ThatOneMushroomGuy

Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 3 homework.

Organic Arrows

-Starting with the organic arrows you are doing some good attempts at the perspective of the ribbon and you’ve also drawn your marks with confidence. It seems that you are both aware of how the arrow gets wider as it moves closer to the viewer, and the fact that the negative space between the zigzagging sections of the ribbon decreases as it moves further away. I don’t really have anything to call out here so let’s move on to the next section.

Branches

-Moving on to the branches I think that you may have not followed the instructions as best as you could have.

• First of all remember that you should extend each segment fully halfway to the next ellipse. RIght now it seems that you are drawing each edge of the branch in one go rather than dividing it into segments. This causes you to have some gaps where the edges are not touching the ellipses.

• Once you’ve drawn those edges you can use them as a sort of a “runway” to guide your next stroke, by overlapping them a good bit, this will ehlp ou to achieve a smoother transition. Here is a diagram that illustrates these past two points https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/18463269.png .

-And lastly remember that the ellipses should shift degrees as they move through space, this concept was explained in lesson 1 ellipses section so go andd check it out if you need a reminder.

Leaves

-Moving on to the leaves you are doing a good job with the first two steps, that is drawing the flow line and the edges for the silhouette. But you are skipping one important step and that is drawing the edge details, the only optional step is to add texture. So unfortunately I don’t have too much to critique here.

Plants

-Moving on to the plant constructions you are moving in the right direction and overall this is a good start but we do need to keep working on some things, so let’s see what those are.

Now that we are getting into constructional drawing is important to keep in mind that we should do our best to break our subjects into their more primitive elements without getting too caught up with one particular aspect or detail of it.That means bulding our drawing one step at a time, making a lot of desicions and smaller moves rather than trying to capture many things at once

-Also before continuing on further I did notice that you included many demos for your plants, and they constitute more than half of them which is against the instructions, they clearly state that they should consitute less than half. I’m not going to hold you back just for that one detail but I do want to stress how important it is to read the instructions carefully.

-The first thing I want to call out is the way you have drawn the leaves in the potato plant demo, it seems that you have not followed the steps laid out in the leaves exercise, right now you are just drawing the flow line but then instead of drawing the edges and then adding the edge details it seems that you are trying to do both at the same time. Which goes against what we were talking about at the beginning of this section, so remember to alway take things one step at a time rather than trying to capture many things at once.

However it seems that you are actually following this process correctly on your orchid, anyways do keep it mind in the future.

-Another important issue to call out is leaving gaps. One way this can happen is when the flow line of one petal or leaf doesn’t meet at the tip with its edges like on your daisy demo and another way it can happen is when you lay down an ellipse as a foot print for how the flow lines should be arranged but at the end those lines don’t touch it.

For example, when you start a flower with an ellipse to establish how far out the petals will reach, the flow lines you then draw for each petal should stop at the perimeter of that ellipse, rather than falling short or shooting past. Then the given petal should only be as long as the flow line, with its end stopping at the flow line's tip. This allows for the simpler structures to pass on their solidity as we build upon them - but this does not work if you approach the drawing as a loose sketch. This issue is seen on your hibiscus demo.

-And lastly let’s talk about texture, I see that you’ve add it in most of your plants but there are some things that need to be adressed.

There are many cases where you will add many cast shadows , like on the hibiscus demo, however this can easily become as distracting as drawing explicit details, and that is what happened here. One way to solve this issue is to use a gradient, that means having an area that is densely packed with cast shadows and progressively moving to an area where these details are more sparse, we saw how to do this on lesson 2 texture analysis. You may be thinking that texture serves as decoration but this isn’t the case it helps to define a specific relationship wih the form casting the shadow and the surface receiving it, It comes handy with situations like your Napoleonaea where all of those exlicit details are quite distracting. So before finishing this critique I want you to go and read this notes that may help you to apply texture more effectively in the future. https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/2/reminders

Okay, I’ll assign some revisions so you can apply these principles on some of your own plants.

Good luck!!!!!!!

