paperhat

Hello D0Z! I'll review your work!

First of all, there is a lot of the lesson work that is incomplete or missing (I marked them on the revision space). Or, if they are done, I can´t see or critique them due to the overall untidiness of the homework. I would suggest to do all the exercises in new and white pages instead of using previously used ones, like I see you did.

I think some of them are annotations of the lessons. And I don't think doing them is bad, in fact, I recommend taking some notes from the videos and the text. But make sure to separate them from the actual homework.

Lines

In your lines I see a lot of wobbling, so make sure you think before every mark you make and you are confident about it. Remember that confidence is more important than accuracy. Also, some of your lines are repeated, meaning you drew them two times. Don't forget that no matter how far off a line may be, you should keep going as if it was right.

Ellipses

Your ellipses are great. But there also wobbling and many of them are not kept within the given bound. Be sure to check how far off the bounds your ellipses are after you draw them, and try to fix it when you draw another one.

Boxes

They have pretty much the same line mistakes mentioned on Lines. Also, you did the Rotated Boxes exercise twice (I think one of them is a note taken form the video but just in case, remember you should not grind). And in Organic Perspective some boxes are in two point perspective, so make sure to be using the Y method of constructing a box.

Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 6 homework.

Form Intersections

-Starting by the form intersections you have successfully drawn your forms as if they were sharing the same 3D space, by keeping the foreshortening shallow and keeping their size consistent.

When it comes to the intersections themselves you are moving in the right direction, you do seem to be able to pick straight or curves as needed. If I have to get nitpicky I would point your attention to your lineweight on the first page, when you drew those intersections your linework got pretty scratchy. So don’t forget to go through each individual phase of the ghosting method whenever you are going to freehand something.

Objects

-Moving on to the objects there are many good things that you are doing, but first let’s talk about what we are exactly looking to learn in this lesson.

The focus of this lesson is precision which is something that we had not worried about before, in previous lessons we had to stick to the outcomes of our choices regardless of how they ultimately turned out. For example we may have drawn the head of an animal too big, but that was not an issue as we were only looking to break down our subjects into their main components and how those related to each other in a 3D world.

Accuracy and precision are two different things, and in the context of this course accuracy refers to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, but precision has nothing to do with drawing that mark, instead it has to do with the steps and decisions we take beforehand.

A good example of this would be the ghosting method, when going through the planning of a straight line we can place an initial and ending dot, this will increase the precision of our drawing by declaring what we want to do. Once that is in place we can draw the mark, it may nail those points, it may overshoot or undershoot, etc. The important thing is that prior to any of that we have used the ghosting method to think about each mark's purpose and how we are going to achieve it best rather than figuring everything as we go, this kind of approach is more useful for the kind of geometric forms that we are working with as they have different planes, sharp corners, and clearly defined proportions.

We can capture all of these elements through the use of subdivisions, these allow us to meaningfully study the proportions of our object by way of an orthographic study, after that is done we can apply those studies to the object in 3 dimensions. That way everything that we do is the result of careful planning, and nothing is done by eyeballing or improvising.

-You are doing pretty good when it comes to boxy objects, as they have clearly defined edges, but whenever working with objects that have curves you do struggle quite a bit.

Given the limitations in the tools we are working with it is better to break down those curves into a series of straight lines, this will also help you to take more time to think about what you are doing. Once you have done that you can start to round them off towards the end.

I also want to quickly redirect you to these notes which explain why jumping right into drawing curves is not the best choice. https://drawabox.com/lesson/6/1/curves

-I would also advise against doing more work than necessary, this may get you in the mindset that you can compensate for any mistakes you made during your first 8 pages, but the best approach would be to actually do your absolute best with the right amount of work, and leaving the rest for the person that is going to review it.

And lastly be careful with how you apply lineweight, if you are drawing freehand then try to avoid using lineweight on any particularly long segment. And also keep in mind that if you end up making it too thick as you will end up turning those objects into graphic shapes.

Fortunately I think that you still did a great job following the principles of this lesson, when you do hit lesson 7 you’ll find the challenges are going to be vastly more demanding and you will benefit from following the points I have raised here.

