imnase211

You could practice ghosting with the superimposed lines exercise like I do.

Here's this post by Uncomfortable that might help you with overcoming any hesitation that you might have with making marks. The important thing for you to realize is that hesitation while mark making is useless, you need to be comfortable with the idea of making a wrong mark. When you're at the point of making the mark, you'll have to let go of hesitation, since you're well past the point of correcting any mistakes that you could be baking in the mark. Its hard. Its something that I am personally working on, but its possible. You need to put in conscious effort towards it. At the last point, you simply cant trade the confidence of the stroke for its accuracy, a confident stroke is way easier to work with and account for down the line as you develop your piece. You just need to forcefully shut the hesitation down because it will do you no good.

Oh hey, I think I formatted the link incorrectly. The word Here's got added to the link, kek. Here's the actual link, without any attempts at fancy formatting

https://images-ext-2.discordapp.net/external/rvDOEpSWih7FLx8dG3CuHwqB1Utj_HS5k0HCJD8dH2k/%3Fwidth%3D480%26height%3D473/https/media.discordapp.net/attachments/368871002584907776/382605790869061664/Demo.png?width=381&height=375

Arrows : Pretty solid if I say so myself. You've done a very good job exploring the 3d space with these. They are smooth and have confident lines. Amazing work.

Organic Forms: This is the exercise that I was talking about that you will have to repeat. You have the ellipses and contours following the axis of the body to an acceptable extent. This is true both the contours and the ellipses so good job on that. The small ellipse on top of the form seems to be somewhat off consistently however. It's always either way too far inside or has way too high of a degree. Remember that the plane of the cap is the plane closest to you, so it should have a smaller degree than the rest of the ellipses.

Texture Analysis: You've done a good job with these in general. There are a couple of things I'd like to point out though. The medium light zone on the paper texture could have been a little less dense you could have used much lesser of the sharp lines in that region. In the rock texture, I think you should have directly copied the reference and fit the two ends to lighter and darker conditions. Reproducing the texture on your own is very hard after all. In your attempt, I think I understand why the rock surface looks so off. The shadow shapes on one rock are all of the same size, which is very unlike your reference. One rock has one big shape and 4 or 5 small shapes in the reference whereas you have two big very similar shadow shapes on the same rock.

Dissections: Great work on these. You've done a good job wrapping the textures around the cylinders and push the silhouette nicely. The baguette texture especially looks really impressive. There's a general emphasis on cast shadows throughout the exercise. Great work.

Form Intersections: Really well done! The intersections of the cubes on the first page are very good. The intersection of the top right box with the one below it feels half-assed, but the rest is good. You have some obvious mistakes on the second page but you've corrected them in the following pages. I see that your line weight is somewhat hesitant, which is understandable. Try to build up some practice with ghosting curved lines and your line confidence will improve drastically.

Organic intersections: You have some inconsistencies here. In the first page you've had obvious problems with drawing forms that lie on top of another. I do see that it got much better in the second page, but the right side of the pile on the second page feels much less stable. This is okay as this is a very hard objective to reach, but it gets easier with practice. The cast shadows seem good for the most part, except in those forms in the first page that i mentioned earlier. Keep practicing this exercise and the others. You'll get better at stacking the forms in believable piles

All in all great submission! Feel free to mobve on to lesson 3.

Hello there SethLynch, I have critiqued your lesson 2 and am now critquing your 250 boxes as promised. If you don't get a critique even after waiting for long, head over to the critiques exchange on the drawabox discord server, you'll be able to get a critique in exhange for 5 others that you do.

Now for your critique.

As you said, there's a considerable improvement in line quality as you progressed from the start to the end of the challenge. I see that you've done a decent job applying line weight and hatching in the challenge, so good job on having the patience to take your time to do these properly.

The biggest concern I have is that fact that after the first 50 boxes, none of them have any foreshortening applied to them. Boxes with that shallow of a foreshortening are rather rare and most boxes go have some foreshortening applied to them. You have medium foreshortening in most of the boxes among the first 50 which is nice to see since they are the hardest, but you absolutely need more familiarity with dramatic foreshortening.