Hi Topless! Congratulations on finishing the 250 Box Challenge. I'm Wendy and I will be reviewing your submission.

Things you did well:

• Your lines are pretty confident and smooth. There is the occasional wobble, but nothing major.

• There is a definite improvement with the perspective of the later boxes compared to the earlier ones.

• On all 3-point perpective boxes, you extended the lines in the right direction consistently.

• You drew your boxes nice and big on the page.

Things you can work on:

• You included a number of boxes in 2-point perspective. It's good that you are experimenting with box angles. However, in this challenge the boxes are supposed to be in 3-point perspective.

With these 2-point perspective boxes, you also run into a problem with the extension lines. In 2-point perspective, by definition you only have 2 vanishing points. That means that you cannot extend the third set of lines, as they are completely parallel and never meet at a vanishing point in either direction.

• On some of your boxes, you try to keep the lines a bit too parallel. At times, this also results in the lines diverging.

• You have a fair amount of variation in box proportions. However, I think you can vary it more still; try making some boxes that are really flat, like a pizza box. Or really long and thin, like a box of tinfoil.

• I think you can experiment with box angles more. Your boxes all have very similar angles, because you placed the vanishing points at roughly equal distances from the box. You didn't include any boxes where one or two of the faces are barely turned.

In order to draw a barely turned box, one vanishing point will be really close and one will be really far away. If that doesn't make sense to you, this awesome visualization may help:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkp1xfWJ9n4

• On some boxes, the vanishing points are so close, it results in extreme foreshortening that no longer looks realistic. It's good that you are experimenting with levels of foreshortening. However, going forward it's important for you to find the sweet spot where the box looks like it has dramatic foreshortening, without being pushed so far that it looks misshapen.

• Your hatching is a bit too loose. Make sure that all your hatch lines properly meet up with the boundaries of the plane, and fill it out entirely. Draw steady lines, like you would for the sides of the box, and ghost them if necessary. Don't flick your hatch lines.

• You could try and add line weight to the silhouette of the box.

Conclusion:

While you did make a few mistakes, your boxes are improving nicely. I will mark this lesson as complete. Just be sure to continue doing boxes as part of your warm-ups, and keep the above feedback in mind.

Starting with your organic intersections, there's one main thing I want to call out. You appear to be choosing to draw these really small. You've got a ton of space available to you, but you appear to be using around 10% of it (based on this). Back in my critique of your Lesson 4 work, I did actually explain towards the beginning of that feedback, that you should be focusing on giving yourself as much room for each individual exercise/drawing/construction, in order to give yourself plenty of space to think through the spatial problems.

While overall you're handling the rest of the exercise decently, there's no good reason not to draw them way bigger, and to give yourself the benefit that comes with.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, this size issue does continue to be present, which does have a more notable impact here, because it is seriously limiting the amount of space you have to work construct the individual forms you're working with, and to think through how they're relating to one another in 3D space. There are also other major points we'd worked through in your Lesson 4 revisions that are coming back into play here, which suggests to me that as a whole, there is a significant issue present in just how you're applying the information you're provided with.

The main thing we worked on in Lesson 4, through your various rounds of revisions, was focusing on one key point: do not engage with your drawings in 2D space, by simply putting individual marks or partial/flat shapes on the page. Always add elements as complete forms with their own self-enclosed silhouettes, thinking about the existing structure as though it's really three dimensional, and then reinforcing that in the next marks you add. In quite a few places, this squid for example, you draw lots of your forms partially, and as shown here in red you also do at times cut back into your silhouettes in order to add further detail by "refining" the silhouettes of existing forms, rather than introducing new ones.

Another point I raised in Lesson 4's critique, specifically in regards to your revisions, was the frequent tendency to neglect to define the joint between the sausage segments used in your leg constructions with a contour line, as is explained in the middle of the sausage method diagram. You continue to neglect to do this in your constructions here.

