mermanomania

Hey there! I will be looking over your homework today. Congrats on making it through Lesson 1!

I will be pointing out what's good at first and then explaining where I believe you have room to improve in. If necessary, I will ask for revisions before sending you on your way.

Lines: Lines are super hard in the beginning, especially since you're just learning the shoulder movement and all. I think you're starting out good. Also good job on getting your lines from Point A to Point B! In your ghosted Planes exercise the lines seem to wobble a bit. It's still fine but remember for next time to ghost as many times as you need before placing your line, so that you get a smooth, confident line! I would also advice you to try varying shapes of rectangles and squares. The lines don't have to be parallel, in fact, most of the time they aren't. In your second page of the ghosted planes it actually looks like you drew the lines with a ruler. Don't do this. It will not help in learning how to draw a confident line and you lose significant study time. If you get impatient, just take a break instead.

Ellipses: Your ellipses look really good! Confident and dynamic, good job! Also good job on drawing through all of the ellipses at least two times! Remember that we're going for a maximum of three times, preferably two times.

Boxes: The most important thing about the Boxes assignments are still the lines. I feel like compared to in the beginning, they look like they need more ghosting since almost all of them look rather wobbly. Definitely incorporate that in your warm-up for the next time!

Before sending you on your way, I would like you to do another page of the Ghosted Planes exercise. Try to ghost enough times before placing your lines and try to use varying angles for the planes! If you're unsure, you can use other people's completed homework as reference. I think it could already help by angling the lines differently and making one longer than the other.

Wishing you good luck! Don't forget to answer to this with another link to the revisions!

Hi! I will be reviewing your homework today ^^ Congrats on making it through the first Lesson! The first step is always the hardest :>

Your lines are looking good! A bit wobbly and arching in the beginning but you improved very soon so I don't think that's anything worth mentioning. Just continue keeping an eye on that. You might want to include the Superimposed Lines in your warm-up's, especially the longer lines. Good job on making it from Point A to Point B. Also something you're improving on gradually.

Ellipses are looking good as well, though I did notice you seem to have a bit of trouble with staying within the lines in the Table of Ellipses and properly reaching them in the Ellipses in Planes assignment. Make sure to ghost as much as you need before placing the line. It's good you draw through them several times, but keep in mind to do that a maximum of three times, aiming for two. Your ellipses are looking really dynamic already, keep it up!

The most important thing about the boxes assignments are the lines, which you've done a good job on. I don't think there's anything I could nag about. Keep up the good work! You can head onto the 250 Box challenge :) Don't forget to continue training those lines and ellipses in your warm-ups! Wishing you good luck and lots of patience ^^

Lerin

Hi Stonechild! I'm Piapal and I'll be reviewing your work!

First of all, congratulations on finishing the first Drawabox lesson!

Lines

Your lines are not wobbly, which is remarkable and good! They look steady, maybe not 100% straight in the Superimposed lines exercise, in which I can sense them curving a bit, but it's not critical. I believe that you will improve this with practice and thus gaining more confidence in your line-making. I want to congratulate you on having almost no fraying beginnings, which means, that you have been carefully placing your pen at the beginning of each line, and then executing the action. It's very important that you keep doing this, since patience and concentration is Drawabox' core. Remember to do this while drawing Ellipses, too!

Ghosted Lines: many of them accurately land on both dots, which is great, and they look straight too!!! Which is great, keep that up!

Planes: All the lines look straight and accurate. Good job!

Ellipses

Table of ellipses: I can see that you've struggled with this exercise, because many of them don't fit in the table, they're smaller than the table itself in the first page that you've handed in. But in the second one, I can already see improvement!! Which is great, and means that's a calculation error and thus avoidable if you ghost your ellipses enough times until you feel confident enough to execute the action. Take your time, gain confidence, and then, draw the ellipse. I'll request a revision from that one exercise.

However, in the planes exercise, maybe 3 ellipses are either smaller or bigger that the plane, the rest of them look fine, so I guess that it is a matter of practice.

I can also see that you're trying to draw over them two times, which is what's asked for and therefore great, however I could also see that you haven't done that in a few ellipses. So I'd encourage you on keeping that in mind: redraw the ellipses 2 times and don't rush trough them. I can also sense that they've been done through engaging your shoulder so congrats on that too.

Same with the Funnels exercise: the volume of the ellipses looks conserved in each of them and they're also well bunched up together.

All in all: keep working on ghosting before drawing the ellipses and concentrate on making them fit in the table! You could make warm-ups with that.

