Dr_Scrapjack

Thank you for taking some of your time to critique my submission, I really appreciate! I admit that in the dissections exercise I fell back on some textures that are hard to convey with cast shadows only because I was running out of ideas for textures. I will try to avoid it in the future for things like the texture challenge (and also try to avoid making the black bar too thick as you observed). I also agree with you on your point on the sagging, I was indeed a bit afraid of making an overtly complicated shape but it does indeed look a bit too much rigid, I will try to better capture the weight effects in the future. I want to thank you once again, and I'm excited to move on to lesson 3!

Hi Kokolo, and congratulations on making it through the challenge! I will try to give you a brief critique, pointing out where I think you did well and where things could be improved further.

Your linework throughout the challenge stays consistently precise, in the sense that your segments look very straight and give a clear sense of directionality. During the first half of the challenge, while applying correctly lineweight to the silhouette of the boxes, your lines feel however a bit scratchy with more than 2 superimposed lines, which ruins a bit the sense of confidence that your otherwise steady marks convey. However, this tendency starts to disappear further down the challenge, where lineweight is applied with only a single superimposed line, as it should be. Even if with time you managed to correct this, I will remind you here that lineweight is a tool that we use to convey the feeling of looking at something in 3d space and not a way to correct a line that looks faulty to us. One of the things we do in this course is also to try learn to accept mistakes and build or work around them instead of necessarily correcting them. In all the exercises of this course we should always fight the urge to try to correct a bad line, whatever its nature or purpose.

Your line extensions, except for a couple of early mistakes (boxes 32 and 42 for instance) extend correctly away from the viewer. Generally speaking, your convergences are quite good, with at least 3 sides for each set of sides of a box usually converging in a fairly small area (or at least looking believably convergent in the cases where the VP is outside the piece of paper). The fourth side of the set often ends up being noticeably more slanted towards one of the other 3, resulting in a more sparse area of convergence or (more so early on in the challenge than later) convergence in pairs i.e. the hidden edge converges with one of the sides but diverges with respect to the other 2. This is due to the difficulty of placing the back corner of the box when drawing it beginning from the front, and it's a very common one since mistakes with convergence on the front will inevitably pile up at the back. To some degree this can never be fixed completely, but there are some methods that could help improve the precision of your back corner, such as reversing the process and start to draw the box from the inner corner or helping yourself by placing auxiliary reference marks when you ghost in one of the directions that form the back corner intersection, so that you may fix one of the directions and find more precisely the actual position of the corner.

I don't have many other remarks to make on your homework. Viewed as a whole, I'd say that you did a nice job with this challenge and that you have shown a good grasp of the concepts and instructions of both lesson 1 and this specific challenge. Keeping in mind the areas where you could improve, I'd say you are more than ready to move on to lesson 2. Good luck and good work!

Hi K4llegro, good job on finishing the box challenge! I imagine you will be quite relieved. I will try to handle your critique, trying to point out where you did well in my opinion and where there could be room for improvement.

Starting with a general consideration, the broad trajectory of your work tends towards improvement over time, with the occasional misstep here and there as it is normal with a repetitive task. Your boxes start as confident but somewhat wonky at the beginning of the challenge, often resulting in these early boxes having sets of sides that converge in pairs rather than near a single point, as if we were looking at an irregularly shaped box in isometric view rather than a rectangular box in 3 point perspective. However as the challenge goes on your accuracy improves and you manage to produce more consistent convergence of your boxes with a fair accuracy.

More on convergence, you experimented with a fair variety of shapes and inclinations. You seemed to struggle a bit with boxes with more pronounced foreshortening in the beginning, but with the general quality of your boxes improving further down the challenge your ability to capture foreshortening followed suit. In a couple of boxes you have placed your extension lines in the wrong direction, but seeing that otherwise they are placed correctly it seems likely to me that these were instances of momentary distraction rather than misunderstandings of perspective.

