good idea at some point in the future, coming back to repeat this exercise and see how much have you improved over time and practice.

And last, your organic perspective exercise. I loved it. Just, as in the previous exercise make sure you spend time and effort on improving your ghosting lines, push on hitting those spots that you mark on the paper. During the 250 box challenge you'll have enough time to think on how lines converge and how to avoid divergence when drawing boxes.

Overall, as I said, this's a solid submission and you've demonstrated that you understand the concepts explained on this lesson. I'll mark it as completed and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Have a lot of fun!!!

This is my first feedback! I just started as well and want to be helpful while going through the course.

Re: rough perspective exercise - it seems like your accuracy dropped more when you ghosted back from the right side of the page/ far-right of the VP and when working with relatively free-standing objects (e.g. page 1 panel 3 bottom box, page 2 panel 3 bottom box). When this exercise comes up in future warm-ups (if it's within the warm-up rules, idk I haven't gotten there yet) try purposefully plotting a majority of the boxes right of the VP until your two sides even up. Likewise try separating your boxes from each other to practice hitting the VP without another object to anchor you nearby.

Re: organic perspective - just commenting to say I like the overall design of your boxes and how they're moving in space. I think a lot of students (myself included) forget composition and design during something structured like this and it was nice to have a reminder that just because we're practicing perspective doesn't mean we should forget about thoughtful design.

Happy new year and good luck with recovery and the rest of the course!

Hello Potat, I’ll be critiquing your submission today; if you have any questions, feel free to ask below. With that said, I’ll go ahead and review your submission.

Lines

You start off the lesson well with your superimposed lines; the lines remain fairly consistent between each line. Fraying begins to occur as the lines get longer, nothing to worry about; that will improve with practice. Next up are your ghosted lines, which wobble slightly a bit but are fairly accurate for the most part. Nice work.

Ghosted Planes & Ellipses

Now onto the ghosted planes and ellipses. Clear planning of your lines is present, and you seem to be very accurate in each line. The ellipses shown are confidant and are clearly drawn over more than once. Additionally, you reach all four edges of the plane most of the time.

Table Of Ellipses & Funnels

Moving along to your table of ellipses, consistent lines are present, and all ellipses are drawn through at least twice. Ellipses are slightly loose, but that’s a normal occurrence that’ll tighten up with practice. Your funnels have little to no tilt and you understand the importance of the central minor axis. Nice execution on your ellipses overall.

Plotted, Rough, & Organic Perspective

Starting from plotted perspective, the back corners are slanted, but don't be worried; this is pretty common and as you progress towards the 250 challenge you’ll learn where to estimate back corners. Your boxes within the rough perspective remain in one-point perspective, and appear to have clear planning for each line. Line extensions are correctly taken from each corner of the box using a ruler and reach the vanishing point fairly accurately. Pressing ahead, your rotated boxes have clean lines with little space between them. However the diagonal boxes don't rotate as much and appear to converge towards the same VP. Don't be too worried about it though, I recognize the difficulty of this particular exercise and you'll get more opportunities during warm-ups to work on it. Lastly, your organic perspective boxes hold consistent lines, and you show clear intentions with the ghosting method. As you progress through pages 1 and 2, you begin to experiment with box orientation as you develop spatial reasoning. Next time try exaggerating the scale a bit more, the box size doesn't really increase dramatically as the path approaches the viewer. The hatching is generally good but be mindful with the confidence, lines on a few boxes appear a bit more wobbly.

Overall great job, you understand the importance of line confidence and met the goals for each exercise.

Hello Chieftang, just dropping by to give you some feedback on your bugs. This might be a tad shorter than my usual critiques, but that’s mostly because you’ve done such a good job that there isn’t much to criticise.

Starting with your organic forms you’re doing a good job of keeping your lines smooth and confident, and sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here.

Your contour curves are looking confident and well aligned too, and it is nice to see that you’re experimenting with shifting their degree. As a little bonus I’d like to share this diagram with you, showing the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived. You’re doing great at expressing your forms in a variety of orientations, the point I wanted to make here is that when one end of a form faces the viewer the degree of your contour lines should be shifting wider as we slide along the sausage form, moving farther away from the viewer. This is also influenced by the way in which the sausages themselves turn in space, but farther = wider is a good rule of thumb to follow. I think perhaps you’ve understood that already, as I saw you shifting them correctly on the form at the bottom of this more recent image.