Boxes

The first one looks great. However, I can see that in the second exercise where you cannot use a ruler, you've been going over the boxes. Restrain from doing that. I know it's hard because we hate when we do mistakes... but try to restrain from doing that because one of Drawabox rules is to not go over the lines you make. Instead, ghost the lines as longer as you need, in order to execute confident and straight lines. A tip: when I ghost the lines for a box, I tend to extend my arm in direction to the Vanishing Point a few times to train my arm muscles. Then, I execute the action, drawing the line in the direction of the VP but obviously not all the way through. This helps me to nail the perspective, yet it's not perfect all the times and that's okay!

In my opinion, you've done a great job in the Rotated Box exercise. You've left a bit more space between each box in the left side compared to the right side. Therefore, the boxes doesn't seem to rotate that much. I don't know if you've rushed in that part too, since you could have reduced that space and put them closer.

And sometimes, the set of parallel lines don't match the VP. This is expected because it's one of the first exercises in which you confront 3 VP's. In your warm-ups, I'd redo a few boxes and try to match the set of parallel lines to the VP's without using a ruler. Once done, I'd use a ruler to check if the lines meet the VP's, like you did in the Rough Perspective exercise.

The Organic Perspective exercise looks great too, even though a few sets of parallel lines don't match the VP¡'s they are supposed to meet at. (Which is expected, and I still encourage you to warm up practicing 3 point perspective to become better at that. The 250 box challenge will indeed help, and aid you with the practice that you require.)

All in all you've done a great job. Keep up with the good work!!

Super imposed lines are looking fine, your ghosted lines however seem to have a bit of wobbling which could be due to a lack of confidence or not drawing with your shoulder (still, it's just a few of them)

Your ellipses also look great, although one or two do overlap each other. You did great in the ghosted planes with the ellipses.

Except the occasional wobbling, your rough perspective looks great, and so does the organic perspective (though some lf the boxes don't seem to be changing much their orientation in space). The rotated boxes also look great, the corners are aligned and there is rotation in all of the boxes.

Overall you understood everything great, keep it up! I am marking you as complete, so good luck with the 250 boxes!

(sorry if some part of the review sounds akward, english is not my first language)

Hey!! Well, if you have done the 250 box challenge, then a lot of what I'm about to say are probably already things that you've been working on and improving, but I'll go ahead and state them anyways!

First of all, this is a very good submission! You're lines are looking straight and your curves are smooth and you did a great job with the organic perspective excercise. I'll list a few areas where you can improve!:

• Some of your ellipses are looking a little lopsided or egg-shaped. This is something that comes with repetition, but just be aware of it and do try to make sure that you're making both sides equal.

• Also, try to reach both the top and bottom of the grid with your ellipses!

• Although your rotated boxes exercise is mostly very solid, there are some lopsided and stiff parts. Again, this is something that happens with practice and you've already done the 250 box challenge so you're probably alread well on your way, just watch those rotations!!

I won't ask for a revision as you've already moved on and these things come from repetition, but make sure you're really focusing on those ellipses! In fact, I would recommend doing a grid of ellipses every day for warm-up for a little while! Those ellipses become real important real fast in lesson 2 and onward, so it's really important to be getting consitent shapes that are the size you need them to be! Besides that, wonderful job!!

Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. I will critique your work today, Let’s see how you did!

the ghosted lines/planes suffer from some insecurity but in general solid. It’s more important for a line to be smooth, and straight, than it is for it to hit its start/end points, or even start/stop at them. This could also be getting used to drawing from your shoulder, which I am sure will improve over time with enough mileage.

For the Tables of Ellipses exercise you kind of stray away from the instructions of the exercise.

Start off by taking your piece of paper and dividing it into a table with two columns and a bunch of rows.

The 2 columns with clear sections makes it also easier to critique your work and keep things clear.

Some ellipses are more like tubes or sausages, they’re bordering on wobbly, and look a bit rushed. Be consistent about how many times you rotate, don’t decide as you’re going at it, decide beforehand.

If its still unclear, re-visit this page .

For Ellipses in Planes exercise it's overall looking good, you have some misses here and there but definitely better than the tables of ellipses. For the misses, take your time, ghost as frequent as you can until you feel 100% confident.

Next, Funnels, I would suggest here to draw bigger and make more use of the paper space. Most ellipses are looking pretty good like in your ellipses in planes, some misses but that is okay.

The plotted perspective exercise has been done well.

Next, Rough Perspective okay so they're actually hitting the vanishing point closely, with some errors but that will definitely improve with the 250 box challenge coming up. The boxes aren't looking too hot, I’ll definitely encourage you to ghost more and take your time, you’re committing to a mark before you’re ready to. If it still happens even then, then remind yourself that the time for second guessing is during the ghosting stage only – once you’ve decided to commit, you should do so confidently. Be careful, here, especially, that you’re not drawing from the wrist.

