Tuxflop

Alright, so first, your arrows are evidently pretty wobbly. If you continue practicing this exercise, I recommend making your arrows simpler to start off. Don't jump right into the difficult ones. I would just draw arrows waving back and forth, getting closer to the viewpoint, to start off, because that gets you acquainted with the negative space getting larger as the arrow gets closer, as well as the foreshortening and all that, without giving you too much to worry about. This is what I did, if you want to have a look. Again, it might seem too simple, but we don't want to pile on too many objectives at once here, of course.

The basic shapes of your leaves look nice, but I have to say there's far too much detail, and it's incredibly visually noisy. Remember how the dissections in Lesson 2 worked? And the texture analysis? Every texture, at its brightest, is just white, while the details start to become more obvious as it gets darker (because the shadows are casting off the details). So remember that NOT every vein in the leaf needs to have a shadow, because in reality, not all of them really do. At least, not to a point where we should consider them.

Your branches look alright. There's a lot of bumpiness, though I get that too since it's something that can only really be solved with a lot of practice. Remember to try tapering your line in, gradually increasing the pressure, as you start it. This should minimize that effect and make it look less chicken scratchy. There's also a lot of unevenness to them, which technically isn't WRONG for a natural, wooden branch, but it would be worth the effort to try and keep them consistent anyway as drawing tubes in general can be quite useful.

Now, the first couple pages of plants. Some of the leaves are kind of wobbly and they don't seem to look 3D. I recommend drawing a circle around your flower first, as this will give you a range for all your petals to go. This one I drew of a hibiscus, for example. It helped me a lot to draw that circle you see around the flower to get a guide for the shape of the flower. Also do remember that every petal exists in 3D, and so they turn and sag, and flip around at times.

The top left plant on the second page has a stem with an inconsistency with the rest of the plant. Both the ellipse where the stem connects, and the ellipse to WHICH it connects, should be the same shape, since they're viewed at the same angle. Unless the base of the plant is supposed to be sagging? In that case it will help you in situations like those to put down a couple contour lines, just to help you out while constructing the drawing.

The bottom middle plant on the second page has some really wobbly leaves, too. Remember when you draw a leaf at first you're basically just drawing the gesture of it. The actual EDGES can come later--you'll build those one at a time. Doing the gesture of the leaf, and then the edge, will produce some more convincingly 3D results.

As for the mushrooms, these look pretty good. I don't see any very obvious mishaps so nice work there.

As for the rest of the plants which you gave detail, I have to say, my GOD that is a TON of detail, man. And that's not a bad thing. Actually, I think it looks pretty good. You did a nice job of making it darker in the more shadowy areas to draw the eye to the lit ones. You seem to have done a better job here at making your constructions more three dimensional, which is good. A well-made construction is like a cake without icing. The icing is the detail, but it should still be good without the icing anyway. But yeah, I wouldn't put THIS much detail into all your Drawabox exercises, because it's gonna take forever if you do. I would reserve this kind of detail into the drawings you create for the sake of artwork.

So there's some gesture and flow issues in some things, but just try to keep in mind all the stuff you've learned about 3D space, and the construction tricks to make things easier (like the circles around the petals) and you'll improve with practice. Feel free to practice the branches, leaves and arrows as warmups in the future. Branches in particular will be useful for drawing insects, with their antennas and all. And remember too, detail is nice, but it's not a vital part of learning construction, so don't worry about it TOO much.

Oh, that line overlapping with the branches just went right over my head at the time. I'll be sure to do that going forward. I did kinda mess up with the solid black voids, honestly, they were more meant to just hide the mess of lines I didn't know how to deal with. So I'll try to be a little more orderly with all this next time, so I can make more sense of it all. I appreciate the feedback.

Longest break I've taken is probably about 2.5 months? It took me about a week, I think, to get back into it.

Warming up is always a part of drawing. There's kind of an equation to it. The longer your break is, the more you have to warm up. You're always gonna have to do it to some extent.

The length of your break I suppose shouldn't be any longer than the span of time you've been at work drawing. For example if I've been drawing for two weeks, and I decide to stop, I have to get myself going again after those two weeks--preferably sooner, but I'll take as long as I need.

Alright, so your superimposed lines are looking good. The curves and stuff are less accurate, of course--but you'll gain experience to remedy that. Your ghosted lines are fairly good for the mostpart. There's a bit of wobbling, but it's minor. Hitting the point every time with a perfect line is something to shoot for, but remember that smoothness comes first, and accuracy second. The lines on your ghosted planes are smoother, and that's good. I notice an odd few, though, that are REALLY curvy. You might've had your arm at the wrong angle. Remember you can rotate your page and yourself as well, in any orientation you need to get a smooth line. I know for a fact that drawing lines and stuff at angles we're not used to is insanely hard... at least, for me it is.

Your tables of ellipses are surprisingly well-done. I see a lot of people on this site with really wobbly ellipses but you've managed to avoid that here, so good on you. With some experience, your brain will begin to develop little subtle strategies, and that should help you out with drawing through your ellipses, because some of them are a little bit messy in that regard.

