youenoh

Hi Gady,

Thank you for the thorough review and for attempting to find improvements in each of the exercises. Some of the issues I was aware of, but many were new insights. I was specifically planning on doing more form intersections and texture analysis (I don't think my references were the best choices for analyzing or respresenting cast shadows), so I very much appreciate having some new areas of focus for improving on those exercises. I will also focus on the other two orientations of the sausages when I get to Lesson 4. For some reason I thought we needed to show one end facing toward the viewer on each sausage but I definitely misread or misunderstood part of the lesson.

I learned more than I expected to from this critique, thanks again for the quality feedback!

• youenoh

Sorry for such a late response, my current curriculum led me away from DAB for a month or so.

I'm so glad I could help! Excited to see you future work :)

Hi KamiyaSora,

Thanks for the thorough review and for addressing my questions. I think you're right that I may have gotten too hung up on the accuracy of my lines after planning, especially since I was getting a better idea of where they needed to align for accurate convergences.

The link you sent for box construction is great to see because I started noticing that specific process leading to more accurate results. I don't remember how early on I employed that method, but I experimented with a few others and that one seemed to work best. I never saw that process explained anywhere prior but it's certainly nice to have some confirmation on my trial and error approach.

I also appreciate the advance box exercises, I'm not sure how I missed those but I can see how they will be very useful, especially the second exercise in regards to future lessons. I will most definitely give them a shot and stay fresh on boxes for warmups. Thanks again!

• youenoh

Hi Galinap, my name is youenoh and I will be critiquing your Lesson 1 assignment.

If this is your first time here, welcome aboard! I am fairly new as well so I am excited to contribute. Let's get started:

Superimposed Lines

Your lines are VERY straight, which is especially impressive on the longer lines. I see a tiny bit of wobbling but almost no fraying, which tells me you can speed up your stroke just a tad. I'm sure you've heard it plenty here at DAB already but always go with confidence over accuracy. Your starting points are clean, so it's clear that you're setting up each line beforehand. Nice work!

Also, It looks like you're using pencil for this exercise. I won't bug you about not using pen since this is an unofficial critique, however I think you'll see any mistakes a lot clearer with a fine-tip marker or ballpoint in this case.

Ghosted Lines

Your ghosted lines are also very impressive. These lines are straight, and the start/end points are dead-on for the most part. I would encourage you to fill the page more, or at least use ghosted lines/planes as a warm up to keep your muscle memory tight, seeing as this is the basis for nearly all our future drawings.

Ghosted Planes

These are also very clean. I see all eight dots on every plane for your ghosting, so I can tell you aren't taking any shortcuts.

If I had to say something constructive here, I would say to keep an eye on your horizontal midpoint lines. Try to keep them more or less centered on the edges. I realize true planes will be distorted or foreshortened in 3-D space, but they should land at roughly the same location on opposing edges. This is really nit-picky and wasn't stressed in the assignment guidelines, but these midpoints will help you accurately shape your ellipses in the future, so it's something to keep in mind. Otherwise, superb planes!

Tables of Ellipses

Your ellipses are very smooth, and you are following through the line 2-3 times for each ellipse. Perfect! I would merely suggest - if you use ellipse tables for warm-ups - adding some variety to your tables i.e. deeper angles or shallower ellipses (smaller minor axis) so that you have a wider repertoire of shapes in your muscle memory.

There were also a few spots where the ellipses are not meeting the edges of the bounds. Overall, your ellipses are super snug, but we want to make sure that we're hitting the edges of our tables as well. This predetermined boundary we've set for ourselves is going to help us construct accurate ellipses in the future, so we want to be very diligent on this especially. Overall, excellent work, one of the better ellipse table submissions I've seen.

Ellipses in Planes

These look excellent, very clean, and it appears that you stuck with a consistent two follow-throughs on each ellipse. Consistency will really help you develop good habits, so this is great to see.

If you look at the planes I mentioned earlier with the slanted midpoint lines, you'll see how the ellipses appear a little warped. These midpoints provide anchors/axes for our ellipses, so we want to make sure those are accurate, foreshortened or not. Otherwise, we wind up with egg shapes or distorted ellipses. You may have noticed this already, so apologies in advance if I'm being redundant but this will be important in future exercises so I believe it's worth reiterating.

Funnels

These are very clean, your ellipses are straight along the long axis of the funnels, and they're divided in half perfectly in almost every case. Again, consistent follow-throughs and very smooth ellipses.

Even though these look really good, you could probably stand to do some more of these funnels in your future warm-ups, just to push the variety of the ellipses a little more. Try to really exaggerate the shallow or "squished" ellipses near the center, or do some of the corner funnel shapes like in this example from the lesson.

