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Much better, nice work! Overlapping the boxes like this will train your eye nicely to find forms amidst a tangle. Congratulations on your completion of Lesson 1! I'm very pleased to mark your lesson as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Keep it up!

Perhaps this isn't as personalized as it could be (in fairness, all I know about you is from your Lesson 1 submission, and it's very specialized work! I've already given you all the feedback I think you need on it), but you should always be taking care to keep up with and prioritize your 50% work. Exercises like what Drawabox offers are good for practicing a narrow range of fundamentals that you may use, but the work you make for yourself is where the bulk of your holistic art learning will come from, and where you'll start to learn about yourself and what you really like to do with drawing. The relationship you have with drawing matters way more than any technical skill!

Hey there Freedom Fighter, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!

• Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. Great job including a varied array of line lengths and curves.

• Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Accuracy is just a matter of mileage, so as you continue with this exercise in your warmups you'll find you can hit the mark more precisely, and more often, over time. Confidence will be your main focus whenever executing freehand lines, so don't worry as much about a mark being inaccurate as long as you put effort into making a bold mark. That said, you've reached a considerable degree of accuracy with these already.

• Good job on your ghosted planes and ellipses in planes, I see diligent continuation of the ghosting habit and a good effort to fill the page. It looks like you might be slowing your strokes on the ellipses to try to get a more cohesive shape, resulting in a somewhat wobbly form (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/deformed). Avoid forcing lines to fit the shape of a "good" ellipse, and learn to trust your ghosting motion. Confidence and smoothness are our first priorities when drawing any line in Drawabox; by prioritizing confidence and practicing consistently, we can achieve very good line quality with accuracy that improves over time. You may get looser, somewhat haywire ellipses while you focus more on confident movements -- but again, like with ghosted line accuracy, your marks will tighten up over the long run on their own.

• Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. Well done.

• Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. As mentioned above, some of your ellipses here have a bit of a wobble to them. While I stand by my advice above, I would also try a few minutes of drawing in ink on printer paper to see if the sketchbook paper you're currently using is causing friction that leads to wobbling like this. Ringed sketchbooks are fine for this course, but are a second choice behind printer paper since there are many types of sketchbooks and not all are best for absorbing ink; most are geared toward graphite and as such have a tooth to them that can be unsavory for fineliners.

• Your plotted perspective exercise is also satisfactory. Each box traces back to its appropriate vanishing points, and the vertical edges are parallel and drawn to the appropriate corners.

• Your rough perspective exercise is very clean, each front and rear plane is believably parallel in space and a good attempt was made to extend each back toward the vanishing point.

• Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes; however, your exercise is missing the four corner boxes. These tricky boxes can be easy to miss, but worth adding in to complete the form and achieve that truly rounded shape. It wouldn't be a bad idea to return to this exercise and see if you can add them in.

• For your organic perspective exercise, I see a great variety in Y shapes and sizes; this method of freeform drawing will serve you well in the box challenge. I also see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick.

In all: great work! I'm very pleased to mark your Lesson 1 as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Congratulations!

Hey there Niii989, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!

• Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. Great job including a varied array of line lengths and curves.

• Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Accuracy is just a matter of mileage, so as you continue with this exercise in your warmups you'll find you can hit the mark more precisely, and more often, over time. Confidence will be your main focus whenever executing freehand lines, so don't worry as much about a mark being inaccurate as long as you put effort into making a bold mark. That said, you've reached a considerable degree of accuracy with these already.

• Good job on your ghosted planes and ellipses in planes, it's clear that each stroke has been executed with confidence and care, and the ellipses have been drawn through and fit within the bounds of the plane.

• Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. Well done.

• Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. For an extra challenge, in future iterations of this exercise you might try varying the degree of your ellipses to create the illusion of expansion as you move out from the center (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3).

• Your plotted perspective exercise is also satisfactory. Each box traces back to its appropriate vanishing points, and the vertical edges are parallel and drawn to the appropriate corners.

• Your rough perspective exercise is very clean, each front and rear plane is believably parallel in space and a good attempt was made to extend each back toward the vanishing point.

• Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes.

• For your organic perspective exercise, I see a great variety in Y shapes and sizes; this method of freeform drawing will serve you well in the box challenge. I also see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick.

In all: great work! I'm very pleased to mark your Lesson 1 as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Congratulations!

Hey there Skyfrost, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!

• Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. Great job including a varied array of line lengths and curves.

• Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Try to fill out your page a bit more in the future to get the most out of this exercise.