Moving on to your insect constructions your work is similarly well done. I can see you using the methods shown in the demos, sticking to the principles of markmaking (smooth, confident purposeful lines) and the principles of construction (starting with simple solid forms and building your construction up gradually piece by piece) and there is a fair bit of growth across the set.

I can see that you’ve put a fair bit of thought into how your forms exist in 3D space, and how to connect them together with specific relationships, and your constructions are coming out quite solid and convincing as a result.

You’re very much on the right track, although I am going to go ahead and use a piece of prewritten text that I share with many students to help them to build up their constructions in 3D more consistently.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose, but many of those marks would contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

Fortunately I didn’t notice any areas where you’d cut back inside the silhouette of forms you had already drawn, and that’s fantastic. While cutting back into a silhouette is the easiest way to depict the issues with modifying a form after it's been drawn, there are other ways in which we can fall into this trap. For example I’ve marked with blue on a section of your moth a couple of spots where you drew a one-off mark bridging from one 3D structure to another, enclosing the hatched area. But this hatched area exists only in two dimensions - there is no clearly defining elements that help the viewer (or you, for that matter) to understand how it is meant to relate to the other 3D elements at play. Thus, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional, and in so doing, reinforces that fact to you as you construct it. While extending the silhouette of leaves or insect’s wings with single lines works fine, this is because they are paper-thin structures, so essentially they are already flat and altering their silhouette won’t flatten them further. When we want to build on forms that aren’t already flat we need to use another strategy.

Instead, when we want to build on our construction or alter something we add new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.

I’m really happy to see that you’re already exploring this kind of additive 3D construction quite liberally in some of your pages, your mantis and crab have some really good examples.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you tried out a few different strategies for constructing legs, but I’m happy to see that you were using the sausage method for your later constructions and getting the hang of applying it well.

It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms.

I’m happy to see that you’ve taken a swing at building onto your sausage armatures on many of your pages, adding the sorts of lumps, bumps and complexity that you observe in these structures, arriving at a more characteristic representation of the leg in question than what can be achieved with the sausages alone. I have some diagrams to share with you that I hope will help you to build onto your leg structures “in 3D” as you move forwards.

• These diagrams show how we can add to the construction with complete 3D forms instead of flat shapes and one-off lines.

• This diagram shows how instead of fully engulfing an existing form within a new one, we can establish a clearer relationship between the existing form and the new addition by breaking it into two pieces.

• This ant leg demo shows how we can take the sausage method and push it further, adding all kinds of lumps bumps and spikes to the sausage armature.

• I’d also like to share this dog leg demo with you, which shows how the sausage method can be applied to animal legs. This is important, as we’d like you to continue to stick with the sausage method of leg construction when tackling your animals in the next lesson.

If a part of your construction won’t fit on the page, such as some of the legs of this spider you can retain the solidity of these forms by capping them off with an ellipse, rather than running them off the page as a pair of lines and leaving them open ended. You will see Uncomfortable using this technique in the tail of his “running rat” demo on the informal demos page of lesson 5.

Before I wrap this up I should touch briefly on texture. I think that the texture you added to your tick is excellent. You’ve told the viewer that the exoskeleton has little pits or holes along its surface, implicitly, by drawing cast shadows rather than outlining the holes themselves, great job. The texture on your moth was a little less in line with what the texture section of lesson 2 describes. I suspect you filled in the eye because it looked dark in the reference, rather than because it is sitting in cast shadow. This gives the eye the look of a flat shape or a hole, rather than that positive bulging form I’d expect from a bug’s eye. The detail on the wings is also looking a bit explicit as you seem to be outlining a pattern, rather than describing a texture.

Anyway, overall you’ve done an excellent job with this lesson and I’ll tag it as complete. You’ll need a couple of agrees to trigger the badge, but I don’t expect you to have any difficulty getting them.

Superimposed lines:

Straight lines look decent, your first page the curved lines and ellipses are pretty wobbly but already much more consistent and looks like better technique, nice.