Now that's not to say there aren't good things present in your constructions - this horse, while it runs into a lot of those same mistakes (no contour lines defining the joints between sausages, lots of areas where you've added partial shapes along the legs and elsewhere, and so on) overall it's still a pretty good construction in that the way it's drawn still makes it feel believably 3D despite those other shortcomings. I can also see clear consideration to how the mass you added along the backside of the horse wraps around the torso (although you do not appear to have drawn this as a completely self-enclosed mass, and instead just let its outline stop where it hit the thigh).

Ultimately, you're simply not giving this work the time you need to apply all of the information you've been given - and that doesn't merely manifest in the instructions you're not following, but also in the manner in which you're drawing. I can see a lot of signs that suggest (though of course I can't know this without watching over your shoulder as you draw) that you're not investing nearly enough time into your observation of your reference images. I think that's actually one of the things that made the horse so much stronger than many of your other constructions - it suggests that you were investing more into observation, looking back at your reference more frequently, and making more of your choices based on what you actually saw, rather than what you remembered.

Compare that to this panda which has plenty of signs that you're rushing - both in terms of the individual elements of the construction being oversimplified (which is a hallmark of relying more on memory rather than looking at your reference frequently), as well as the fact that you didn't use the sausage method, didn't block in the ribcage or pelvis, and so on.

As many of the shortcomings of your work come down to the way in which you're using your time, I'm not going to call out too much more, but I did want to take a moment to talk about how you're approaching head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos - although in all fairness I'm not seeing a whole lot of signs that you were applying the methodology from them throughout most of your constructions, but rather just kind of winging it. Given how the course has developed, and how I'm finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems. So not all the approaches shown are equal, but they do have their uses. As it stands, as explained at the top of the tiger demo page (here), the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning, is what you'll find here on the informal demos page.

There are a few key points to this approach:

• The specific shape of the eyesockets - the specific pentagonal shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.

• This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together - no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.

• We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball - working in individual strokes like this (rather than, say, drawing the eyesocket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.

Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but with a bit of finagling it can still apply pretty well. To demonstrate this for another student, I found the most banana-headed rhinoceros I could, and threw together this demo.

Now, I unfortunately am going to have to ask for a full redo of this lesson's work. When it's completed, you will need to send it in as a fresh submission, which will cost you an additional 2 credits. It is entirely up to you to take the information you're provided with and apply it to the best of your ability (and to ask when things are unclear), and I think you are falling far short of what you are capable of here. I don't feel you're doing that intentionally or with any kind of malice, just that you may be underestimating just how much time these things take. Not only on the individual constructions (which can take multiple hours when you factor in all of the observation, taking your time in the execution of each mark with planning and preparation as per the ghosting method, and in thinking through each step you take consciously rather than allowing your instincts or subconscious to take over), but also in processing the feedback you receive, and reviewing it frequently.

Of course, not everyone has multiple hours to dedicate to a single construction in a single sitting - but of course as I mentioned again in previous feedback, you are welcome and encouraged to spread each individual construction across as many sittings and days as you need.

You clearly have what it takes to do this really well - we can see it in that horse, as well as in your hybrid construction - but you simply aren't giving yourself the time and energy you need. Unfortunately, that severely limits my ability to help you, and as I have limited resources to spread across many students, I will have to warn you that if this pattern continues, we may need to review whether or not continuing with this course in the way you are currently is a good use of both your time and energy, as well as the limited resources I have to spread across the students here. But, that's something we'll look at again later - for now, focus only on giving everything I've said here as much time as it requires, and focus above all else on demonstrating your understanding of the feedback you've been given before, as currently that is not being accomplished.

Hello Kabachuha, congrats on completing lesson 3, I'll critique your homework.

Arrows

Starting with your arrows , you've generally handled these pretty well, they're drawn with confidence and you're not afraid to let them ovelap.

Leaves

The confidence is still shown here, you let most of the leaves move and wrap around believably , you're also drawing every single piece of edge detail as its own separate stroke and a single trajectory, aside from a couple of cases in the taro leaf where the edge detail end up a little more jagged and wobbly.

You've skipped a stage when drawing the storax leaf (always start by making the most basic leaf shape you could possibly do), but you've rectified that with the fern leaf and stuck fairly well to the premise of drawing the leaf in separate stages, being careful to define their relationship, good job!