• Good job on your ghosted planes and ellipses in planes, I see diligent continuation of the ghosting habit and a good effort to fill the page. It looks like you might be slowing your strokes on the ellipses to try to get a tighter shape, resulting in a somewhat wobbly form (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/deformed). Avoid forcing lines to fit the shape of a "good" ellipse, and learn to trust your ghosting motion. Confidence and smoothness are our first priorities when drawing any line in Drawabox; by prioritizing confidence and practicing consistently, we can achieve very good line quality with accuracy that improves over time. You may get looser, somewhat haywire ellipses while you focus more on confident movements -- but again, like with ghosted line accuracy described earlier in this lesson, your marks will tighten up over the long run on their own.

• Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. As mentioned above, in the future you'll want to focus on confidence over precision to help train your arm for the long term -- while you're able to get every ellipse to follow its previous curves accurately, if you look at the shape of the ellipse as a whole many of them are malformed and a bit wobbly.

• Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. For an extra challenge, in future iterations of this exercise you might try varying the degree of your ellipses to create the illusion of expansion as you move out from the center (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3).

• Your plotted perspective exercise is also satisfactory. Each box traces back to its appropriate vanishing points, and the vertical edges are parallel and drawn to the appropriate corners.

• Your rough perspective exercise is done well, each front and rear plane is believably parallel in space and a good attempt was made to extend each back toward the vanishing point. I can see that you're experimenting here with how you use your arm for straight line motions, so just know that while the primary driver of the motion will be your shoulder, it's totally normal and expected for your elbow to move along with that motion (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/2/simplified).

• Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes; however, your exercise is missing the four corner boxes. These tricky boxes can be easy to miss, but worth adding in to complete the form and achieve that truly rounded shape. It wouldn't be a bad idea to return to this exercise and see if you can add them in.

• For your organic perspective exercise, I see a great variety in Y shapes and sizes; this method of freeform drawing will serve you well in the box challenge. I also see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick.

In all: great work! I'm very pleased to mark your Lesson 1 as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Congratulations!

Hey there Naokimaru, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!

• Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. Great job including a varied array of line lengths and curves.

• Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Accuracy is just a matter of mileage, so as you continue with this exercise in your warmups you'll find you can hit the mark more precisely, and more often, over time. Confidence will be your main focus whenever executing freehand lines, so don't worry as much about a mark being inaccurate as long as you put effort into making a bold mark.

• Good job on your ghosted planes and ellipses in planes, it's clear that each stroke has been executed with confidence and care, and the ellipses have been drawn through and fit within the bounds of the plane.

• Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. Well done.

• Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. For an extra challenge, in future iterations of this exercise you might try varying the degree of your ellipses to create the illusion of expansion as you move out from the center (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3).

• Your plotted perspective exercise is also satisfactory. Each box traces back to its appropriate vanishing points, and the vertical edges are parallel and drawn to the appropriate corners.

• Your rough perspective exercise is fine, each front and rear plane is believably parallel in space and a good attempt was made to extend each back toward the vanishing point. I do see a few redrawn lines here (lines which are meant to accomplish the same goal, but have been drawn several times because you felt the first one wasn't adequate). Some of these lines, it seems, were just ghosting errors from your pen touching the page too early, but I can spot several that were drawn over twice in full. Keep in mind that we have a "one line, one attempt" rule in Drawabox: "Your job is to make a single smooth stroke. The second your pen touches the page, you need to accept that any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed, and all you can do is commit to the motion and push through."

• Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes.

• For your organic perspective exercise, I see a great variety in Y shapes and sizes; this method of freeform drawing will serve you well in the box challenge. I also see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick. As before, avoid drawing a line more than once. Planning and committing to your marks is key to this course, since we'll be working on everything directly with pen. It's okay to make mistakes -- letting them exist plainly on the page is how we can easily spot them and find ways to correct them in the future.

In all: great work! I'm very pleased to mark your Lesson 1 as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Congratulations!

Hey there Riblet, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!

• Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. Great job including a varied array of line lengths and curves.

• Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Accuracy is just a matter of mileage, so as you continue with this exercise in your warmups you'll find you can hit the mark more precisely, and more often, over time. Confidence will be your main focus whenever executing freehand lines, so don't worry as much about a mark being inaccurate as long as you put effort into making a bold mark.