Okayyyyyy, I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, best of luck on your next assignments.

Hello, I will be critiquing your lesson 1

Lines

-Starting off with your superimposed lines, I see they are confidently excecuted and they all start at one clear point. I do see that there is some wavering, but this will improve with more practice.

-Your ghosted lines look confident in some areas, but I also do notice some wobble at the ends. It is always a priority to give them one consistent trajectory. Since there are only a few of these lines, I believe it will be nothing to worry about as you will improve with practice.

-Ghosted planes are similar to your ghosted lines and you did better at committing to the linework.

Ellipses

-Tables of ellipses look rather tidy and confidently drawn. One thing I would like to mention is that your ellipses should be well rounded and symmetrical no matter what position they are in. All you can do is change the width and what position they are in. Otherwise, great job.

-Ellipses in planes will follow the same rules as I said above and I do see that you have drawn these ellipses more confidently. For some of these, I would like to point out that it is not necessary that the ellipse is modified to touch all contact points of the plane.

-For the funnels excercise, I see that your ellipses are turning out a lot better. You did well with keeping them well rounded and tidy.

Boxes

-For your rough perspective your line quality is turning out very well. I do see that some of the estimates for the vanishing points are a bit off, but this will definetely improve.

-Rotated boxes are looking great and I believe it will help to give yourself some more room to ghost and to put some hatching lines in to further define the shapes. Overall, this is a great attempt.

-Lastly, you did good on the organic perspective and any issues I may not have mentioned in the box section will be addressed later in the 250 Box Challenge.

*Use this lesson in your warmup routine

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete and you can move on. Great job :)

Helll Darklight, I'm your local Mushroom enthusiast and today I'm going to be reviewing your work, I hope that my feedback aids you in the next steps of your drawabox journey.

Firstly I would like to congratulate you on finishing 250 boxes! Now let's continue, shall we?

Lines

• You're making great use of the ghosting method and your lines look confident, straight and smoothly drawn. Good job!

• Your hatching is haphazardly done at the start of the challenge but after around 40 boxes you start going the extra mile to carefully add it in, it definitely adds to your boxes and makes them feel much more finished, along with being great extra practice.

• It's good to see you adding lineweight around the silhouette of your boxes at around 60 boxes in, but you seem to drop this at around 140 boxes. Not only does this mean your boxes aren't as elevated as they could have been, but it means you lose out on lots of practice for superimposed lines.

• On the boxes that you do add lineweight there's a couple of things to improve, the first is by making it more subtle and keeping in mind that when adding lineweight to taper the line into the one underneath, to seamlessly integrate it into the silhouette of the box. The second is to add only a single line for lineweight. Remember to keep practicing this and you'll continue improving.

Convergences

When it comes to your box constructions there's not much to point out as you've done really well and your convergences improve as you move through the challenge. There's always a thing or two to improve though, so here are a few things I believe will make your boxes better:

• Sometimes your back corners are converging in pairs instead of as a set.

https://m.imgur.com/KSHwTwo

The way we can improve upon this is by keeping in mind that all of our lines should converge as a set, and that inner lines will usually be very almost parallel to the outer Y unless the box is quite long.

https://m.imgur.com/8PqQLE0

• When you attempt boxes with more dramatic foreshortening, a very common problem you face is distortion. Uncomfy goes over this more in depth in his [notes on distortion and field of view.](https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/7/di

But in short this particular mistake happens when one of the 3 vanishing points pulls one of more of the box's corners outside the field of view, causing distortion even if the box is technically correctly constructed because realistically the human eye would never see a box this way.

To fix this you must keep in mind the rate of foreshortening of your boxes

• It would've been nice if you varied the foreshortening rate of your boxes throughout the challenge, many of your boxes are in similar perspective and most of them have their vanishing points inside the page, it would have been nice to see some more boxes with subtle convergences from you.

• Varying the range of box sizes and shapes, while you attempt some different box shapes such as flat boxes and rectangular boxes it'd be nice to see some more long and rectangular boxes from you, most of your boxes are square like.