For the Rotated boxes exercise, I am glad you fully committed to it. Good that you already experiment with line weight, however it should be a bit more subtle but that will also be covered in the other lessons. I would suggest re-visiting this exercise once you've completed the 250 box challenge and see how much you improved since it is not bad at all for a first attempt.

The organic perspective exercise looks decent. It does have a lot of the same issues as its predecessors , but nothing new. Your boxes are, more often than not, well constructed, and they flow well, as per their size and foreshortening.

Final thoughts:

It will most likely come down to mileage, keep doing these exercises as warm ups, draw from the shoulder and take your time ghosting. Overall this was a solid submission but I will be asking for some revisions before I can mark it as complete since I am also missing the super imposed lines.

Once you've completed your revisions reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready I'll move you on to the next lesson.

Hi, I'm Nobody, and I'll be covering your submission critique. Note that I'll be using Elodin's notes on marking Lesson 1 submissions as a checklist. My criteria for rejecting a submission is when a section has not been satisfactorily completed, which I consider to be when a third or more of the mistakes in Elodin's notes have been made across more than a quarter of that assignment, or when the mistake appears consistently throughout the submission.

With that said, let's get started.

Lines

Superimposed Lines

Your superimposed lines look good. I can't see any signs of fraying at both ends, and there's only one line with any wobble at all. One thing that does concern me is that there's some arching here, though it appears not to be the sort that's indicative of drawing from the wrist. Given that your Ghosted Lines and Planes don't show any signs of arching, I'll take that to be indicative of lack of practice and something that'll straighten itself out over time.

Ghosted Lines

Not much to say here, other than they're good. The lines themselves are smoothly and confidently drawn without arching, and you don't seem to have attempted to repeated lines that you've erred on, which is good.

Ghosted Planes

Again, not much to say here, these are also good. But something that I thought I should point out is that in your first page of the exercise, you've attempted to construct the planes by connecting where some of your lines terminate instead of the laid out endpoint. This is less than ideal, because your targets are not to "construct a closed plane", but rather to "draw four ghosted lines that end up enclosing a plane". You're not trying to construct a plane, you're drawing four lines that just happen to enclose a plane, and by aiming to connect the lines instead of targeting the points you undermine the importance of those points and the planning stage. It's better to have a plane that isn't perfect than to have undermined the process. That said, this is just an observation and not a mistake, so I'll consider this exercise completed.

All in all, Lines is cleared.

Ellipses

Taking a step out to talk about a persistent mistake, you don't draw through the Ellipses. This is a critical part of this section, and regardless of your skill level, skipping out on it can be harmful to your getting everything out of this part of the lesson. Additionally, this results in you also performing some other mistakes in this section.

Table of Ellipses

Your ellipses, while drawn confidently, suffer from deformation and occasionally fail to touch the sides of the box/neighboring ellipse, or go over their bounds. The remedy for both is the same, draw over the ellipse two to three times (that is, draw the ellipse, and then continue the motion twice or thrice through the ellipse before lifting your pen).

Ellipses in Planes

While you've drawn confidently, because you haven't drawn through the ellipses, your ellipses end up deformed where you try to correct the ellipse.

Ellipses in Funnels

While you've aligned your ellipses to the center line about half the times, your ellipses tend to go out of bounds fairly often, and it's hard to tell if it's because of an unintentional jerk or because it's a failure of planning. Again, this is a mistake born of not drawing through your ellipses.

All in all, Ellipses needs to be redone.

Boxes

Plotted Perspective

First of all, you've done fairly well here, but the one mistake you've made consistently is the failure to fully draw through the rear side of the box—remember, boxes in this exercise should have four lines perpendicular to the horizon line, and you've mostly drawn through the three that are visible from the front, but not the last one that's often hidden from sight. You should probably redo this exercise as well, as drawing the far side of the box is important in understanding the box in three-dimensional space.

Rough Perspective

This one is good. Your lines occasionally fail to align to the horizon line properly (as in, your height lines are occasionally not perpendicular to the horizon line, and your width lines occasionally aren't parallel to the horizon), but as this was not only unintentional, this mistake is practically unavoidable in the start and will fade out as you continue to warmup using the exercise, I'll consider it minor. Also, I'm glad to see that you're doing the ghosting methodology, it's practically intrinsic to the exercise.

Rotated Boxes

Ah yes, the rotated boxes exercise. If the 250 Boxes exercise is the crucible, then this is the Wakeup Boss of Lesson 1. Your goal isn't perfection, but to minimize your mistakes, and in that you've done a good job. You've kept your edges close, and at least tried to rotate your boxes. Some of your boxes aren't fully rotated, but on the whole you've done a good job, and I'll call this part done.

Organic Perspective

I'm not comfortable being overly critical here, because the big mistakes here are all about perspective and that's something you'll automatically correct by the end of 250 Boxes. That said, I will comment that you've consistently made the mistake of making the closer end of the box smaller than the farther end, which results in deformed looking boxes. Remember, lines converge away from the front face when foreshortened.