Ghosted lines:

I think more examples here would have been good, some of these are great hitting both points and not going beyond the intended end point.

Ghosted Planes/Ellipses in Planes:

The planes themselves look pretty good, remember to use the ghosting method for the lines, some of the lines look like you have drawn over multiple times. The ellipses show good improvement from the first to the second page, and appear to have been drawn through twice. Nice work.

Tables of Ellipses & Funnels:

These all look nice and consistent, good job.

Plotted Perspective:

Being picky, your vanishing points stray a little and some of your rear edges connect to a trace line they don't belong to, for example the leftmost box on your second pane. Nothing to change and it won't feature in the 250 box challenge, just remember to be careful when making marks.

Rough Perspective:

Many of these lines don't appear to be ghosted or have been drawn over more than once. Remember to use the ghosting method when making marks and try not to draw over lines a second time. Mistakes are OK and will happen!

Your second side shows a lot of improvement from the first, however you have drawn many of your lines simply directly back towards the vanishing point and not through either the plotted points you made or the line you actually drew. The point of this exercises is not to draw completely accurate boxes, but to trace the boxes you are currently making and compare where you were trying to orient them towards the vanishing point, and where they actually ended up.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/20/step9

I would ask that you either plot the lines as described in the task, or draw another side of rough perspective with correctly plotted lines.

Rotated Boxes:

A few of the boxes look parallel to each other, e.g. the second boxes on the first and second rows, but this looks to me to be a good attempt executed well.

Organic Perspective:

These look good. Don't cross out boxes where you made a mistake. It appears that all of these were done with the Y method, one or two closed the angle a little smaller than 90 degrees at least after you drew the ghosted lines.

Note on hatching - this should be performed with the ghosting method, starting at one concrete edge of the face you are drawing the hatching on and aiming to stop at the opposite edge. It looks like some have been drawn this way, but a lot has just been drawing lines on the face or over both edges which should be avoided.

So after plotting the lines back as described in the rough perspective article I would mark this lesson complete and you will be ready to begin the 250 boxes challenge.

Welcome and congratulations on finishing the first lesson of Drawabox! I'm Mada and I'll be taking a look at your submission.

Overall you did an excellent job here, but I do have a bit to mention so let's break them down one by one. I'll write the most important things in bold.

Lines

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking good. Ghosted lines look correctly ghosted and confident too, and there are barely any arching. You've also demonstrated the same confidence in your ghosted planes with a great accuracy. However, I noticed that you didn't put the start and end points when you bisect the planes horizontally and vertically. This results in floating lines, like this: https://imgur.com/a/Ud2O6tR. Do not forget to always plan your lines first when ghosting, even though you already kind of know where they should be.

Ellipses

Now with the tables of ellipses, you've demonstrated a great understanding of the concept in executing confident ellipses. The ellipses in planes are nice, you drew it confidently and snugly in their respective planes.

The funnels are also looking great; you've managed to fit them snugly and carried the same confidence as in previous exercises, but try to align them more carefully to the axis next time (you can rotate your page if it helps). Otherwise, I have no complaints here as your ellipses will tighten as you get more practice.

Boxes

You've shown a good understanding of how to make 2 point perspective in the plotted perspective. I did see some skewed back vertical lines here and there, which is usually caused by an accumulation of human error as you plot more and more lines. I assume that's the case and you understand that every vertical line is straight in 2 point perspective. Even if the points are not aligned correctly, try to find a middle ground and draw it as vertical as you can.

You've applied the ghosting method and lines extension correctly for the rough perspective. You also drew the front/back faces rectangular, which is correct for 1 point perspective.

As the notoriously most difficult exercise in this lesson, you've done a great job at doing the rotated boxes. You've rotated them pretty well (while making sure to move the converging lines) and used neighboring elements to deduce the next orientation of boxes, which is the whole purpose of this exercise.

Finally, organic perspective looks great as well. They look like they belong in the same page and the lines converge as they move farther away from the viewer. There are a few hiccups here and there where there are divergences that results in skewed boxes, but overall they're minor and they look pretty solid.

This will get more relevant as you get to the box challenge, but any hatching from this point on should also be done with the ghosting method. It will make your stuff cleaner and more practice is always good! Try to cover the whole area of the box with consistent spacing.