Extension Lines

Nothing to say here, you've extended your lines correctly. But sometimes you forgot to extend back corners like in box 118, 223 and 209.

Final Thoughts

Some of your lines are extremely difficult to see, try to take better pictures, scan your pages, or invest in getting colored ballpoint pens with darker ink such as red, blue and green.

Overall, you've done really well in this challenge and have shown noticeable improvement. I believe that you're ready for the advanced box exercises, as well as Lesson 2.

I'll be marking this lesson as complete.

Hello Kevin. Congratulations on finishing lesson 2! I'm Strauss and would be pleased to critique your work, I hope that they can help you one way or another on your art journey. I’ll divided this into 5 major sections, now let us get into it:

=========

Organic Arrows

• First, with arrows section, your lines are being executed smoothly and confidently. You also made some good attempt at drawing the arrows bigger/smaller towards/away from the viewer (this is very important since we want to convey perspective), plus, the act of adding line weight in overlapping areas also help strengthen the illusion of 3D space we’re trying to make. Though, try to make the lineweight thinner and less tight next time (as we all know, less is more), and don’t forget to employ the ghosting method plus rotating the canvas to achieve the smoothest linework.

• Please take a look at this image (https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/011d064f.jpg) remember that not only did the size of the arrows have to change, but the negative space between each fold has to also change adhere to it, too. this is an element that people tends to overlook. Please keep that in mind.

Organic Forms with Contours

• Now moving to the organic forms with contours ellipses exercise, you’re doing great with confident lines. You’re also sticking to simple sausage forms which is nice, since we don’t want to end up with forms that are too complex, as being said in the official instruction material. For contour ellipses, I can see that you're intentionally shifting the degree of your ellipses with an awareness as to how they rotate and moving through space, the ellipses are also fit in snugly/tightly within the sausage. Good job.

• The contour curves are also beginning to wrap around believably on the surface of the forms, but they barely changing degrees, unlike your previous exercise, keep in mind when you decided to use this exercise for future warm-ups. One way to help with this is to try using the ghosting method with more consideration and calculation beforehand, also, try to imagine how a sausage would look like in your head and the way the contour lines wraps around the form itself will help you immensely before you put a mark on the page.

• I also want to note that the concept of “contour” itself. is a double-edged sword. Granted, it’s a very useful tool to describe how a form sits in 3D space, but it can easily work against us by flattening our drawing and makes it hard to read, so use them wisely and sparingly, and make sure to keep experimenting later on.

Textures

• Textures Analysis: Good! I can see a smooth and seamless transition of dense/sparse in your work. You also being able to identify and distinguish the differences between cast shadow and form shadow, and apply them in your analysis, which consists mostly of cast shadow and clean, implicit mark-making.

• Dissections: Solid attempt at minding, respect the curvature of the sausage forms, and wrapping the textures around them logically. You also take every chances you got to break the silhouette of the forms, which makes them easier to read. Silhouette-breaking is a super useful tool to help convey the texture better and makes it look more believable/realistic.

• Some of your texture looks good and you’re able to achieve a nice range of gradient, for example, the Snake Scale, Rock and Wood Bark texture. I am also glad to see that you’ve maintained the technique you’ve learned from Texture Analysis and employ it here to some of your texture.

But, a few of them, like the Leaf or Scales (pg.1) texture, you're focusing largely on outlines, surface color-change, explicit mark-making (instead of implicit mark-making) and negative space rather than the cast shadow. Remember to employ the same method in Texture Analysis to convey texture. The lessons carry on and overlap with each other. You can do this ^^

?

Form Intersections

• Now moving on to the form intersections, you have drawn your forms in a way that they seem to be sharing the same cohesive, believably 3D space. Good job. It’s very normal to feel like you’re not really comprehend this at its core, since this exercise is only meant to introduce to you about forms and how they can interact and intersect with each other, like puzzle pieces. We will have a lot of opportunities to tackle this again in later lessons so no worries..