Now, you didn't need to draw two more pages of planes for your ellipses in planes, but more experience never hurts, so nice work there. The ellipses themselves are fairly well done. A few bad apples, though--again, you might've just been drawing at the wrong angle for these. But you did well on drawing through your ellipses here.

The ellipses in your funnels look alright--they're smoothly drawn and pretty accurate--but many of them are angled a little wrong. Make sure to have your ellipses line up together with the minor axis. That'll be important later when drawing cylinders. You did succeed on making them wider as they stretched further outward, so that's good.

Finally, the boxes. Your plotted perspective is done well, though it is missing a third panel. Your rough perspective boxes have some good smooth lines, and they're pretty accurate to their vanishing points too, although there's a page missing here. Your rotated boxes look okay, but they do seem to vary a lot in shape, and the linework is a little messy so it's hard to really see much of it. This exercise is pretty hard, of course, and if you give it another try, I recommend making it bigger. More space helps a lot in clarity when it comes to art. That's why we've got 4K canvases, you know?

Your organic perspective boxes are done well. The foreshortening is a little too extreme on a couple of them, though. Something to remember in this exercise is to vary your foreshortening, but not TOO much. Closer boxes have more foreshortening, while farther boxes have less. And remember, of course, that each plane has a vanishing point they all converge towards very slightly.

So, yeah, if you do believe you've gained enough experience, you can give the 250 Box Challenge a shot. If this were an official critique I'd only let you pass if you did the missing bits, but you've managed to complete MOST of the lesson and you've understood the lessons themselves well, and I'll say that's good enough. The Challenge will give you plenty of practice on the box foreshortening and stuff I was talking about.

First off, your superimposed lines look good, which isn't a surprise, really, I mean, it's pretty easy. Some of your sharper curves do have some minor wobbling, and it seems to me that you might've focused a bit much on accuracy there. Remember to do your best to make one, decisive stroke of your pen when making a line. Accuracy isn't the first priority, remember--it's still important, of course, but not as much as having a good, clean line, at least in this course.

Ghosted lines look good. You're pretty accurate and smooth with the lines here, so that's good.

Your ghosted planes have some minor wobbling in the lines, I notice. Your ellipses here look good for the most part, but there are still a few that also have some wobbly lines in them. Your accuracy is nice, but remember that it's second priority to smoothness. I'll say the same about your tables of ellipses, too, as there is some wobbling in a few of them. I shouldn't be too hard, though, since most of them look alright, and of course, ellipses are just difficult to begin with anyway, so you're off to a good start at least.

Your funnels look good, you've done well at widening the ellipses here as they get further out. Plotted perspective is nice and clean in all aspects, good work there. You've done your rough perspective nicely as well, though again, there's some wobbly lines in there.

Both your rotated boxes and organic perspective pages are done cleanly. Good work on that. I'm not actually experienced enough to really tell how good of a job you did on the rotated boxes, but you did make them very clean and symmetrical, and it looks very believable, so nice work there. Your organic perspective boxes also have very good linework, though they are a little off on a lot of their foreshortening and all.

Remember this: if something (such as a box) is either very big, or just closer to your viewpoint, its foreshortening will be more dramatic. Objects further in the distance, or objects that are just smaller, will have less dramatic foreshortening. Most of the boxes in your organic perspective, both close and far, seem to have mostly the same foreshortening, which sort of downplays the depth of the scene. I don't think this is very important for the organic perspective exercise itself, but it is very good to keep in mind for drawing in general.

You've done a pretty nice job at Lesson 1, overall. You did seem to focus on accuracy a bit much in most cases, but that seems to have gotten better with your organic perspective boxes. You'll get better with ellipses, too, with practice. Just remember: confidence first, accuracy second. You'll get some good practice with box foreshortening in the 250 Box Challenge.

So you've got some good superimposed lines, first off. The curves are a little wobbly, but they are admittedly a little more difficult, so that's fine for now. Your ghosted lines look nice too, though I see you did miss very slightly a few times, which, again, is normal. You'll get better at it as you practice.

You did a fairly nice job at the tables of ellipses, for the most part. There are a few ellipses that look like you might've slowed down a bit much--I do recommend trying to draw them a little faster. Don't go too fast, of course, but go just quickly enough where you won't run into any wobbling. Of course, ellipses are just tricky to begin with, so again, you'll improve with practice, however you'd like to do so.

Your ellipses in planes look pretty nice. Your ellipses here seem to be much more smooth than before, so keep up the good work. The planes themselves are looking good too, lots of nice straight lines. Your funnels also look pretty nice; it seems at this point you're getting the hang of ellipses. You've done a good job of keeping them properly inside the funnels, although some of them are very slightly off-center--but this is a common mistake, and nothing to really worry about as long as it's not extreme.