• Good job on your ghosted planes and ellipses in planes, it's clear that each stroke has been executed with confidence and care, and the ellipses have been drawn through and fit within the bounds of the plane. Keep an eye on how many times you're drawing through your ellipses -- while 3 times is still fine, a couple of these are drawn through over that amount (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/drawingthrough). While drawing through helps us define a cohesive form, we want to limit how many times we do it since our ellipses will later be used in construction and will need to be kept simple so they can be drawn over.

• Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. Well done.

• Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. Again, aim to keep your ellipses drawn through a maximum of 3 times (2 is ideal). For an extra challenge, in future iterations of this exercise you might try varying the degree of your ellipses to create the illusion of expansion as you move out from the center (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3).

• Revision needed: Your plotted perspective exercise is pretty bare, recall that the expectation is to have 5-6 boxes per frame (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/19/step8). You can leave the third panel alone for now, but I'd like you to add 3-4 boxes each to your first and second panels. Having many elements on the page can feel daunting, but this is a great exercise to train your visual acuity in being able to find forms amidst overlapping lines, a skill that will be very handy in later lessons.

• The first page of your rough perspective has a few issues, mainly being that you drew over your lines several times for some of these boxes. Keep in mind that we have a "one line, one attempt" rule in Drawabox: "Your job is to make a single smooth stroke. The second your pen touches the page, you need to accept that any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed, and all you can do is commit to the motion and push through." Drawing over your marks several times like this creates a frayed mess where the true form and placement of the box can't be seen anymore. Letting mistakes exist on the page in plain sight helps us learn from them, and we're going to be drawing so many boxes in this course that it really doesn't matter if you end up messing some up, especially in these early stages. I'm happy that you seemed to learn from this in your second page, which is much cleaner and has the extension lines drawn properly.

• Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes. You got the form as a whole, but you're missing the bottom two corner boxes here. These tricky boxes can be easy to miss, but worth adding in to complete the form and achieve that truly rounded shape. It wouldn't be a bad idea to return to this exercise and see if you can add them in.

• For your organic perspective exercise, I see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick. Another portion of this exercise was to experiment with Y shapes -- while I see very little variation here, you'll get tons of practice in the box challenge, so I'm pretty satisfied with what you've got.

In all: great work! You're very close to completing Lesson 1, I'd just like to see you complete the exercise marked above before I can clear you for the box challenge. You have a revision pending, don't move on just yet!

Hey there JmanX, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!

• Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. Great job including a varied array of line lengths and curves.

• Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Accuracy is just a matter of mileage, so as you continue with this exercise in your warmups you'll find you can hit the mark more precisely, and more often, over time. Confidence will be your main focus whenever executing freehand lines, so don't worry as much about a mark being inaccurate as long as you put effort into making a bold mark.

• In your ghosted planes / ellipses in planes, I see several floating ellipses (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/floating) where you may have been ghosting your ellipses conservatively; given that our second priority (after ghosting confidently) is to form an ellipse that touches the edges of the planes, it's okay if you end up overshooting the bounds of the plane as long as you try to touch the ellipse to all the edges. Since you still achieved the first objective of this exercise (confident markmaking), I think you've done this homework well. As a perspective tip -- and this has no bearing on this particular exercise -- an ellipse in a plane will sit such that it touches all four quandrantal lines that subdivide a plane after we place our diagonal lines. There is a bit of wobbling / curving in your straight lines, suggesting you may have been slowing down to try to land the endpoint more closely instead of prioritizing confidence. Consider how we split up this exercise into "levels" (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/levels), and keep in mind that regardless of which level you're on, confidence is key, and level 1 (missing both start and end points, but still drawing a confident line) is in fact acceptable for Drawabox; hitting the start and end points precisely is an effect of getting good at line confidence, not something you should be trying to force your lines to do from the start.

• Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. Well done.

• Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. For an extra challenge, in future iterations of this exercise you might try varying the degree of your ellipses to create the illusion of expansion as you move out from the center (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3).

• You've missed all of your boxes' rear edges (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/19/step7) in the second and third frames of your plotted perspective exercise. I'd highly recommend going back and drawing those in, since they help you practice analyzing overlapping linework and identifying the back of a construction. You drew these properly in your first panel, so I'm a bit curious why you missed them in the other two.

• Your rough perspective exercise is very clean, each front and rear plane is believably parallel in space and a good attempt was made to extend each back toward the vanishing point. I still see some curving to your lines as mentioned above for your ghosted planes.

• Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes; however, your exercise is missing the four corner boxes. These tricky boxes can be easy to miss, but worth adding in to complete the form and achieve that truly rounded shape. It wouldn't be a bad idea to return to this exercise and see if you can add them in.

• For your organic perspective exercise, I see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick. Another portion of this exercise was to experiment with Y shapes -- while I see only modest variation here, you'll get tons of practice in the box challenge, so I'm pretty satisfied with what you've got.

In all: great work! I'm very pleased to mark your Lesson 1 as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Congratulations!

Hey there B4drake, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!

• Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. Great job including a varied array of line lengths and curves.

• Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Accuracy is just a matter of mileage, so as you continue with this exercise in your warmups you'll find you can hit the mark more precisely, and more often, over time. Confidence will be your main focus whenever executing freehand lines, so don't worry as much about a mark being inaccurate as long as you put effort into making a bold mark. Good work so far.

• Good job on your ghosted planes and ellipses in planes, it's clear that each stroke has been executed with confidence and care, and the ellipses have been drawn through and fit within the bounds of the plane. I do see a fair bit of wobbling to your ellipses, but I can also see that you were properly using the ghosting method to make them, so most of that wobbling should buff out with time and isn't a big deal here.

• Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. Well done.

• Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. For an extra challenge, in future iterations of this exercise you might try varying the degree of your ellipses to create the illusion of expansion as you move out from the center (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3).

• Your plotted perspective exercise is also satisfactory. Each box traces back to its appropriate vanishing points, and the vertical edges are parallel and drawn to the appropriate corners.

• Your rough perspective exercise is very clean, each front and rear plane is believably parallel in space and a good attempt was made to extend each back toward the vanishing point.

• Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes.

• For your organic perspective exercise, I see a great variety in Y shapes and sizes; this method of freeform drawing will serve you well in the box challenge. I also see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick.

In all: great work! I'm very pleased to mark your Lesson 1 as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Congratulations!

Hey there Fruitloops, congratulations on your submission of Lesson 1! My name is Mickey and I'll be providing your critique this round. Let's get to it!

• Your superimposed lines exercise was completed to satisfaction, with each line clearly drawn from the shoulder. Great job including a varied array of line lengths and curves. I do see a fair bit of wobbling in the curved lines, suggesting that you were trying to control your marks using slower movements (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/wobbling). Recall that the purpose of this exercise is to practice markmaking confidently, and that fraying (not following the original line perfectly) is totally fine. There are later exercises that are much better suited for practicing accuracy, this one's just for getting used to using your shoulder on various lines.

• Your ghosted lines exercise has also been done well, each mark begins correctly on one of the dots and follows through confidently. Accuracy is just a matter of mileage, so as you continue with this exercise in your warmups you'll find you can hit the mark more precisely, and more often, over time. Confidence will be your main focus whenever executing freehand lines, so don't worry as much about a mark being inaccurate as long as you put effort into making a bold mark. Good work so far.

• Good job on your ghosted planes and ellipses in planes, it's clear that each stroke has been executed with confidence and care, and the ellipses have been drawn through and fit within the bounds of the plane.

• Your table of ellipses includes a variety of ellipse degrees and angles, the space was used well and your ellipses are drawn through. Well done.

• Your funnels exercise is similarly well-executed, the ellipses stay within the bounds of the curves and are split symmetrically along the minor axis. For an extra challenge, in future iterations of this exercise you might try varying the degree of your ellipses to create the illusion of expansion as you move out from the center (see: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3).

• Your plotted perspective exercise is also satisfactory. Each box traces back to its appropriate vanishing points, and the vertical edges are parallel and drawn to the appropriate corners.

• Your rough perspective exercise is very clean, each front and rear plane is believably parallel in space and a good attempt was made to extend each back toward the vanishing point.

• Rotated boxes is an (in)famously challenging piece of homework, and it looks like you've properly grasped the concepts of edge alignment, rotation, and mirroring your boxes.

• For your organic perspective exercise, I see a great variety in Y shapes and sizes; this method of freeform drawing will serve you well in the box challenge. I also see that you tried drawing some boxes much larger (closer to the viewer) and some much smaller (farther) -- very nice! Implying depth through size is a foundational perspective trick.

In all: great work! I'm very pleased to mark your Lesson 1 as done and give you the go-ahead for the box challenge. Keep these exercises in your warmup rotation, I like to recommend this handy tool (https://mark-gerarts.github.io/draw-a-card/) to help you choose a warmup before you begin future Drawabox work. Congratulations!