Organic Intersections

• And for the last one, organic intersections, ,they look good. Nothing much to critique besides the fact that you don’t draw through forms. You should always draw through forms, just like the form intersections exercise. This isn’t mentioned in the instruction, so it’s reasonable that you do not acknowledge and choose not to apply this technique in your assignment, but you have to know that some of the material written on this website is a bit…old, and is in progress of reconstruction. Next time, try to draw through forms when you’re using this as your warm-up exercise.

Overall, you did great! Please feel free to move on to Lesson 3, using any exercise from Lesson 1, 250 Box Challenge and Lesson 2 as 15-30 mins warm-up before diving into the assignment is highly recommended. Good luck Kevin ^^

Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your 250 Box Challenge.

Linework

-Starting by your linework I can see that most of your lines are drawn with a good deal of confidence while maintaining good accuracy, which means that you are using the ghosting method to good, and this has definitely helped your boxes look more solid.

The first thing I want to call out is that in some instances it seems that you are repeating your lines, remember that if you make a mistake you should not try to correct it by drawing over it. This only happened on a few instances but it is worth mentioning.

-I can also see that you did not apply lineweight, for most of your boxes, sometimes you did it unconsciously because the line extensions overlapped with the edges of the box, although you should avoid doing this. Lineweight is not a necessary requirement, but it is important that yo get used to it as we will be using this tool in the next lessons, whenever we want to apply it we should do so very subtly, only add one superimposed line and use the ghosting method to draw it to the best of your ability. I also want to quickly redirect you to this diagram which shows how to correctly apply lineweight, and you can also see it here in the context of a box.

-The hatching on your boxes looks very tidy instead of rushed and I like to see that you have taken your time to ghost and draw each individual mark, and I hope that you keep displaying this patience in the future.

*Box Construction**

-You have used the line extension method correctly and most of the set of lines of your boxes converge which is correct, I want you to keep an eye out for lines converging in pairs as shown here, one thing that can help with this is to start thinking between the relationship between each pair of lines of a given set and the angles they form respective to their vanishing point. This relationship is exemplified here, you can see that the inner pair of lines will always be quite similar and the outer set can vary a lot depending on the location of the vanishing point, the further away you place it and the closer to parallel they will be.

-I also want you to keep experimenting with the rates of foreshortening, sizes and orientations of your boxes. Most of your boxes have dramatic foreshortening, so try to experiment with boxes with shallow rates of foreshortening with their vanishing points far off the page, in these cases the sets of lines will run close to parallel but keep in mind that no matter what they should always converge, due to perspective they will never be parallel or diverge from the vanishing point.

If you have trouble coming up with new orientation for your boxes you can take a look at this diagram which you can use as reference. It is important to experiment a good deal with all kinds of orientations for your boxes, because it helps to form a better understanding of the concepts we are exploring in this challenges, so I hope you will continue to keep nurturing this habit in the future

Okaay that should be about it, keep up the great work I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete

Hey, congrats on taking the first step on your drawing journey and finishing lesson 1. Here's my critique:

Lines

• Your lines have a bit of wobble to them, and some lines are curving in the ghosted planes exercise, but otherwise the exercises look good. Remember smooth, confident strokes drawn from the shoulder are the goal here, and accuracy isn't that big of a deal right now.

Ellipses

• Some of your ellipses look squished or egg shaped. Although touching the edges with the ellipses was a goal, getting smooth looking, symmetrical ellipses is more important.

• Your ellipses are drawn somewhat loosely, so work on tightening them up during your warmups.

• It looks like a few ellipses in the tables exercise may have been drawn through too many times, so remember to only draw through them 2 or 3 times.

• In a few sections of the tables, you had ellipses with different angles. While experimenting with this can be good, for this exercise specifically the angles needed to be consistent in each section.

• Some of your ellipses in the funnels exercise were slanted and not cut in half symmetrically by the minor axis. It's good that you made a note of this though.

Boxes

• Your line weight has some wobble to it which implies to me that you tried to ghost these lines instead of plotting them with a ruler like the instructions said. The weight was also to be applied only to the silhouettes of the boxes and not on lines that would be overlapped by another box. Line weight was optional though and it's something you'll get to practice in the box challenge, so not that big of a deal.