As far as your line work is concerned, it looks smooth and confident for all the structural and lineweight lines all throughout the challenge. The hatching lines look sometimes a bit uneven and wobbly however. While for the purposes of the exercise hatching lines are a minor concern, remember that in this course lines should always be traced with confidence using the ghosting method, and hatching is no exception.

At last, some comments on the back corner. The back corner of the box is usually the part of the challenge students struggle the most with. It is not unusual (and it happens often in your boxes) that one or multiple of the hidden sides converge less precisely compared to the remaining 3 sides in the same direction. This is due to the fact that if we start beginning drawing the box from the front, the back corners will be both difficult to pinpoint because we have to ghost in 3 directions that must be consistent with the previously established vanishing points and because all the little convergence mistakes we previously made will pile up at that point. There are multiple possible ways to improve this detail. A possibility is trying to start to draw from the back corner instead and build up the rest from there. Another method I tried is to choose 2 of the 3 directions that form the back corner, ghost in the first direction, place a small reference mark where you think the corner will be (thus fixing one of the segments) and the ghost in the second direction to find out where the 2 lines actually intersect.

As a whole, I think you did a nice job in this challenge and demonstrated that you could improve from your previous mistakes. Keeping in mind the things you could improve, I'd say you can move on to lesson 2. Good luck and stay motivated!

Hi, congrats on completing the 250 box challenge! This is safe to say a quite daunting task for everyone who follows the course, so take a deep breath and enjoy the certainty that it is finally over and you did it! I will say a few things here, mostly about what I think you did right and where there's room for improvement.

Starting with the convergence of the boxes, each set of sides consistently converges away from the viewer, and quite often with a decent level of precision. The only exceptions that I noticed are a couple of boxes towards the end, specifically boxes 204, 208 and 210, that are actually trapezoidal and not rectangular viewed in perspective. The fact that otherwise all of your boxes correctly converge away from the viewer suggests to me that this is due to letting your guard down towards the end of the challenge rather than lack of understanding of the rules of 3 point perspective. In any case, always remember that in 3 point perspective the sides of the visible faces always converge away from the viewer, i.e. "behind" the box and not in front.

Sometimes the hidden edge of the box is more slanted than the other sides going in the corresponding direction, resulting in a more sparse area in which the intersections of the extensions are found, or in convergence with one side but not the other two. This is a very common and easy mistake caused by the fact that, since we are working essentially through eyeballing, the back corner will be the place where all of the small mistakes we make pile up if we start drawing from the front. There are ways to improve this: some people find it easier to start drawing from the back corner and build up the rest from there. A less elegant method, but that I find personally more useful, is to ghost in one of the directions that form the back corner intersection, place a small reference mark where you think the intersection could be to fix the established direction and then ghost in the other direction to place the mark where the lines actually intersect.

About your line work, I can say it looks smooth and confident, indicating that by now you have a solid grasp of the ghosting method. This applies both to normal lines and hatching lines. Line weight is correctly applied only to the silhouette of the shape. Sometimes it looks like you ceded to the temptation of trying to correct your line through application of line weight, resulting in lines that end up looking a bit cluttered and uneven, but most of the time it looks like you actually applied it correctly, with only a second superimposed line.

All in all, I think you did a good job with the challenge. Keeping in mind what I said, I think you can move on to lesson 2. Good luck and stay motivated!

Good job! I see much improvement in your confidence, especially in the ellipses, who look much smoother than before. Now that your ellipses look confident try to focus gradually on other elements, such as symmetry and accuracy. In your planes the ellipses are broadly accurate in the sense that they come close to touching each side, but sometimes don't end up symmetrical. On the other hand, in the funnels the ellipses are fairly symmetrical, but going outwards they don't touch the sides of the funnels. You should try to reach a happy medium between these two situations. I also see improvement in your boxes. In the rough perspective some sides are still noticeably more slanted, but your precision has improved. The 250 box challenge will surely improve it even more. Overall, you did a good job and I feel you are ready to go on. Remember to stay motivated and revisit these exercises in your warmup routine. Good luck!

Hi Art101, congrats on completing lesson one! I will handle your critique here. My review will be divided in sections corresponding to each exercise.

