fantasticallymundane

Hello again Ma,

You second submission shows a lot of growth! Your super imposed lines look even better and the arcing present in your forst submission has almost vanished. The same applies to your ghosted lines. They're smooth and confident. Although you don't always hit your mark, continued application of the ghosting method throughout this course and/or your artistic career will no doubt increase your precision. About your ellipses, not being able to draw them "nicely" is secondary to what we're looking for, and that's fitting them within a clearly established goal. Your work demonstrates this very well with each ellipse neatly tucked in with the rest, following a defined degree, angle and size. Finally, let's look at your rotated boxes and here, the difference between your first submission and second is night and day. You've drawn through your boxes which allows us to better interpret how they sit in relation to one another in 3D space. Furthermore, each box is veering more towards converging towards seperate vanishing points, which should be expected when the boxes are rotated. The boxes one the fringes get a little further away from this, but overall, I'm very impressed with your revisions and have no qualms about marking this lesson as complete. Well done!

PS: I remember you mentioning on Discord that you already did the 250 box challenge, right? If so, then there's no need to redo all 250 boxes. Feel free to post the work you've already done so you can get your completion badge.

PPS: I also remember asking for another page of the rough perspective exercise. Your work here shows enough understanding of how boxes should converge that the omission isn't too bad.

Hello Ma, I'm Fantastically Mundane (or @Canoe on Discord) and I'll be taking a look at your lesson 1 submission.

Let’s start with your superimposed lines and they’re off to a good start. You follow a consistent trajectory and execute your lines with confidence. There's some fraying at the end of your superimposed lines, but that's expected at this point. The curvier lines exhibit more fraying than your straighter ones. The important thing right now is that there is minimal fraying at the beginning of your lines which shows you're paying attention to where your pen starts. The same applies to your ghosted planes. You don't always hit your end point, but they're looking confident and that's all we're asking for at this stage. You're also putting in the correct amount of work per plane, treating every line as a 'unit of work' rather than just focusing on the whole plane itself. There's a noticeable arc in all of your lines. This just comes down to how our arms work, but consciously arcing in the other direction can help reduce this. It's not too drastic, but maybe something to look out for. I've already noticed an improvement between your first and later exercises. Two things of note for your lines exercise. First, the lesson asks for two filled pages of superimposed lines and I can only find one page. Did the second page get left out or did you only do one page? Next, I find it difficult to evaluate your ghosted lines exercise. You've heavily doodled on the page which makes it difficult for me as a reviewer to critique your submission. Also, I can't discern any concrete start or end points for your lines. These would be two dots on the page that you connect with a ghosted line. This is to help determine how accurate your line placements are and weather you can hit your intended mark confidently. Sometimes I can find a dot from which you've started, but not often. In lieu of these, it kind of looks like you've just randomly placed lines on the page without thinking about their positioning.

Moving onto ellipses, overall your ellipses look smooth and confident. You don't always draw through your ellipses at least two times, that's something to keep in mind for the future. For the tables of ellipses exercise, I'm not quite sure you've understood the instructions completely. Our goal is to try and draw ellipses touching the top and bottom of the box, using those boundaries as a set of goals to fulfill rather than randomly placing ellipses willy-nilly. We also want to keep our degree consistent when drawing out ellipses. Refer to the homework instructions here. Some tables do this well, like the top left tables of both of your ellipse pages. However, most of the other sections of your ellipse tables have ellipses in random degrees and with seemingly random placements. I can see that you're doing well in packing each table full with ellipses, carefully trying to keep them from overlapping too much in regards to each other, but it looks like some of your ellipses have been placed randomly in the table. We should be trying to fit a clearly defined goal from the get go! Your ellipses in planes show a much better understanding of how to fit an ellipse into a clearly defined goal. The planes themselves are well executed and I can see your effort in fitting each ellipse snugly into each plane. Some ellipses haven't been drawn through, but you're definitely getting better with practice. Again, you've heavily doodled on one of your submission pages. As a reviewer, I would ask you to please refrain from that in the future as it renders your work harder to make out among the noise (I appreciate the hearts though

EDIT: Huh, for some reason the website deleted the second half of the post? Oh well. to summarize, please freehand the rough perspective exercise and take another look at how the correction method should be employed. Also, please draw through all of your boxes in the rotated boxes exercise.

Hello there, I'll be taking a look at your lesson 1 homework.