As far as texture is concerned, be careful not to Copy your reference, specifically when drawing the veins of the leaves; try instead to imply its presence by drawing the shadows they cast on the leaf itself , it helps to outline the shape of those shadows first and then fill them in ,no matter how thin they are.

Branches

Moving onto branches, aside from the first one,I see you're applying the segments as highlighted in the lesson notes, good work.

I noticed that your lines sway a little at at times, but what i'm most worried about is your ellipses, which often end up wobbly.

Be careful about the principles of markmaking of lesson 1, and remember to keep up with warmups, it will improve with time

Plant constructions

Starting off with the first plant ,the mushroom:I can't be sure unless I could see the reference, but I'll remind you of this lesson 1 paragraph.

In this case the relationship of the ellipses seems inversed, I say seems because if (in the reference)the cap were pointed away from the viewer or simply bent in a specific way, your approach would be entirely correct , but if it were facing towards the viewer it would look off; you can look at the mushroom demo from drawabox if you wish to expand on this topic , as its shown quite well there , notice as the ellipses get wider and wider as they approach the bottom of this mushroom in said demo.

Moving on,what I noticed is that the leaves had a prominent drop in quality, which is understandable due to the drawings being a good 2-3 weeks away from the exercise itself, but do be careful about this.

The hibiscus,lavander, potato plant and lilac are fine as far as the main leaf shape is concerned, they have a sense of flow and movement to them, the other plants' usually feel far more static, sometimes even flat.

What I see in all of them however, is that you're not adding any edge detail, at all.

While textures are optional, edge detail is not, as it's a key component in showing how the leaf sits in 3D space.

This isn't much of a problem , you've shown that you are capable of drawing the leaves well, and I'm sure you just need to give the drawings and the instructions a little more time in order to make full use of your abilities.

Keep in mind that you don't need to finish a page the same day you started it and you're encouraged to give as many sittings/days to a drawing as it needs; I'm aware it's difficult at first , and frankly I'm struggling with giving drawings more time myself, but it's good to keep in mind and take back control of our focus when it inevitably slips away from us.

I've also noticed you are not drawing the branches as instructed in some plants, the Spruce being the most obvious case where you draw the entire length of the branch in just a couple of strokes, I'd also reccomend using this method in order to draw forking branches, instead of just making an ellipse and extending another branch from the original one; if you struggle with this, try to draw a few more ellipses to delimitate your branch, if you use too few of them and too far apart from each other , it makes drawing the segments a lot more difficult.

However , you do a good job of observing your plants, you've drawn the rose using a pentagram as a guide , which shows a good deal of experimentation, and you're still adhering to drawing in steps , you've also drawn ellipses for all leaves to use as guides and drawing them in their entirety, which is great.

The last thing i want to mention is in regards to cast shadows, specifically the potato plant and lilac; it's easy to get the wrong idea when watching the demos , but you're not meant to fill the darkest and deepest areas of the plant in black , you should aim to use said shadows to define the relationship between the leaves and/or branches, which I can see a hint of you doing in your hibiscus demo.

Now, this is my second critique ever, my apologies if it sounded harsh at times, but I truly believe that you can knock this lesson out of the park with a few revisions, as most of the mistakes in your work are either because of a lack of time ,a misinterpretation of the instructions, or simple forgetfulness.

As such , I'll be assigning some revisions below.

Feel free to take as much time as you need on these, and if you have any questions feel free to ask them.

Hello I'll be handling the critique for your 250 Box Challenge

Linework

-Starting by your linework, I can see that your lines are drawn with a good deal of confidence while maintaining their accuracy, which means that you are using the ghosting method to good effect. The same goes for the hatching lines, it is good to see that you are giving each one of them as much time and attention as necessary, so I hope that you keep displaying this patience in the future.

-I like to see that you are using lineweight, it is not a necessary requirement but it is good that you are getting used to it. You are using it properly on most of your boxes, there are only a few instances where you take it a bit too far, it is important to keep in mind that if you end up making the lineweight too thick you will end up taking the solidity of your forms away and turn them into mere graphic shapes, that's why it is better to keep it subtle, only add one superimposed line and no more. I also want to quickly redirect you to this diagram which shows how to correctly apply lineweight.