Hello Sethlynch, I hope that you're still here with us. I have checked your work on lesson 2 and I will give you my thoughts on it. I also noticed that your 250 boxes haven't been critiqued yet, I have taken a look at them and can tell that you need some more mileage with drawing boxes. I'll leave a critique on them in your 250 boxes post soon after I finish this and tell you what I think you need to do about that. Overall, it hasn't really impacted your ability to do lesson 2 apart from the form intersections exercise where the convergences of the boxes are really off which destroys the illusion of perspective. I think you're okay on Lesson 2 but you really need more mileage on the boxes.

Now for the critique:

Arrows : You did a good job with exploring the 3d space with the arrows. They have a good sense of depth to them. The first page had more wobbly lines, which was almost to be expected giving that this is the first time in the course you draw freely flowing curved lines. It's a daunting task to draw them the way you want to. You do get very comfortable in the second page which was impressive to see. So overall, excellent job!

Contour lines and ellipses: You did a generally good job with the contour ellipses. The axes of the ellipses line up pretty well in most cases with the flow of the form. You change the degree of them pretty nicely too. So good job with that. In the contour lines however, you seem to have had issues, which is understandable. Drawing contour lines can be very disorienting in the start, so its understandable that you didn't have the confidence tp align the contour lines properly. You seem to have done a much better job with the contour lines at the end, in the organic intersections exercise, which is impressive. So good job on these!

Texture analysis: You have some issues here but all of them are understandable for a first attempt. I'll leave some pointers for what I think you can do to improve these. Starting out with the paper texture, the stexture transition into pure black is too sudden. The cast shadows are too small on the darker end, The shadows should be more or less an inch long at the last edge before the fully dark end. The only white spots should be like the top most peaks of the paper crumbles at that point. It sounds extreme but that's how it should be, a region in pitch black is pretty extreme too after all. You have a similar problem with the leaf texture at the end. The cast shadows by the veins are too small in my opinion. Now coming to the sting ray skin texture, I see that you have only paid attention to the shadows in the crevices between the spheres of the skin completely neglecting the cast shadows the spheres themselves would cast. In the darkest region, you've drawn what would be more appropriate for the middle region. And the middle region has without would work for the brightest region where the light starts to fill in some of the shadow in the space between two spheres. In the dark region what starts to happen is that the spheres before a sphere also cast a shadow on it, leaving only the top most parts visible. The side away from the light is also dark as effectively no light reaches it in the dark region, which it would have in the medium and bright zones because of the light bouncing off of the spheres around them.

Dissections : These look nice. You take a lot of effort in pushing the silhouette which is nice. There are some instances where I see you drawing outlines instead of shadows. The snake belly is a good example. The long fat lines in the middle of the texture do a good job looking like cast shadows,but what broke the texture is the fact that the last fold also had a line of the same thickness. If you used a thin line for the silhouette, you could have sold the actual cast shadows in the middle much better,but seeing the sillhouette with that thick of a line broke the illusion.

Form intersections : This is really the only exercise of yours that I think you need to do better. The intersections themselves being off is okay. [https://images-ext-2.discordapp.net/external/rvDOEpSWih7FLx8dG3CuHwqB1Utj_HS5k0HCJD8dH2k/%3Fwidth%3D480%26height%3D473/https/media.discordapp.net/attachments/368871002584907776/382605790869061664/Demo.png?width=381&height=375](Here's am image that might help you with that.) What I really need is for the scene to feel coherent in perspective. You take the easy road out with all surfaces being completely flat in perspective, which is fine. You have put in thought about the relationships between the forms which is what the point was. Keep practicing this exercise. I'd suggest you to join the drawabox discord server, if you wanted a critique on a particular attempt of yours on the form intersections.

Organic Intersections : These came out really well. The pile of the forms feels stable like it should. The contour lines are drawn nicely and the cast shadows work. Solid attempt

Congratulations on finishing lesson 2 ! You've done a good job overall. There are a few things that you might want to keep in mind that I will list out in the critique, but you'll get them as you practice these exercises again in the future. But apart from this, feel free to move on to lesson 3.

Organic arrows: You've done a fairly good job with the arrows. The arrows are pretty hesitant, but that's okay, they will improve with practice. I see that you made clear effort to add depth to the arrows, even if the ones on the first page look a bit shallow, the second page came out much better. Keep practicing these for more confidence.