Superimposed lines

You followed the instructions of the exercise and made each time many repeated superimposed lines. However, from the beginning we start to see a recurring problem with your lines: they look very wobbly and uncertain. I will expand more on this point in the section that involves the use of the ghosting method. This may be because you were a little bit too much concerned with keeping your lines parallel rather than placing a confident stroke and letting your muscle memory do the heavy lifting. Remember that the golden rule of this course is confidence over accuracy: for the purpose of this course, a confident but inaccurate line will always be preferred to an accurate line that lacks confidence.

Ghosted lines

In this exercise, with the introduction of the ghosting method, your confidence seems to have improved a little, but there are still many lines with noticeable wobbling, even if to a lesser degree compared with the previous exercise. This residual wobbling may be caused by two things:

1. Not drawing from your shoulder. You should always try to consciously use your shoulder as your main pivot, since it allows for maximum fluidity and freedom of movement. You may not like the result in the beginning, since this method makes it harder to have control on your line, especially in shorter marks. However, you will notice that greater control will come with practice. By contrast, drawing from the elbow or the wrist allow for easier control, but makes it very hard to draw long lines without breaking your flow.

2. Not applying the ghosting method correctly. The ghosting method is the fix that we will use here from now on to place our marks without sacrificing too much accuracy. I won't go over the details of the method, you probably already know it and the lesson notes explain it far better than I could (in case you wanted to go over the details again, I link back the instructions here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/ghostedlines). It is possible that the wobbling may result from the movements of your shoulder being still somewhat stiff. If that's the case, do not be afraid to spend more time carefully ghosting each line until you feel that your muscle memory has registered your desired movement. If you feel uncomfortable working in a certain direction, you could also turn the page to place your mark in a way you feel more comfortable.

For the rest, your lines are quite precise, with little deviation from your fixed points. There's some overshooting, but for now that is a secondary concern until we refine the more important aspects of the exercise. As a minor criticism, I'd say that you could have experimented with a wider variety of directions and lengths, instead of repeating similar lines.

Ghosted planes

Here, you lose some of you previously gained confidence, most likely because of the greater restraint coming from the task of having to build an actual solid polygon instead of simple floating lines. As a result, at the beginning of the exercise your lines look more wobbly. However, as the exercise goes on, the wobbling becomes increasingly reduced, and by the end of the exercise your lines end up looking quite confident and without wobbling. This shows that throughout the exercise you managed to better familiarize with the ghosting method and applied it more successfully.

Ghosted ellipses

Your previously gained confidence is quite reduced here, most likely because you are drawing an unfamiliar shape with the ghosting method. You manage to keep your ellipses closely packed and mostly within the bounds of each panel, but the ellipses themselves look wobbly and often asymmetric. My previous comments on ghosting applies here: if you feel unsure, take your time to ghost as much as you want before placing your mark with a fast and confident stroke. Note that this is also one of the reasons for why we draw through each ellipse 2 times: repeating the curve allows us not to worry about immediately breaking the line once we finished the loop, thus allowing greater confidence.

Ghosted planes

The same comments above apply here. The wobbling is somewhat improved, but it is still noticeable.

Funnels

The wobbling is still there, but I can see some further improvement. More specifically about this exercise, in many funnels the ellipses often end up being not correctly aligned with the funnel and appear slanted. In this exercise, the axis of the funnel should coincide with the minor axis of each ellipse, cutting it in symmetrical halves.

Plotted perspective

The sides of the boxes correctly converge towards the 2 fixed vanishing points on the horizon line. However, your boxes seem to converge also in a third direction. This is not something that should happen in 2 point perspective, where we don't have a vertical vanishing point (you can also think that the vanishing point is still there, but it's infinitely far away). Note also that these aren't technically rectangular boxes in 3 point perspective: if that was so, since we see all of your boxes from below, the third vanishing point should be upwards, not downwards. The way you have drawn them, the lateral faces of your boxes are actually trapezoids. In this exercise (and in 2 point perspective in general), the lateral edges of each box should be vertical, i.e. perpendicular to the horizon line. To ensure this, you simply make sure that the edges of the lateral faces visible to the viewer are reasonably vertical (if you are using just a ruler with a graduation scale, you can try to align the marks with the horizon line to establish a vertical). Once you have done that, simply extend the intersections towards the VPs and then complete the hidden faces with the back edge by joining the new final intersections. You probably applied the very same method I described; in that case the source of error stems solely from the non vertical edges.