• Hatching was also optional on plotted perspective, but there's a bit of fraying on some of your lines so make sure you're carefully planning out each stroke and placing your liner on the edge of the box before you make a stroke.

• Rough perspective looks good and your height and width lines were oriented like they needed to be. The only issue was wobble in your lines which I mentioned before.

• Rotated boxes doesn't look quite like the exercise was looking for, and your boxes on the outer edges and corners, as well as the back faces of most of your boxes, are elongating rather than rotating. Remember that we're trying to have all of the lines that are meant to be parallel to each other converge to a vanishing point.

• In organic perspective, watch out for boxes with corners that are at less than a 90 degree angle, because they look distorted. Your sets of parallel lines also diverged instead of converging on many of your boxes. Remember that they should be converging away from the middle corner.

Before you move on to the box challenge, I'd like to see that you're able to properly rotate boxes and have sets of lines converge to a vanishing point, since these skills are going to be very important for making realistic looking boxes. I'll ask for one more quadrant of rotated boxes (since a full page is a lot of work) and one more page of organic perspective. Good luck and don't get discouraged if you still have trouble.

Hello Sleepy_Xanthe congrats on finishing lesson 1. I'm kL, still a beginner, and I will try to help you with your submission. I will divide this into three sections of lesson 1.

1. Lines

• A well executed smooth confident lines on all three exercises. Well done!

2. Ellipses

• Also a well executed ellipses on all three exercises. Well done!

3. Boxes

• Your Plotted Perspective and Rough Perspective are well executed, but the boxes are too few, especially on Plotted Perspective. I would like to ask you to draw additional boxes on your Plotted Perspective and both Rough Perspective. Draw 4 to 6 boxes per panel, https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/15/example and https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/example. Do not hesitate to draw box in front or behind other box.

• Your Rotated Boxes is well executed. Well done!

• Your Organic Perspective turns out great. I notice some re-drawing line on two boxes, try to not make this a habit. Re-drawing line only cause confusion, stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Your Organic Perspective box construction relying pretty heavily on parallel line. The line construction suppose to converge to vanishing points after Y line construction https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3. The next lesson and exercise, 250 Box Challenge, will help teach deeper understanding how to construct box line converging into their respective vanishing points.

Overall this is a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. You seem very comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. Draw additional boxes to your Plotted Perspective and both Rough Perspective, then I will mark your lesson 1 complete.

Hi there,

congratulations on finishing the 250-Box-Challenge and thanks for submitting, I'll be reviewing your homework. I hope my feedback helps you.

Your work reveals that you had put a lot of focus, energy and time in completing the challenge. Your work came out beautiful, well done!

I structured this critique as follows: the praises (what you did well) and where you went off and should keep an eye on in the future. In the end I'll give some general pointers/reminders, so you don't forget them.

THE PRAISES ( The job you did well in the challenge)

You always drew through your forms and understand how they sit in 3D. Nicely done

You did a great job checking for your mistakes by checking the boxes convergences by extending the lines always from the viewer. It would have sometimes helped if you drew the extended lines longer, this way mistaakes are easier spotted (especially with the less forshortened boxes). You identified where it went wrong and worked on it.

You are able to construct the boxes of various types with different orientation, proportion and foreshadowing with good amounts of convergences. So hats off for that!

I can say that you are building a sense of confidence and patience in drawing your boxes by plotting down the starting and end points of the lines before executing, so thats good job!

If you are concerned about accuracy, I will advise you to leave it there for some time and prioritize confidence first. After we build some confidence, we can work on some accuracy as well.We prioritize confidence and draw lines from our shoulder without thinking about any accuracy there. Our lines will look solid and more appealing, even though they are in inaccurate. Also don't repeat inaccurate lines and try to correct them. It just wastes time where you don't learn anything.

You hatched the face of the box facing towards the viewer. You took you time doing so and ghosted them thoroughly. I'm not sure if you added line weight around the silouehette, but since it wasn't obligatory thats fine. If you do, make sure to add it to all outer lines and not just the corners, so the form looks more solid.