All in all, Boxes is mostly cleared.

Hey there, Piapal! The name's Keisari42, and I'll be the one to critique your Lesson 1 submission today. Before all else, congratulations on finishing Lesson 1 and starting your Drawabox journey!

Lines

Mostly, your lines look good. Specially in Ghosted Planes, you're doing a great job engaging your shoulder and drawing smooth, confident lines which should only improve with practice. However, in your Superimposed Lines it's apparent you lacked patience -- the majority of your lines present a lot of fraying on both ends. It's important you place your pen carefully at the starting point before making a mark, and judging by the sheer volume of lines you've made, I'm guessing you bit off more than you can chew. Patience is a virtue, and one of the core values of Drawabox -- if you're going to do that many lines, put as much effort into each one of them as you would if you were doing few. I'll be requesting revisions, reply with those.

Ellipses

You did really well with your ellipses! You're drawing through them more than 3 times occasionally, but that'd be nitpicking. Overall, they mostly look smooth, but some deformation can sometimes be seen, specially in the Ellipses in Planes exercise; keep in mind that having then be smooth and even is your highest priority, so don't let other factors take precedence over that. That being said, it seems each pass diverges a lot from the previous one on some of your ellipses (mainly in Tables of Ellipes), losing a lot of solidity. Once again, I'd like to emphasize how important being patient and giving your best is in this course -- are you taking your time to properly make use of the ghosting method?

Boxes

Your boxes are very good, and you've shown a proper understanding of the concepts and information presented in the lessons, and your line quality was preserved. However, I have a few things to comment on about your Rotated Boxes exercise:

Firstly, you seem to have missed the cornermost boxes in both of the bottom quadrants and seem to not have done the 180-degree reminder squares (https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/step3), but I'll let that pass. More importantly, you seem to have misunderstood how converging lines towards vanishing points work -- at least for the back corners. As the exercise page says, the perpendicular lines are where two of the three vanishing points for all boxes sit, with each of a box's set of lines converging towards one. You seem to have gotten the rotation aspect, but for most of your boxes, these lines don't converge properly, with the lines on the back corner instead being parallel to or even diverging from the visible ones.

To help, here's an edit of your rotated boxes showing how the lines of some of your boxes should converge; note how far off your back corners are: https://i.imgur.com/aF2OLsk.png

Of course, errors in the Rotated Boxes exercise are to be expected and you've in fact done much better than most people, so just keep that in mind for when you do it as a warmup.

So I saw your post for lesson 3 and decided to come back and critique your lesson 2.

Your arrows show that you understand the idea that the arrows need to be larger when closer to the viewer and smaller when further away. However, it appears you are stretching the arrows at various points, especially near the ends and when you put them in a loop. Try to think of the arrow as having one consistent width, and being inflexible along that axis. When this width gets stretched or squished at various points, it messes with the foreshortening illusion.

Your organic forms in the contour ellipses and the contour curves are very stretched. They almost seem to be flat flowing forms similar to the arrows. Go back to that exercise's video and keep in mind these are supposed to be as basic as possible, two spheres joined by a tube. Don't be attempting to apply foreshortening in this exercise, as it is making it much more difficult for your contours to have the intended affect of giving solidity. I am going to ask for revisions here, as I feel you misunderstood the exercise a bit. It is not about foreshortening, it's about making these simple forms feel solid.

Your texture studies show that you understand the idea of implicit textures and not explicitly outlining forms. However, in your dissections you have a lot of explicitly outlined forms and explicit textures. Keep the emphasis on cast shadows, not in explicitly outlining textural forms. Also keep your textures related to reference. I noticed you had one form labelled "triangles" I am not sure if that is actually a real-world texture.

Your form intersections have way too many forms, muddying the relationship between them. This is a very common problem, one I ran into myself. Focus on spending more time per form, using larger forms to fill up the page. This will also make it easier to clarify the relationships.

Your organic intersections look a lot better. The forms are still somewhat stretched, but appear more solid than the ones in your contour ellipses and contour curves exercise. Your cast shadows are well done and don't adhere too closely to the form.

I am going to ask for revisions on the contour curves and ellipses exercises, dissections, and form intersections. I know this is a lot especially so late. I really hope you get more timely critiques in the future.

As explained on discord the lines that are supposed to converge only partially do so. Instead of all four lines of a set of parallel lines/edges, at best two converge to the same vanishing point in most of your boxes. Maybe take another look at the exercise description (or use the text to voice function at the top of the page to have it read to you) and consider the things I pointed out regarding which lines are supposed to converge. Try doing thirty or so more with that knowledge and then we can check again for improvement.