Let's start with the lines section of the lesson. Your superimposed lines are looking fairly wobbly. This suggests that you might not be completely giving up control of the mark from your brain to your arm. Remember, in all of Drawabox, we want to stress confidence in our marks over accuracy! This comic from uncomfy explains this practice better than I ever could: https://drawabox.com/comic/1. Apart from that there is some fraying at the ends of your lines, which is entirely expected as we build up our confidence. Like I said, accuracy will come later. One thing to look at is the fraying at the beginning of your lines. This doesn't happen very often and really only at the beginning of your longer lines, but we still want to be deliberate without rushing into our marks. Moving on, your ghosted lines are looking a lot better! There's a slight curve to them and you don't always hit your end point, but for now they're looking confident and that's all we're asking for right now. Similarly, the first page of your ghosted planes continues this streak of confidence over accuracy. However, the second page seems to regress a bit in this regard. There is a lot more wobbling on your second page than on your first. In lieu of having sat over your shoulder watching you do this exercise, I can't determine if you've rushed or were overwhelmed by the amount of work in front of you. There are also some instances where you've omitted a line (for example, in the four in the top left corner of your second page). Remember, a ghosted plane is not a single "unit of work," rather, a ghosted plane consists of 8 lines, each of which are a single "unit of work." We want to give each line in the plane its proper diligence. You have as much time as you need to finish any given exercise, so if you ever feel overwhelmed of like you need to rush, there is nothing wrong with taking a break and picking up the exercise during your next sitting.

That's it for lines for now. Let's get ellipse-y. For your tables of ellipses, you're doing a good job of fitting them snugly into the tables, using clearly established borders to judge how successful your execution was. You're also doing a good job drawing through your ellipses, though you really only need to go through 2-3 times. Sometimes you draw through as much as 6-7 times as far as I can tell. The same applies to your ellipses in planes and funnels, which also fit nicely inside your pre-established borders. Some of your ellipses can be a bit loose, but they will eventually tighten up as you incorporate these exercises into your warmups. In short, well done.

Finally, let's look at your boxes. Plotted perspective looks good. You've correctly plotted your edges back to the vanishing points while keeping your verticals perpendicular to the horizon. The back corner being off is a symptom of all the little mistakes you've made in plotting back to the vanishing points and isn't a grave mistake. I have a few notes for your rough perspective exercise, so if you'll allow me, I'll skip straight to your rotated boxes. You done a good job setting up the exercise with center lines and boxes at teh edge. You've also done well drawing through your boxes as if you had x-ray vision. As you get further out, your boxes don't rotate as much as they should. The result is that it looks like they align to the same vanishing point as the neighboring box. Since the box is being rotated, it shouldn't align to the same vanishing point. For your work, though, this is very minor, and I wouldn't consider it an issue at the moment. One thing I'd like you to do is to finish all the boxes in the set! This includes the extreme corners which are difficult to draw. You've included one box in the top right corner but left the other corners empty. Your organic perspective exercise shows good use of the ghosting method, as well as a starting grasp on the principles of foreshortening. Some of your boxes don't converge properly - some of them even diverge - but this will get ironed out in the 250 Box Challenge.

Now for rough perspective. This part of the lesson is where I'm torn. On the one hand, I think what you've shown demonstrated you understood the instructions. For example, you're correctly applying line extensions back to the vanishing point to evaluate how well your boxes converge. They don't always line up perfectly, but you've made a great effort. However, where I'm torn up about this exercise is in your execution. The quality of your lines suggests you're not completely employing the ghosting method. They're very wobbly and in some instances, you've drawn over them (such as in the two boxes on the right of the middle frame of your first page). I don't know whether that was an attempt to correct the lines or not, but a principle of the course is to accept the mistakes that happen and move forward. If your line doesn't come out exactly as you wanted it to, then it's ok to just move on to the next line, ghosting and preparing to the best of your ability for each line. The verticals/horizontals of your boxes also sometimes lean into guessing (https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/20/guessing), which we want to avoid. There is only one set of lines that should be converging towards a vanishing point in this exercise, so the rest of your lines should be either horizontal or perpendicular to the horizon. Overall, though, one of the main things I think you should be paying attention to is your confidence and line quality. It varies between your exercises. In your first ghosted planes page, rotated boxes, and organic perspective, you've done a good job. In rough perspective, the second page of ghosted planes, and ellipses in planes, your lines become much less confident. The fact that you've made an improvement between the earlier exercises and later exercises suggests that you're starting to "get it." I bring this up because confidence in our marks is such a core part of Drawabox as a curriculum that I feel like it should be emphasized early. This will come up again in later lessons, so best to begin solidifying it here.

That being said, you've shown enough of an understanding of the concepts of this lesson that I'd be ok with marking it as complete. I am also confident that your lines will improve with practice as you grapple with the 250 Box Challenge, as well as your spacial reasoning skills. Feel free to incorporate lesson 1 into your regular warm up pool moving forward. Also consider finishing your rotated boxes exercise with the boxes in the extreme corners!

Thank you so much! I tried to base it off of the real world ice trade from the 19th century =)

And they said 'Avengers: Endgame' was the most ambitious cross-over of all time...

Quite drafty indeed. I just looked at your prompt and it definitely gives a new meaning to "musical chairs"!

Thanks, I don't think I could have done this a month ago!

No, I just kind of made up random symbols!

Thank you for the feedback and for the tip about practicing the ghosting method. I'll get on that right away!