WHERE IT WENT SLIGHTLY OFF? ( Where you should keep an eye on)

In this part I will just point out where it went slightly off. In the coming part I will explain how to avoid them and how you can improve them. I made this part because it will remind us where we are going wrong and it will thereby make us conscious about our mistakes while drawing those boxes.

Of course you had improved throughout the challenge but there are times where some of the set of lines converges at a faster rates than the others resulting in converging in pairs. this point you can definitely work on, in your warm ups.

According to the rule of perspective, all the parallel lines in the 3D world (real world) will appear to converge to a specific VP (vanishing point) on a 2d page. SSo what we can say is that our parallel lines should always converge as a set and not in pairs. They will never diverge from the VP as this will break the rule of perspective. So next time, instead of drawing parallel lines in the boxes, try to consciously think that the parallel lines in the 3d world of box will always converge to a specific vp. These vps can either be staying inside the page (creating more dramatic/foreshadowed boxes) or outside of it (creating shallow boxes) https://imgur.com/mWLlnYl

It's completely and totally normal to have the back corner line slightly off compared to the rest. You should try and work on those as well. They have significantly improved at end of your work, so nice job!

In this challenge, we are estimating where our lines going to converge to a point. As we are humans, it is almost impossible to perfectly estimate where our lines will going to converge thereby resulting in an error. This error will continue to accumulate as we construct the box freely rotated in space. Finally this accumulated error will be thrown to the back corner. So its pretty normal to have the inner back corner come out pretty off.

I want to take a look at this info here; https://i.imgur.com/8PqQLE0.png

In this image we can know that how each line will behave relating to the position from its neighbouring edges and the VP. If the distance between the internal edges and external edges gets reduce more and more they will eventually become parallel to one and another. Alternatively if the distance between the internal corner and the external grow more and more the internal line will also converge. You can also try and start from the back corner if the box is narrower. https://imgur.com/a/DHlA3Jh

These diagram can be pretty hard to understand at first, so if you don't understand it, don't get frustrated, keep reading it from time to time while practicing regularly and it will click eventually.

SOME GENERAL STUFF I WISH SOMEONE HAD REMINDED ME BACK THEN

I would highly advise you to include boxes in your warmups and construct 1-2 boxes daily. After some time you will see how your boxes get better and better.

Remember the 50% rule. This challenge takes a lot of time and effort and you'll burn out/lose motivation if you don't do something for yourself as well.

You didn't do this, but I still want to mention this: don't erase wrong lines/draw correct ones over top. If your line is incorrect, mark the correct ending point and draw the rest of your lines correct (you don't learn anything correcting lines, so it just wastes time)

Take your time with the exercises. You'll learn a lot more if you take your time. DaB in general is a marathon and not a sprint. It really helped me to set my goal to "draw x minutes each day" instead of "draw x boxes a day". The amount of boxes you manage during that time will increase the further you get. It also helped me to do DaB at a specific time slot each day.

We all know this challenge was very intimidating. Constructing 250 boxes arbitrarily rotated in 3D is hard and yet you did a great job by keeping persistent till the end with lots of effort, focus, energy and time, well done! Your submission reveals that you did take time to read through the lesson materials, followed the instructions and executed to your best of your ability.

Feel free to move on to lesson 2 and good luck in your artistic journey.

Hello! As we talked on the discord I'll take over since the previous Thing07 wasn't replying.

Overall I think you've made good progress and mostly you're drawing confident lines, but you still have some wobbly lines. On lines our main priority is always to draw them as confidently as we can make them. Give a reread at the levels section of the website.

In general we always prefer level 1 lines to level 0 lines, so a confident straight line will always be better than at wobbly accurate one. Here's one example. The bottom line is a level 0 and the top line is a level 1, so we'll always prefer the top one even if it misses.

Other than that make sure you don't cross or repeat any lines even if they're off, as you did it on some places.

And in general I think you're getting good progress so I think you're ready for the box challenge. I'll mark this as complete.

Make sure you focus on drawing lines at least level 1 throughout the box challenge and good luck! Keep up the good work!