Rough perspective

You correctly applied the line extension method for convergence checks. Your boxes are roughly oriented towards the VPs, which is a good start. We are not aiming for perfect precision here, after all we are eyeballing the whole thing with a few additional steps, however I feel there's room for improvement at this stage. Some of your boxes tend to actually diverge, but it's mostly limited to one side, while the others broadly converge. More importantly, in my opinion, is that there's some improvement to do in how you apply 1 point perspective. Since we are working with 1 VP, each box should have 1 set of converging lines, while the remaining 2 sets remain vertical and horizontal. Again, since here we are not working with rulers things will be not very precise, but I notice that many of your boxes tend to have one or two lines belonging to the non converging sets noticeably more slanted than the rest. This appears me to be caused not by a misunderstanding in the rules of the exercise, as the other lines are broadly oriented correctly, but rather by placing the endpoints of your segments in a way that could benefit from more care. You could improve this for segments that are constrained in 2 fixed directions, instead of trying to place your point directly at the first try, by placing a "provisional" point by ghosting explicitly in one of the two directions and then checking your initial guess by ghosting in the other direction and seeing where the lines should actually intersect. On a different note, I think that it's worth mentioning that from this exercise on your lines look way more confident compared with the beginning of the lesson.

Rotated boxes

This and the next exercise are notoriously difficult for beginners, so it's very common to make mistakes here. The central cross has a quite wide range of rotation. The boxes in the corners however seem to follow the rotation only of the horizontal arm of the cross, resulting in an overall shape that looks more cylindrical than spherical and in boxes with faces that become less square the more you drift away from the cross. It may be worth to revisit this exercise later on during the course.

Organic perspective

The boxes correctly get bigger as they get closer to the viewer. You didn't shy away from making boxes overlap, which is good since overlapping shapes will play an important role later on. The boxes look rather wonky, but you shouldn't worry to much about it, you will have plenty of time to practice in the 250 box challenge.

Conlusion

I hope I didn't come off as harsh in my criticism. I feel that you made visible improvement during the course of your homework. Still, I think you may benefit from some additional practice before moving on to the 250 box challenge. For this reason, I will assign you some extra homework. Take all the time you need and when you are done, reply with your homework. Remember to always draw from the shoulder, ghost as long as you need and then place your mark fast and confidently. Good luck and good work!

Hi Nobody, good job getting done with lesson one! I will handle your critique. I can already tell you that I think that overall you did a great job here, nevertheless I will still try to give my opinion on each exercise and tell you where I think you did well and where I feel there may be eventually room for improvement.

Superimposed lines

From the beginning you show that you already have a pretty good control over your lines. I see virtually no wobbling in your straight lines, and fraying on only one end as it should. Similarly, your curved lines look very confident and each repeated follows very closely the established curve.

Ghosted lines

Here again, aided by the ghosting method, your lines look very confident, almost perfectly straight in some cases. They also follow very closely the direction established by you fixed points of choice with little deviation or arching, and very little overshooting or undershooting too.

Ghosted planes

Much of the same I said above applies here as well. You experimented with a fair amount of different shapes of planes, which is good and will come in handy for later exercises where perspective will become a factor to consider. A small critique I will make is that in one of the planes on the left in the first page, one of the sides is made of disjointed lines. If this was caused by an attempt to correct your trajectory, remember that here we will always prioritize confidence over accuracy, so if you ever notice a mistake in one of your marks, try to resist the urge to correct yourself midway, because the result will probably end up looking less confident. Instead, try to work with and around your mistakes on the paper.

