SimonP

Hi there! I'm Liia and I will be critiquing your work today :) Let's get started!

Lines

Superimposed Lines - You have some strong markmaking here. The lines are drawn confidently and smoothly without hesitation. One thing to note here is that some of the lines have fraying on both ends, so try to give yourself one more second to set the pen correctly at the starting point before starting the stroke https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/superimposedlines/fraying

Ghosted Lines - Again, these look smooth and confident. There is a tad bit of overshooting, but the important thing is that once you start a stroke, you commit to it with a confident stroke. It would have been nice to have the page filled in a bit more, with a wider mix of both long and short lines. Overall, I'm not sure what size page you're drawing on, for some reason it looks on the small side (if a page is too small, it makes it difficult to draw from the arm).

Ghosted Planes - Both of these pages look excellent. Each stroke looks well planned out and confident. There is a bit of arcing on some of these lines, but I'm guessing that might be your page warping in the photo.

Ellipses

Tables of Ellipses - Your ellipses fit snugly into the place allocated for them. Something to note for future ellipses in this course, preferably you draw through your ellipses twice, mayyybe three times, but no more than that. Try to aim for twice!

Ghosted Ellipses- These got a little trickier! Keep prioritizing a smooth even shape of the ellipse over accuracy. Just like with lines, we want to prioritize the confident stroke over accuracy. Eventually your accuracy will improve with mileage (warmups)

Funnels - Yes! Your ellipses are drawn through twice, and align nicely to the central minor axis line. Some of your long lines in the middle were off which made the whole thing look off kilter, but it was just the center line.

Boxes

Plotted Perspective - Looks good here. In the last frame, it looks like you redrew two lines. It's good you were aware of it, but in this course, we try not to redraw lines, not just because it tends to draw unnecessary attention to the place, but also it negates the effectiveness of learning from the mistake.

Rough Perspective - These are pretty good. The main thing to keep in mind for this in future warmups, is that the box you draw in the back will always have perpendicular and horizontal lines. Some of the boxes in the back have lines that slant

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/roughperspective/guessing Other than that, it would be nice to have your line extension stop at the horizon instead of going past. This keeps things cleaner and helps make it easier to keep track of things.

Rotated Boxes - You followed the steps and not only drew all the boxes in the set, but you also drew through all of them. The gaps are fairly tight and consistent and your boxes are rotating. Nice work! Also, don't redraw lines even though you made a mistake :)

Organic Perspective - This is some solid work overall. A few of your parallel edges are diverging a tiny bit as they move away from the viewer, but you'll get a lot of practice on this in the box challenge. Also, nice hatching!

Congrats on completing Level 1! This has been a really nice, solid, and thoughtful body of work. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete and send you off to the 250 box challenge! (Also, you can now critique other students level 1 work hehe) You'll need two agrees on this critique in order to get the badge for Level 1, but you can go ahead and get started on the 250 box challenge right away. If you have any questions, be sure to ask!

Hi Tameraaxo,

Im heiwa and I will try my best to critique your work. From my first glance it looks good.

Lines your lines are pretty consistent and they do not have wobble. It Shows that these lines are confident and on top of that good accuracy as well. You also dont have fraying on both ends. This is good work.

Ghosted Lines These lines also seem pretty consistent, only at minor places i can see that you missed the spot but that's okay. This overall very accurate ( not the requirement to pass the exercise ) but confident ( required ) and you have both so good job here.

Ellipses in planes As your lines the planes are also good and ellipses are also drawn such that you have tried to best cover all the four sides. There's no wobble lines as well. Similar work is seen in table of ellipses. Althoough one can make use of gaps remaining to fit in more ellipses, nevertheless that's just me nitpicking. You have also managed to touch the border's of funnel as well. This is good work.

Plotted Perspective You have managed to draw the crux of the exercise i.e keeping the height of the boxes perpendicular and having only two vanishing points. In your rough perspective I see that your guess work on where the vanishing point will lie has missed quite a few time. That is something to try to improve as you practice more because this is perfectly fine. Im sure you are using ghosting method for that and hence im also sure you will improve on this.

Rotated box Apart from one minor correction that you did this is work of art. As homelander once said, 'Its perfect'

Your organic perspective is clean and good, but i would suggest you to have more drastic changes in vanishing points. Your cubes are also aligned in one single direction. Try to rotate this in multiple ways. I will refrain from giving this as a revision because next exercise is full of these. This is overall and amazing work.

Hi there!