Box Construction

-You have made good use of the line extensions to get more consistent convergence and all of the sets of lines of your boxes converge which is correct. The only thing that you have to keep an eye out for is lines converging in pairs as shown here.

One thing that can help with this is to start thinking about the relationship between each pair of lines of any given set and the angles they form respective to their vanishing point, this relationship is exemplified here, you can see that the inner pair of lines is always quite similar and the outer pair can vary a lot depending on the location of the vanishing point, the further away you place it and the closer to parallel they will be.

-You should also keep experimenting with the orientation and foreshortening of your boxes, looking at your work I can see that you experimented a good deal with the sizes of your boxes, which is good but most of them have a somewhat dramatic foreshortening, so try more to give them more shallow rates, just keep in mind that due to perspective our sets of lines will never be fully parallel or diverge away from one another. And lastly try to give each one of your boxes as much room as possible, I don't know what page size you are using but there are some pages where you leave a good deal of empty space, it doesn't matter if the line extensions start to overlap with other boxes. This challenge is all about building an intuitive sense for how to draw boxes with consistent convergences, and experimenting a good deal will help you to get a better grasp of the concepts we are exploring in this challenge.

Okayyyy, that should be about everything I wanted to address, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete

Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your 250 box challenge

Linework

-Starting by your linework, you have drawn your lines with confidence, and you are using the ghosting method to good effect as your lines maintain a good deal of accuracy too. The first thing I want to call out has to do with the fact that in some boxes you have repeated your lines, keep in mind that if you make a mistake you should not try to correct it by drawing the line again, instead leave it like that, and also keep in mind that these mistakes do not take away from the things you will learn by completing the challenge all the way to the end.

-This leads me to another important point which is lineweight, I can see that you have not applied lineweight to most of your boxes, it is not a necessary requirement but it is important that you get used to applying it, as it becomes an important in future lessons. The most important thing to keep in mind when using lineweight is that we should be very subtle with it, only one additional superimposed line is more than enough, here is a diagram that shows the correct way to add lineweight, and you can also see it applied to a box here.

-In most of your boxes the hatching looks somewhat rushed, remember that each line is no less important for being part of a larger group, so give each individual line as much time and attention as possible so that you can draw it to the best of your ability

Box Construction

-You have used the line extension method correctly for all of your boxes and your sets of lines have a tendency to converge which is correct, just keep an eye out for lines converging in pair as shown here.

One thing that can help with this issue is to start thinking between the relationship between each pair of lines and the angles they form respective to their vanishing points, this relationship is exemplified in this diagram, you can notice that the inner pair of lines is always quite similar and the outer pair can vary a lot depending on the location of the vanishing point, the further away you place it and the outer pair of lines will start to run close to parallel.

-I also want you to keep experimenting with the rates of foreshortening, the orientation and sizes of your boxes, for most of the challenge you stuck to dramatic rates of foreshortening, so instead try more shallow rates of foreshortening with the vanishing point outside the page, in these cases the lines will start to run close to parallel, but keep in mind that they always have to converge, due to perspective our sets of lines will never be fully parallel nor diverge from the vanishing point.

-If you have trouble coming up with new orientations for your boxes you can take a look at this image and use it as reference, it is important that you keep experimenting with all sorts of sizes and orientations. Experimenting is a good habit as it helps us to develop a more grounded understanding, so I hope you keep nurturing this habit in the future.

-Lastly, I noticed a tendency to draw tiny boxes, so remember to give each box as much room as you can, this will make it easier to engage your whole arm when drawing and in turn will improve your confidence.

Okayy, before moving on I will leave you a few more boxes. I want you to focus on not repeating your lines when you make a mistake. Best of luck!!

Hi,

let's start with your organic arrows, they mostly look good and confident. One thing that's a problem is that your shading (at the bends) is breaking your arrow silhouette (the lines are exiting the borders of the arrow). This makes the drawing look rushed and messy.