Tables of ellipses

Your ellipses look very smooth and confident. You experimented with a fair range of eccentricity, from almost circular to relatively elongated. The ellipses look more often than not fairly symmetrical, the more elongated ones more than the more circular ones as it usually is the case. You also correctly drew two times through each ellipse. Also, good job with the efficient use of the space of each table, they all look filled with little room for addition.

Ellipses in planes

The planes were a little more challenging as a boundary for your ellipses, but you were more than up to the task. Your ellipses remained confident and for the most part symmetrical, even in the trickier, more deformed planes. Sometimes you ended up overshooting the plane by a bit, but it's not much, and you correctly prioritized confidence over better accuracy.

Funnels

In the first funnel in the top let corner you seem to struggle a bit with aligning your ellipses with the axis of the funnel, but you quickly corrected your shot in the following ones. You also followed the additional step of making you ellipses less eccentric the more you get further from the center, which is good since it will come in handy later in the course. Before moving to the next sections, I will point out that it looks like you free handed your funnels, or at least some of them. While the result looks generally fine, since in this exercise we are trying to use rigid guidelines to make our ellipses as symmetrical as we can by aligning their minor axis with the axis of the funnels, it would be a good idea to trace round objects to make your funnels in the future, when you will revisit this exercise in your warmups, in order to minimize the asymmetry.

Plotted perspective

Not much to say here, you have applied correctly the steps for using two point perspective. My only nitpicks here are that some of your verticals are a bit slanted (one way to correct a bit this when you are using a graduated ruler only is to align the scale marks to the sides of your panel) and that some of your hatching lines look a bit wobbly. Remember that a hatching line is a line like any other: it should be traced smoothly and confidently using the ghosting method.

Rough perspective

Your lines look again confident like they did before. You apply correctly the rules of one point perspective, as your extension lines show. The directionality of each individual side of the lateral faces is correct, with the boxes broadly leaning away from the viewer and towards the horizon. I see that you have also applied line weight to some of your boxes, which is good. In some of the boxes occasionally a stray side ends up diverging instead of converging, and you seem to have a bit of a tendency of placing the sides of opposite faces in such a way that they end up converging in two fairly distanced distinct points. While these are mistakes, I wouldn't worry too much about them since this is your first approach in this course to freehand perspective and you will have plenty of time to practice during the 250 boxes challenge.

Rotated boxes

These last two exercises are notoriously more complex than the rest of the lesson, but you did a nice work. The boxes are well rotated and you did a fairly good job at filling the "corners" between the arms of the initial cross. For the hatching lines, my previous critique applies even more here, where the lines look more like scribbles (which should always be avoided here) than confident lines that communicate depth.

Organic perspective

Very nice job here. The boxes follow smoothly the path of your curve and get bigger approaching the viewer. Compared to the rough perspective, you seem to be more comfortable when you have to just eyeball the perspective deformation of your boxes, resulting in quite believable shapes in 3d space. This shows that you may have already a good deal of perspective intuition, which is a skill that will come in very handy in the 250 boxes challenge as a tool for double checking and simplifying the task. Good job again on applying line weight consistently and only on the outside of the boxes.

Keeping in mind the criticism and suggestions I gave you above, I feel that overall you did a very fine job with your first lesson and I can confidently say that your are well equipped to begin to tackle the 250 boxes challenge. Good luck and stay motivated!

EDIT: I didn't notice that this submission had already a critique. Still, I hope that my thoughts will prove useful to you.

Thank you for the time you put into reviewing my homework, I really appreciate that! The overshooting/undershooting you pointed out has been a problem that followed me since lesson one, and I suspect that the reason is because prior to starting with drawabox I was not used at all to drawing from the shoulder. I guess that now that my straight lines look reasonably smooth I should focus more on trying to have better control on pressure and endpoints.

Also thank you for the reminder on perspective deformation from lesson 1, in trying to have the broadest possible set of different initial y shapes this is something that I forgot to take into account.

I am excited to move forward to lesson 2. Thanks again for your advice!