First off, a huge congrats on completing Level 1! I'll try to make this brief so you can move on asap :)

Lines

Superimposed Lines - Your lines look good! Good meaning that the stroke was confident and smoothly drawn without hesitation from the start to finish. I will note that in the second page, you have some fraying on both ends of the stroke, so I would recommend you take an extra second to line up your pen before you start your stroke in warmups. Fraying on the far end is okay, but not on both ends. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/superimposedlines/fraying

Ghosted Lines - Generally speaking your lines here are solid. There is a bit of wobbling and arcing on some of them, so something that could help with that, apart from just more mileage, is to consciously try to arc your lines the opposite way. But always remember that a confident stroke comes first, after that we can work on our accuracy.

Ghosted Planes - Even when we bumped complexity up a bit, you still took the time to ghost each stroke and also try out both long and short strokes. Nicely done! Here there is also a bit or arcing in the lines, so for warmups you might want to try the suggestion above in ghosted lines.

Ellipses

In general, your ellipses have some wobble to them. This is hard and something I personally still struggle with as well. We should always prioritize having a smooth stroke and even shapes over the accuracy. So confident markmaking first, then how snugly they fit :) This is one of the core fundamental skills we are trying to learn in DaB - how to make thoughtful and confident marks, which generally will make your artwork more convincing than an accurate, but kind of wobbly art. That said, in your Ellipses in Planes homework, and Table of Ellipses, you drew through your ellipses twice, they generally fit pretty snugly, and you tried out different sizes! This is definitely a pass! Oh, I forgot Funnels xD Your funnels line up nicely to the central minor axis line. The ellipses themselves will improve in warmups!

Boxes

For your Plotted Perspective, you used a ruler, and show a solid understanding of the lesson. Here for your hatching, the lines don't always reach the end, so that might be something to look out for.

Rough Perspective looks clean. Your boxes in the front and back are rectangular and they are plotted back correctly to the vanishing point.

Rotating Boxes - You followed the steps and completed and drew through ALL the boxes. Nicely done!

Organic Perspective - Your boxes are rotating here. Some of them looked a bit rushed in terms of hatching and some lines look redrawn. Some of the boxes have a bit more dramatic foreshortening, which we want to avoid because it takes away from the illusion of them gradually getting farther away from us. All in all, nice work and see if you can give your hatching a bit more time, we're in no rush here :)

Congrats again on completing Lesson 1! I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions about any of this :) Also, good to see you in the Discord, it's a valuable place to get help from other boxers :)

Welcome and congratulations on finishing the first lesson of Drawabox! I'm Mada and I'll be taking a look at your submission.

Unfortunately, I can't open your link since you haven't changed the settings so anyone with a link can access the shared folder. Once you've done that, make sure to reply back to me directly on this comment so I can get the notification!

Hie Leviann,

My name is Heiwa and i will try my best to critique your work.

Arrows: Lets look at your arrows first. Although your arrow lines are confident they are not the right shape. They expand and get too thin to show any dimension properly. Few of the arrows you have curves which are not intersecting. It flows beside the existing waves and hence this does not give the illusion of it flowing through space. I will suggest you to visit the Arrows exercise and video again and try to re-draw. It does not have to look pretty but few points for this exercise is to not have repeated lines. Do not be afraid to superimpose the lines on the arrows.

Organic Forms and contour circles: Good job on the organic shapes, they are simple and they flow in 3D space. The ellipse are curvy and not confident. For this exercise i would suggest you to try to focus on your confidence of the ellipse as compared to accuracy. Try the ghosting method for drawing the elipses. I see that you have large variations of the circles which are good as it gives more information to viewer on how the shape has turned.

Texture Analysis: Good job on texture analysis. You have manage to get important information out of only shadows. You have taken good contrast out of the image.

Dissections:. Overall good job here. You have not only broken the silhouette but you have but your texture surrounding the shape. Good job on that.

Form Intersection: Good job on form intersection. They appear to be in 1 3D space and have good guess of the intersecting boundaries between objects. Although common thing that i have notice in your exercises is wavy lines which tells me that you dont use ghosting as much. I would try to suggest you to use ghosting for draawing lines and in case of complex objects like cubes or cones you can place points as your reference and then using ghosting method again. Obverall these are good attempts.

Hey there, saw your submission, so I figured I'd take a look:

Arrows. The central arrow on the page is easily the best constructed of the set. The rest have line width and hatching issues that hinder the arrow's dimensionality in the space. Ghosting for these lines is a good plan, as it helps ensure that the second line will follow first while allowing for more or less width depending on where you want the arrow to go. I do see you trying to use line weight to mark the dominant line of the arrow, which does help define the direction of the arrow. You can go step farther and use line weight to show when an arrow is passing over another arrow behind or beneath it.

Leaves and Branches. There's too much information on the page that makes judging this page particularly difficult. That said, I'll try to offer suggestions that may help:

• Making notes about the errors are distracting, and would be better placed either on a separate page of notes or written down after the photo was taken for the submission.