Your contour ellipses look pretty good: the lines you used are confident, you went through your ellipses. Good job.

I see that you had some lines redone and occasionally they got wobbly, try to avoid that in the future.

The contour curves are wobblier than usual, maybe you found this more challenging? Or did you try to fit everything on the page? I believe it might be better to risk overlapping them with confident lines than filling the page evenly. You did try to turn the degrees of the curves and I see you know what to do. You'll practice this more in the upcoming lessons.

Your texture analysis is excellent, it looks good and you managed to transition nicely from dark to light. Keep it up.

Your dissections are also pretty good: you mind the curvature, I can see that you took your time with them; however, occasionally you "overdo" it, for example, with the grass and pineapple. You filled the entire section with texture and you lost the curvature and that transition from dark to light. I had problems with this too, still do sometimes, the point is: sometimes drawing less is better. The viewer's eyes get to rest and you can focus (by adding more detail) things or defocus them (by leaving out detail). It is also easier for you - you don't have to fill the entire image with details, which is very time consuming.

Your form intersections mostly look acceptable. The most persistent issue I'd like to point out are intersections with boxes. Notice that the vertex of a box is formed by 3 planes. That means that if you cut it off, you'd see a triangular shape. Yet, when you intersect it with another plane (cut it off with that plane), you draw a quadrilateral shape (as in image 1). It's (a) in this picture. Again, don't redo your lines (unless it's for the ellipses).

The organic intersections look good, I see that you made a mistake in image 1 that breaks the illusion a bit, but everything else seems fine: you are wrapping shadows around forms, and making sure your contours follow the surface.

All in all, this is a good submission.

Hello! It will be a pleasure to correct your homework.

I will try to highlight the general details, and at the end I will answer something about your doubts.

Organic arrows:

-You are going through the outline of your arrows properly, which is good.

-The line weight also looks correctly applied.

• However the depth/perspective of your arrows is not noticeable.

The reason is that you are not compressing the size and spacing between the folds from the beginning to the end of the arrow.

You are doing this: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/0f7c806c.jpg

When it should be like this: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/011d064f.jpg

Ellipses and contour curves:

• For starters, the overall shape of your "sausages" is simple and correct. There is no deformation in the middle or any place.....

• Regarding the ellipses, they are well aligned to the minor axis, and also change degree correctly as they move away from the center.

• The contour curves are quite good.

Not much to mention here.

Textures:

• It looks like you're focusing on the cast shadows here, correctly.

• The transition from dark to light is not bad.

I'll still leave you a guide that can help you get a better transition:

https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/7d1f3467.jpg

Dissections:

• I'm impressed with how well handled the textures are here, and that despite their complexity you've kept drawing the cast shadows.

• The fact that you're playing with the silhouette and the rolling of the texture into the shape, adheres realism to the texture itself. Perfect

Shape Intersections:

• The general idea of this exercise, is to make the shapes drawn on the page appear to be in the same scene.

You achieve this by using a shallow foreshortening and drawing shapes with equal length of sides.

Perhaps you didn't manage to demonstrate this effect much in your pages (although, the last page comes very close).

• I see you tried to handle intersections! If you don't understand them yet, that's okay. They will be looked at in more depth in the following lessons.

Organic intersections:

• There is a nice solidity to your organic shapes.

You can actually notice a weight to them.

• You will notice that a few shapes seem to be unsteady.

It is as if they are not suspended above the others.

And this is a mistake that needs to be corrected.

This diagram is often helpful: https://i.imgur.com/KJQhpn8.png

If it still gets complicated, try to think of each organic shape as a water balloon, falling on top of another.

This way you will be thinking in terms of gravity and solidity.

Conclusion:

• You've handled everything generally well.

However, I'll leave you a bit of homework to correct details in the intersections of shapes.

• Regarding your doubt with the hair textures.

These are generally very subtle, and you are applying a lot of line weight to them; which may be killing the hair effect.

Still, you are capturing the growth pattern well.

So, to get more of the hair effect, try not to apply too much line weight for density, rather add more hair!