Hi! I checked your additional homework, and while I'd say there's still a certain degree of uncertainty in you mark making, I definitely see some improvement, more so in the planes than in the funnels, most likely because the planes give you more possibilities to get loose with your ellipse compared to the quite rigid boundary of the funnels, where you have to both draw inside and keep the correct orientation with respect to the funnel's axis. Since you seem to be going in the right direction with your ellipses, I will mark you lesson as complete. The last advice I will give you here is to keep practicing a bit on your ellipses, for instance by giving ellipse related exercises priority in your future warmup routine. Remember to draw from your shoulder, ghost as long as you need and after that place the mark without a second thought.

If you want to get your lesson badge, you could post your submission on the official discord and ask if some users agree with my review (or want to write another review if they feel mine is inadequate). Stay motivated and keep up the good work!

Hi Tom1406, good job getting things done with lesson one! I will handle your critique for this lesson's exercises. I can already tell it won't be very look, since even at a first glance it is looks clear to me that you have a solid grasp on the concepts presented in this lesson. Still, I will try to divide this critique in sections corresponding to each exercise.

Superimposed lines

Your lines look for the most part confident and improve gradually from the first to the second page. There's fraying on one end only as it should be. I see you've also put a lot of effort in trying to experiment with curved lines, which is good.

Ghosted lines

Not much to say here either. Your lines are confident and without wobbling. There's virtually no arching at all and each line goes almost straight from one fixed point to the other with little drifting. You also show already good line control, with very little overshooting or undershooting most of the time.

Ghosted planes

You applied well the principles of the previous exercise to this slightly more complicated case. You are again very precise and confident. Only as a minor note, I feel you could have used the space in the first page in a more efficient way since the bottom of the page is a bit empty compared to the rest. You did however corrected your shot in the second page, so that's good.

Tables of ellipses

Your ellipses look fluid, confident and more or less symmetrical. You correctly draw at least 2 times through each one and manage to stay fairly close the bounds of the table and neighboring ellipses, with precision improving as you go forward.

Ellipses in planes

Pretty much everything above applies here. You manage to make your ellipses confidently while clearly putting in the effort to make each ellipse touch all four sides of the plane. As a result a couple of ellipses end up looking a bit wonky but most of them remain fairly symmetrical.

Funnels

Each individual ellipse look mostly good in isolation, with all the upsides described in the 2 previous sections. As a whole, most of the ellipses are cut in half by the major axis of their funnel. In a couple of funnels however some ellipses are a bit slanted respective to said axis. Also, in some funnels the ellipses are a bit too much spaced, while they should fit snugly between each other. That said, I think you generally understood and applied the goals of the exercise.

Plotted perspective

Not much to say here. You apply 2 point perspective correctly and draw through each box.

Rough perspective

The linework looks for the most part confident. You have correctly drawn through your boxes and made only one set of lines per box convergent to the VP, as is required in 1 point perspective. Your line extensions for most boxes go roughly towards the VP, showing already a good sense for direction and depth in 3D space.

Rotated boxes

Now we enter the final and hardest parts of the exercises, and let me say that I feel you managed to tackle them really well. Specifically for this exercise, your boxes are kept tight and rotate well, creating a nice spherical shape. The 4 corners between the initial cross in particular is well handled. As a minor critique, your hatching in some section looks quite messy, having 2 sets of different hatching lines crossing each other. Unless stated otherwise, hatching in this course should always be applied in one direction only, with evenly spaced lines made using the ghosting method.

Organic perspective

You did well here too. The boxes follow nicely the initial curve, and get bigger coming closer towards the viewer. I see that you also were not afraid to draw overlapping boxes, which is good since it helps to understand how objects relate to each other in space. Some boxes look a bit wonky, but don't worry too much about it, you will have plenty of time to practice in the 250 boxes challenge, and besides getting the boxes "right" wasn't the focus of the exercise.

Final remarks

I think your did very well in this first lesson. A few errors aside, you have shown that you understood and are able to apply the concepts presented in each section. In my opinion, you are more than ready to move on to the 250 boxes challenge. If you want to get your badge, you could post your submission on the official discord and ask if some users want to check and agree with this review. Good luck and keep up the good work!