• Tallow leaf, bay leaves, and cannabis leaf seem to have multiple passes of basic construction lines. Line clutter is a bane of constructional drawing, and should be avoided.

• Texture detail is overwhelming to the point that the construction is nearly obscured, with the exception of the maple leaf, where the texture is the construction.

While texture is information, ultimately it is but one piece of the construction puzzle. Depending on the subject, more information can be better conveyed through the breaking of the silhouette.

Branches look okay. There's some odd errors here and there, but you are using ellipse's degrees to properly show the branches tilting towards or away from the viewer. My main concern with this page is the consistency of the ellipse construction. Some have only a single line to define themselves, while others have errant lines to contain their shape. There are plenty of others that are wobbly but okay. Wobbles will disappear with continued practice, but the habit of drawing through their shape is one that we must remain vigilant for early on if it is to become a subconscious routine in the future.

Plants.

Some of these are plagued with the kind of chaotic sketchy marks that were seen in the leaf exercise. The delphinum, hydrangea and shamrock have some serious line clutter that defeats the point of the construction. Incidentally, this is similar to a problem I found when I tried to draw a lavender. Like the potato plant demonstration, cast shadows can bring clarity to areas that might otherwise be too dense. There's also some occasions where constructions can be partially implemented, but that requires a nuanced touch that I'm not entirely sure I understand, but it's something to think about. For the end of this section, it's worth mentioning that the last page of plants is markedly improved over the second-to-last page.

Hie Tawny Owl,

I hope you are doing good. I will try my best to critique your work.

Arrows: Good job on drawing the arrows. The main focus of the assignment is seen from your work. The Arrows are shortening and getting bigger as the distance gets less. I see you tried different type of bends giving it the 3D look. The lines also look fairly confident.

Sausage Shapes:: Your sausage shapes are fairly decent. Your work is technically correct. I would suggest for future drawings try to add variations on the size of the ellipses drawn remembering those are the viewpoints on how a viewer would see a circle. More of the circle meaning more turn towards/ opposite to the viewer. We can try to exegarate this. Currently they dont have lot of variations. Same with Organic forms with contour lines. Try to give them more of a curve for future practice.

Texture Analysis: Perfect. loving it.

Disections: Both the dissections are amazing. Great details and good control over contrast and shadows and not getting into drawing random lines or 'sketching'. They are technically correct. One improvement i would like to suggest you here would be to keep in mind or imagine how the sausage shape is moving in the space. Due to this the texture on top of it would also flow or change. I can see that in few spaces but its not much. Example: Cucumber. Knowinging that the small circle is the bottom part ( pole ) of the cucumber then the black strips would end & start on that circle on all the sides. In your case it goes besides it if that makes sense? You can notice that in multiple disections as the shapes don't go around the shape as the shape change. Also do not be afraid to let that texture come outside of the border of the sausage shape. Overall the texture looks really good.

Form Intersection: They do feel like they belong to same space. This seems to be on right track.

Organic Intersection: Great job here as well. The forms look on top of each other. The cast shadow also seem consistent. One thing you can do is exagerate few of the forms as flat as if there's weight put on top of water balloons. Regardless the contour also seem correct. Good Job here as welll.

Hello! I'll be critiquing your work. To be honest this will probably be a short one, your homework looks great.

LINES

You've got clean and confident lines and great accuracy. All exercises in this category are very well executed. Well done!

ELLIPSES

Ellipses look smooth and have a consistent shape.

The funnels look great. I like the variety in ellipse size and width.

BOXES

Nice perspective on the Rotated and Organic exercises, you're really good at estimating rotations :)

I have nothing more to say except great work!

I'm marking this lesson as complete and you can move on to the 250 Box Challenge.

Good work. Line work is very clear. I think the perspective lines on rough perspective should be a different colour than what you used for the boxes to make it more distinct.

Hello! Congrats on completing the 250 Box Challenge! This is nothing to scoff at so give yourself an extra pat on the back for going through this daunting challenge. Looking at the first and last pages, the improvement is clearly visible :)

Things you did well:

• Firstly, your boxes look great. Lines look clean and confident, and hatching is consistent. Good job!

• You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening. Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding. I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.

Things you can improve on:

• Looking again at the last 50 boxes I noticed sometimes your lines converge in pairs. This is an example of lines converging in pairs, and this shows the relation between each line in a set and their respective vanishing point. The inner pair of lines will be quite similar unless the box gets quite long and the outer pair can vary a lot depending on the location of the vanishing point. Move it further away and the lines become closer to parallel while moving it closer increases the rate of foreshortening. The key things we want to remember from this exercise are that our lines should always converge as a set, not in pairs, never diverge from the vanishing point and due to perspective they won't be completely parallel.

• I also noticed that sometimes the inner corner is off. If it gives you trouble in the future you can also try out this method of drawing boxes.