Plotted perspective is nice and clean, looks good to me. You drew through your boxes nicely here. Your rough perspective boxes are looking pretty nice too, though there is a LOT of wobbling and stuff going on with the lines themselves. You do wanna try and keep those smooth, but otherwise, you seem to have understood the exercise itself well. The rotated boxes are, of course, very hard to do, and I see quite a few of yours aren't really actually rotated. The drawing itself should be in a roughly circular shape when you're done, and all the boxes should be roughly the same size. You did do a good job at the hatched lines, though, at least. I would keep in mind that, when drawing this, it should be symmetrical both horizontally and vertically. It helped for me--as much as it could, at least.

Finally, your organic perspective boxes are looking okay, but there's a lot of weird angles that kind of makes everything look like gelatin cubes. A couple tips for drawing boxes like this:

1. When you draw the Y shape to begin your box, the center of that Y is the closest corner to your vision. Everything else gets smaller from there due to foreshortening.

2. Foreshortening itself is something to keep in mind here. Your smaller, more distant boxes should have less foreshortening, as you're viewing them from farther away. The larger, closer boxes should have more foreshortening as they are closer to your point of view.

3. Remember when drawing a line, that it is parallel in 3D space to another line on your box. You can use any parallel lines as a guide for drawing a new one.

4. You can place dots to start planning where to draw a corner. You can place as many dots as you need, adjusting their position, until it looks correct. Then you can draw your line.

So you've done a pretty nice job on Lesson 1. Some of your freehand boxes may be a bit off, but that's what the 250 Box Challenge is for, and so that'll give you lots of practice, during which you'll probably discover and develop your own strategies for drawing boxes.

Well, first off, your superimposed lines are looking alright, accuracy-wise, but they seem pretty wobbly in a lot of areas. Try to focus on making a single confident stroke, and try not to slow down in an attempt to correct yourself. Do know, though, that in my experience, the wobbling gets easier to control after a while, so that's useful for art in general. But as I said before, for Drawabox, you wanna focus on avoiding that. All your lines should be confident and straight.

Your ghosted lines look pretty good, actually. It seems here that you didn't worry as much about accuracy, which is good (even though it's important to a degree, it's not as important as confidence in this lesson). The lines themselves are well done, although there is a bit of curving going on with some of them. You can try and avert that by carefully drawing in the opposite direction that you're curving in--just enough to avert your curving and fix your line back into being straight. Again, though, you've done well here.

Your tables of ellipses, on the other hand, have a lot of wobbling in them, and you may have been a little too concerned with accuracy here. Looks to me like you did understand the directions of what exactly you should be drawing, which is good, but I would recommend drawing your ellipses faster. It leaves less room for this kind of wobbling, and while you may end up with a lot of inaccurate ellipses, that's just part of the process. The goal is to be swift and accurate here, but swiftness is the priority. I would say MAYBE try this one again, at least some of it? But it's up to you. As long as you try to avoid the wobbling in your ellipses, you should be good. I'm confident you'll be able to accomplish this after having seen the smoothness of your ghosted lines.

The lines of your ghosted planes are looking nice once again. I see some slight wobbling and curving, but it's very minor. You're doing a good job of making your ellipses properly elliptical here, and not warped/egg-shaped, but again, the lines themselves are really wobbly, much like your tables of ellipses were. Like I said, I would suggest drawing the ellipses faster, and leaving accuracy as a second priority behind the first, which is smoothness.

Your funnels, again, do have quite a bit of wobbling in the ellipses. Besides that, though, your accuracy's not looking too bad here, which is good. There's a few elllipses here and there that aren't directly aligned to the center of the funnel, but that's admittedly an easy mistake to make, and for the mostpart you managed to avoid it.

Your plotted perspective is looking quite nice. The hatched lines seem to be mostly absent, though. However this exercise is mostly here (as far as I know) to get you acquainted with the idea of every box having a set of vanishing points, and so there's really not much to mess up on. Good work here.

Rough perspective pages look good. You did a good job of hitting the mark most of the time here, even though you understandably did mess up a few times. The lines don't look too bad, but there is some slight wobbling in some of them.

Your rotated boxes are all drawn through, which is good. You might've run into the common issue of not actually rotating your boxes, but to be honest, it's hard to tell for me. I'm not great at doing this one myself, so it's hard to say, unfortunately.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are well drawn, with little wobbling, though I do see you tried to redraw the lines of some of them, which you should probably avoid. In this course, generally, if you mess something up while drawing a shape, you have to just finish drawing the shape to the best of your ability even if you know it's gonna turn out incorrect. The next shape you draw after that gives you a clean slate where you can avoid your previous mistakes. There's some slight warping on some of the boxes, too, but this doesn't seem to be much of an issue for the mostpart.

So I think this is a good submission in lots of areas, but you may want to practice your ellipses a little more. Try to draw them with more confidence, and try to avoid correcting yourself too much. Drawing a line, curve or ellipse should be something you do without hesitation upon being ready for it (after ghosting and all that, of course). The 250 box challenge, of course, doesn't involve ellipses, so you won't need that skill for the time being, but it'll be good to have for lesson 2 once you reach it.