• Your question about the intersections of shapes, I think is answered with my review above.

Hello I'll be taking a look at your 250 box challenge.

-First of all I want to make a quick suggestion about your material, I can see that you are working on a sketchbook, consider changing to loose pages so that you can draw more comfortably without having to worry about the spiral. When doing these exercises about spatial reasoning you want to get rid of all distractions.

Now I’ll address your linework.

-Keep in mind that you also have to ghost your hatching lines, this makes the challenge more tedious and time consuming, but it is a good opportunity to improve. It seems that you improved them as you moved through the challenge, but keep aiming to be more tidy with it.

-When adding the lineweight I’m pleased to see that you have only added it to the silhouette of the box, keep in mind that we want to keep it subtle, so you just have to add one superimposed line. If you miss, do not try to correct it by adding another line, this will only make the mistake stand out even more.

-You did well extending the lines, you always did it correctly, and I’m also pleased to see that you have kept the vanishing point outside the page.

-I think that throughout the set you kept the orientation of the boxes similar, you could benefit from trying more orientations, if you have trouble with this check out this image that you can use as reference.

-I can see that you avoided drawing any sets of parallel lines, which is good, and as you moved on through the challenge I can definitely notice an improvement in the way you estimated the vanishing points. Just be mindful of lines converging in pairs as shown here, as you practice you will become better at estimating the vanishing points and eventually you’ll have your lines converging in sets.

-You didn’t have much trouble with diverging lines, all of them seem to be converging, so good job here.

Overall you showed a good deal of development and improvement during the challenge so you can continue.

Hello, Neosynthetica.

Try not to worry too much about your previous work, as I am only judging you based on your Lesson 1 submission today. Let's get started!

Lines:

Superimposed Lines:

The top lines to your first page have a little bit of wobble to them. Even a small amount of wobble is still a mistake and should be noted. However, I also see no fraying on both ends so good job there.

Ghosted Lines:

Try not to connect each line into what appears to be an abstract shape. By doing so, you risk not fully understanding your own trajectory. It can be hard knowing where your line ends, and where it begins. If you are having trouble, refer back to the example homework under this lesson.

Ghosted Planes:

There is some overshooting and undershooting, so what I recommend is more ghosting before making lines. Try lifting your pen off the page the second you hit the end point as well!

Ellipses:

Tables of Ellipses:

The position on some ellipses should be drawn with a more concrete goal of fitting them snug against other ellipses and your columns. Otherwise, good job on confidence over accuracy.

Ellipses in Planes:

These planes look like they have a lot more confidence to your last ones. For future reference, the same ghosted planes can be used to put your ellipses in. The ellipses themselves are rough around the edges and not usually connecting on one side, so fast confident strokes just like your planes can help.

Ellipses in Funnels:

Knowing your own mistakes is a useful skill, but try not to put X symbols inside of your funnels. From what I can tell, you've started on either end of your funnels and had confidence but struggled with the middle sections. I suggest working from the minor axis, then drawing your ellipses outwards instead. Your goal is to have the minor axis cut the middle ellipse in half.

Boxes:

Plotted Perspective:

One of your top boxes towards the bottom column has a slight touch of distortion. Other than that, you seem to grasp this lesson well.

Rough Perspective:

Many of your depth lines converge parallel to the horizon line, save for a couple stray lines on your middle section.

Be mindful of keeping the bottom of your boxes perpendicular to the horizon as well.

Rotated Boxes:

Your boxes are accurately rotated. The side faces of your rotated boxes may appear squished as a set, due to not giving the sides of these boxes enough space. Compare the edges of these rotated boxes to the rest of the set.

Organic Perspective:

A few of these boxes don't form a box shape and have a slant towards the back. You'll also want to be careful of clumping too many boxes together, as you still want to see the edges and shapes that make up your boxes while still maintaining the flow of your swooping line.

So, overall I see many improvements here as you did more lessons. More confidence too! I would like to see another set of Ghosted Lines before you move on so you can better understand the lines you are making towards your marks using the ghosting method. After that, I will mark your lesson as complete.