Plotted Perspective

These look great, but since we used tools, there are not a lot of comments to make here. If you decide to hatch one of the faces of your boxes, get in the habit of shading one of the front faces. This will help avoid any confusion when you move on to your 250 Box Challenge, as you want your perspective lines to converge away from any shaded face.

Rough Perspective

I don't know why, but I really like the look of these. I see you made a few minor mistakes that you leaned into and continued anyway. A lot of folks have trouble with this, so it's very refreshing to see. These are the wobbliest lines of all your exercises (which has been true for EVERY submission I've seen), but they are still much straighter and more confident then I'm used to seeing at this stage. I also really like the amount of variety you used in the location and size of your boxes. It's clear you have a good grasp on one-point perspective!

(Side note: I used the same short-hand symbols as you did for my 250 Box Challenge i.e. the "X", check-mark, and squiggly. Is this a common thing? I thought I was so cool for "coming up" with that system, haha)

Rotated Boxes

Many DAB students struggle with this exercise, and you did a pretty good job grasping the main idea. However, I see a few boxes rotating the wrong direction or not at all. I also see a triangular prism to the bottom-left of the center box. You're supposed to have a little trouble with this exercise, so I won't ask you to do it again, but I definitely recommend coming back to it after your 250 Box Challenge to see how much you've improved. I see you've spread the boxes out, probably to make this exercise a little easier, but to be honest I think keeping them close together actually makes it easier to follow, despite the clutter. As Uncomfortable mentions in the exercise and the accompanying video, you can use the edges of the existing boxes to help you find the edge of the adjacent boxes when they're close together. This really helped me when I did the exercise and I think it's worth a try. Also, plotting out your horizontal and vertical axes will help you estimate vanishing points on your boxes, which you can then shift to achieve rotation.

I wouldn't try this exercise again now, but after you finish the 250 Box Challenge. I believe the improvement you'll see will really motivate you as you progress through this program.

Organic Perspective

Again, you have a rather good understanding of 3-D space. Also, your linework has not faltered at all, even in the final exercise, which you should be really proud of. Some of the boxes are a little warped or twisted, but I can almost guarantee the 250 Box Challenge will fix that for you if you stick with it. An important note: Many of your boxes are very similarly oriented. If you continue drawing them in the same orientation, you won't develop much versatility, so I recommend you work on rotating, stretching, and flattening your boxes to get more variety, especially during the 250 Box Challenge. I recommend starting each box with a "Y" shape as Uncomfortable demonstrates here. However, rotate the "Y" so it's upside-down, sideways, or diagonally oriented. Also vary the length of each leg of the "Y" shape. Start with one short leg for a flatter box, or one very long leg for a long box. Three equal legs will make a cube, etc. Have fun with this! It really helps prevent burnout when you're working on your 250.

- RECAP -

Overall, excellent work! I see very few issues and your linework is some of the cleanest I've seen so far. You could improve a little bit on your perspective boxes, but I think the 250 Box Challenge will solve most if not all those issues. Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions regarding the review above, additional advice/tips, or heck, just to chat.

Cheers :)

• youenoh

Hi Candyheartlia,

Sorry for any wait on my follow-up review. It looks like the remainder of your submission is the same as before, so I have linked my previous critique in case you wanted to refresh your memory on any of my original comments.

As for your resubmitted Rough Perspective exercise, it's still incorrect in places, but I can see you had a better understanding of the exercise this time around and made a solid attempt at following the edges and the true perspective lines of your boxes. For this reason I will mark your assignment as complete. However, I can tell you're struggling a bit with understanding the construction of these boxes and the function of the vanishing point/horizon line. The main problem I'm seeing is that with some of your perspective lines, you're tracing arbitrary lines from the corners of the boxes where you should be following the edges. The edges of some of your boxes actually point away from the horizon line, which won't make sense in 3-D space, and may be leading to confusion. Please see these images and the associated notes/captions for a visual explanation that may help you see what I mean.

This exercise is supposed to be outside of your comfort zone at this point, so I don't think you need to redo it a second time, but I really think you should review the videos that are provided for this exercise and make sure you understand how boxes work in 3-D space. I recommend the video provided in the exercise here. Also, if you have time, I would review Uncomfortable's explanation of 3-D boxes here. I would also read through the Rough Perspective exercise one more time, paying close attention to each step of the construction of the boxes. I know this is a lot to ask, but I really want to make sure you have a good grasp of boxes before you start the 250 box challenge. While the challenge will help you a lot with this concept, you will have to redo it all if your perspective lines aren't drawn correctly (and that would be terrible!)