Anyway, I think you've grasped the concepts of the whole lesson and ready to put them into practice in warmups. Again, congratulations and keep up the good work!

hello! i will be giving you a critique for your lesson

1. Lines

superimposed lines

looks great, you correctly positioned you pen on the starting point, however there is a slight wobble to it on some of them, its better to just continue with it even if it isnt 100% going towards the point, the point is just a guide the strightness of the line is what we are going for

ghosted lines

i cant really find much to give feedback on here very soild work some lines do wobble a bit but you seemed to have fixed that as you went on

ghosted planes

again very soild work, ive got no feedback here

2. Ellipses

you improved a lot in the second page, i did notice that some of them wobble slightly, there is an ideal speed for executing ellipses you just need to test a bit to figure it out, really good ellipses orverall

Ellipses in Planes

the ellipses fit well in the planes and very few ellipses have deformities

Funnels

some ellipses do wobble a bit, if you miss the mark on the second spin try to not slow down too much and just keep going, other than that the ellipses fit and the axis is well centered

Plotted Perspective

all good here

Rough Perspective

lines are extending properly horizontally and vertically and lines are moving properlly towards the VP

Rotated Boxes

only thing ill say here is that the left side and top boxes are a little too extended that it kinda messes up with the shape otherwise it is all good

Organic Perspective

all good here as well

Hi there! I saw your submission so I figured I'd take a look:

Organic Arrows and Contours. I'm seeing clean confident line work for the most part here, save for one kind of wobbly arrow on the right side of the page here. There are some errors with line width across a number of these however. This creates arrows that do progress through space, but they have sections that appear less dynamic, which brings down the overall appearance of the arrow in question. Practice, as always, will help with this. Make sure you consider the path your second line will take as it moves in tandem with the first. I traced over a few of your arrows in case you find it helpful. Other than that, I thought you did a good job of keeping track of how the arrow bends in space. It may help to apply some line weight to the line that overlaps the other on the arrow.

With the contours it looks like you have the right idea as far as the ellipses shifting in degree as the sausage moves closer or away from the viewer. The sausages are well made with good effort to ensure that the forms are evenly sized throughout. Make sure you keep your ellipses aligned 90 degrees to the minor axis as you work though. I also noticed with your contour curves page that you ran into the trap of contours that don't probably shift in degree on the ellipse. It is a bit harder compared to the ellipses assignment, especially since we aren't drawing through the elliptical mark we make. Make sure you ghost your ellipses, even if you aren't drawing a full one. Alignment to the minor axis applies here as well.

Texture. Your analysis page looks pretty spot-on as far as utilizing cast shadows to describe form; one thing to look out for is not utilizing the black band in the analysis window. Those bands are as much a part of the shadow shapes as anything else you put in that window, so those bands should stretch and merge into the other shadow shapes in the window. A small detail at the end of the day, but if you end up doing the texture analysis challenge, then it's something to keep in mind.

Dissections generally look okay. You definitely try to keep the textures following the form of the sausage, and you push the silhouette out to capture the texture's forms. There are a number of these that sort of miss the mark. The ones that stand out to me are the thorns, tentacles, rippling water, and the succulent. These surfaces can be a bit complex to understand, so I drew some sketches that might help you see the forms that we're supposed to be describing. These surfaces are generally considered smooth with the exception of the forms that protrude from the surface. These surface forms will typically not be drawn through, so we really have to lean on pushing the silhouette to make them visible. With the rippling water, the silhouette is the only way to show this texture. I do want to note here, that in lesson 3, there's a demo of a cactus where the bumpy surface is completely drawn through; I don't remember the logic of that, but I believe it wasn't a construction that had any texture to the drawing, I just wanted to warn you that it may seem contradictory. Incidentally, doing the organic intersections exercise can help improve your understanding of these surface forms, and that happens to be the next section.

Form and Organic Intersections. If there was a page that was just box intersections, it looks like it wasn't successfully uploaded. That said, these intersections look logical, though the lines are a tad scratchy here; much like any other assignment, we want to strive for smooth confident lines every time. Organic intersections look pretty good too, though you may want to keep your forms more uniform in design. That said, this is nothing I'm going to nag you about, it looks like your contours make sense in these.