Organic forms : First things first : good job keeping the forms simple. There is some wobble however in your marks, but that is something i suspect will get better with practice. Moving on to the contours themselves, they are pretty good. In the contour ellipses, the ellipses change degrees like they should and they look reasonable for the most part. You have cases where the ellipses are way off the axis, so try to work on that. Don't rush the exercise. Rushing is probably the easiest way to ensure ellipses that don't line up. The contour curves are okay. Some of them are way flatter than they should like in the middle form at the rightmost edge. In that form, the small contour ellipse at the top and the contour line below it give an impression of a top down view of the form, but the contour lines following it are way too flat for that. But other than that you do a good job. The contours don't spill outside the actual form and they are more or less aligned to the axis, except in like one or two cases.

Texture Analysis: You do a fairly decent job here. The paper texture is especially good. You do have some problems with the texture fading into the dark however. In the scales, the way you make the scratches is pretty impressive, I like how you leave a clean space in the middle to show the round form. You could have done a better job with fading it into black however. The portion of the scale in light remains the same even as you progress from light to dark when it should have become smaller as the scales before occlude more of the light hitting the scales the follow into the darker side. A similar things would go for the folds in the elephant skin. You need to have more and biddr shadows in the darker side. Simply increasing the number of pores isn't enough.

Dissections: I think you do a really good job here. You take good care to push and break the silhouette when necessary and the textures wrap around nicely. I'd say that you could have pushed the sillhouete more in the lower half of the leaf texture you made at the end. The upper half has a boldsilhoutette but the lower half feels very flat in comparison. Great work anyway!

Form intersections: You have done a good job with the perspective here. I feel like the foreshortening is consistent throughout the scenes here. You do struggle with the actual intersections in places, but that's okay for the most part. Remember that the intersection line turns sharply at a corner if the intersection plane changes. You have a few instances where you don't do that. Also know that a flat plane intersects with a sphere to give a circular interesection, or atleast a part of a circle if the plane doesnt cut the sphere entirely. You've missed this in te intersection between a pyramid and a sphere on the last page, so I thought I'd let you know.

Organic Intersections: Done really well I must say. The piles feel stable. You have a few instances where the cast shadows dont follow the surfaces they are cast on exactly (like the cast shadow of the topmost form on the spaces between the two forms it is on (in the first page)) , but that's okay

Overall, great submission. I think you are good to go onto the next lesson.

Splendid work Bears64, congratulations on finishing the 250 box challenge! With this, you can safely progress on towards lesson 2. There's a lot of good progress here.I really don't have much to say apart from a few nitpicks

You've hit the most important target of this exercise of getting the lines to converge correctly. the last 25 or so of your boxes converge very nicely. There is clear, steady progress throughout the exercise. There are a few errors here and there at the end, but those will be fine tuned with practice. You've done both dramatic and shallow foreshortening a fair amount You are pretty good at the two as well.

Your lines are pretty much straight, no wobble whatsoever.

The line weight is applied nicely wherever you have done it. There is a bit of an overshoot when applying lineweight, but that's pretty minor.

Your hatching however, is somewhat inconsistent in my opinion. There are boxes where it's drawn wobbly and boxes where its done immaculately. Try not to lose patience while hatching. I know it's way easier said than done, but make an effort to lose focus while hatching or while putting down any mark on your paper. It's a valuable skill to learn from this course.

But yeah that's about it.

Hello Elias_3000, the link in your post seems to be broken. Re-upload your submission and reply to this post, I'll then leave a critique.

Yup, lots of great improvement here. You're still kinda struggling with dramatic foreshortening but you are actively zoning in the areas that you tend to mess up. The line weight is much better in general and the hatching's improved too.

I'd say you're good to move on to lesson 2. The remaining improvement's going to come through practice, the only reason I held you back was to make you more aware of the fact that you need to work on dramatic foreshortening.

Thanks for your feedback on my work. I had definitely overlooked some of the things you said here like varying the degrees of my contour ellipses and drawing outlines in the dissections. I'll keep these mistake patterns in while moving forward.