Tada-Forever

I can really only offer my own perspective on this and everyone is different but maybe it will be helpful.

You have to figure out how to get in "the zone". That kind of headspace where you are very focused, time slips away, your mind stops flitting about, and you are just very zoomed in to whatever you're doing. You've probably experienced it before - with music or video games or a good book or a bike ride. That feeling is really rewarding and encourages you to go back; you have to figure out how to get there with drawing.

Draw without expectation or analysis. I can't tell you what kind of things to draw but try different stuff until you find what feels right. It could be abstract automatic drawing, or doodles or little cartoon portraits, or trees or literally anything as long as you don't tell yourself it has to look a certain way in the end. Personally I like to draw pages of flowers and then fill up the empty space with tight hatching, or I fill a page with random curving lines and then draw quick figure gestures over them.

Just consider every mark you put down a victory on the way to figuring out what kind of process you enjoy.

Your straight superimposed lines start out quite good, they're very confident and I see fraying at only one end. You fall of a bit from this on your curved lines, I see quite a lot of fraying on both ends, make sure you are still carefully lining up your pen to start from the same point every time.

Your ghosted lines look pretty good I do see a bit of curving, but this is improved in your ghosted planes which are overall quite straight and confident.

I see you are attempting to execute your ellipses with confidence and get them to fit snugly into the tables, but you get rather loose towards the second half of your second page. Make sure you are ghosting each mark you make and don't let yourself run on autopilot from ellipse to ellipse. If you see your accuracy start to decrease or start to get sloppy take a break and come back to it later when you are fresh. Same goes for your ellipses in planes. I think this is a good attempt, for the most part you're prioritizing smoothness over fitting into the planes which is good to see- just remember that after you've ghosted and started your ellipse it's too late to change the trajectory, never try to make a correction mid-mark.

Your funnels are off to a good start. I don't see too much slanting. In your future warmups try to make the arc a bit more extreme like the left side of your page so you can have greater variation in your ellipse sizes.

Your rough perspective boxes start out a bit uncertain but you do improve by the end of them. Just be sure that you are plotting out your lines parallel and perpendicular to the horizon line (mostly you're doing okay here, but I do see some edges of the back face going quite diagonal).

You make a good attempt at the rotated boxes. You don't manage a full rotation but that's to be expected as it's a very difficult exercise. Otherwise it is neat and the boxes are close together which is good to see.

Your organic persepective boxes are looking quite scratchy which is to be avoided. Don't go over your lines again in an effort to make corrections, just let mistakes be mistakes. If you're attempting to add line weight do it with a single, confident, ghosted line rather than several scratchy lines. You also have quite a lot of convergence issues but that's fine and will be addressed in the 250 box challenge. You do have a broad range of box sizes which is good to see.

Overall it's a solid start to the program and I think you're ready to move on.

Thank you very much for your review. I see were I was going wrong now, especially with the sausage contour line. I was thinking I was to just apply a contour on whatever sausage was dominant, overlapping the other, rather than applying it to the joint specifically.

While it was certainly not my intetion to do a light base/clean up pass, I do see that it looks like it. I think the issue was at the start my lines are done much quicker applying less ink and later on slowed down from concentration, applying more ink. I need to slow down my initial foundation lines and do better at ghosting and applying my subsequent forms more confidently and a bit quicker.

In my warmups I've been making an effort to slow my lines while still drawing confidently with my shoulder, but I find with ellipses I still need to execute them quite quickly in order to keep them smooth which makes them rather light.

In any case I will continue to work on everything you mentioned in my warmups, thank you again.

Here are a few I found:

https://i.imgur.com/vgkP5nY.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/mDWu15L.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/6CgUZ3u.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/EjOwbIz.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/LqR0QDw.jpg

No cross hatching unless the texture really looks like that (which you'll find crumbled paper does not). The point of the assignment is that challenge that you only have black and white to work with and you have to determine the shapes of the shadows. Maybe take a look at some other submissions to see how people tackled the problem.

Personally I like to listen to music, I find it helps me focus. I doubt it has any substantial influence on the "learning process" but it makes my time drawing more enjoyable. It really depends on whether you find it focusing or distracting. You could always stick to instrumental only if you find music with singing distracting.

Thank you for your review. I agree with the point about the abruptness on the additional forms. I was worried about making them too smooth and therefore not a believable 3d shapes. I'll try to find a happy medium in my animal drawings.

Thank you!

Thank you!