Like I said, I've marked this as complete. You can take my advice and review this exercise one more time, or you can move along to the 250 Box Challenge if you feel like you're ready for it. Either way, I highly suggest you post your first couple pages of the box challenge to the #lesson1 Discord channel and confirm with our colleagues that you're doing the challenge correctly. Feel free to link some sheets in a reply or DM me on Discord if you want my personal input as well. Nice work overall, and good luck on your future lessons!

Cheers :)

• youenoh

Hi Timothyfet,

I looked through your assignment before I realized Lilego had written a critique for you, they caught nearly everything I had to say, including the most important items like the Rough Perspective and Rotated Boxes exercises.

A couple other things I wanted to note:

• Remember that for the ellipses in tables assignment, we want to force ourselves to build ellipses in the established space we have made for ourselves beforehand with the tables. There's only a few locations where you didn't do this, see the 7th rectangular frame down in the right column, page 1, and the lowest frame in the right column on page 2 for examples of what I mean. We want to fit the ellipses into the rectangles/curves we've already established rather than "freestyle" the ellipses in open space before snugging up the new ellipses. This will be important in the future when we get to stuff like cylinders. We want to be able to nail the minor AND major axes when we build our ellipses. Your ellipses are very impressive otherwise, so I doubt you'd have any issues with this (and no need to redo the exercise), I just want to stress the point of the exercise for future warm-ups, etc.

• I also noticed you're extending some of your lines when it comes to stuff like rotated boxes. Remember to ghost every line, establish your starting AND end points beforehand, and try to nail those line lengths so they don't continue off into space. This will keep your strokes very clean when we move on to more complicated drawings. Your rotated boxes are spectacular and it looks like you have a really good grasp of 3-D space, but we don't want to rely on visible vanishing points or reference lines to create every box. I know, when you're doing pencil or digital, we can always erase or remove these reference lines, but a major point of this program as a whole is to establish confidence in our linework so we don't always need to rely on those reference lines. This will be very important for your 250 boxes! I'd hate to see someone recommend you do the challenge over because you were drawing out your reference lines. We want to eyeball it first and check our work after so we get comfortable with NO reference lines.

Also, just wanted to note that I really dig your style. Your ballpoint technique looks super rad, and while the rotated boxes wasn't technically correct in a perspective sense, it's one of the more impressive drawings I've seen in Lesson 1 submissions. I also really enjoyed the creative ways you tried to push your comfort zone on a lot of these exercises (even if Uncomfortable doesn't typically approve of that). I really hope you stick with this program and that I'll get to see some of your future work. Keep at it!

Cheers :)

• youenoh

If you're like me, you want to continue your progress as efficiently as possible without neglecting any weak points. I am wrapping up my 250 boxes soon, but I've been making sure to warm up every box session with a quick ghosted lines warm-up (5-10 minutes) on scratch paper, just to keep the quality of the submission consistent. It's a nice, quick way to touch on those basics and stay fresh while also not pulling too much time from the boxes or 50% doodles.

250 boxes is a crazy long task, much longer than I thought it would take. Taking breaks fairly often is a great way to not get burnt out. Good luck!

Hi Alexxty, my name is youenoh and I will be critiquing your Lesson 1 assignment.

If this is your first time here, welcome aboard! I am fairly new as well so I am excited to contribute. Let's get started:

Superimposed Lines

Excellent use of your page, plenty of practice here, and overall great accuracy on your marks. Great confidence and fluidity as well. As you mentioned, the longer lines are a little less accurate, but that's to be expected. I'm seeing a bit of arcing on the longer lines, make sure to try to reverse that arc slightly as you move your arm and those lines will straighten out over time. It looks like you've got your shoulder drawing down but IF you're still using elbow, this could cause an arc effect, so keep an eye out for that if you believe that could be the issue.

Also, just a minor note, I'm seeing some variation/fraying in your starting points. Make sure not to neglect any portion of your set-up and be methodical when it comes to where you start and where you end your lines.

Ghosted Lines

These look awesome, not much room for improvement but I would have probably filled the page more, just due to this being such an important exercise (although you get plenty more practice as you progress).

I'm seeing just the tiniest bit of inaccuracy at the end points (nothing to be concerned about at all), but one thing that helped me eventually nail these was to focus on the end point before making the stroke, rather than following the pen as I draw. This only worked for shorter lines, and might not help you the same way it did for me, but it's something to try if you feel so inclined.

Ghosted Planes

These look amazing and you clearly took your time on every line. If I were teaching a class I would use this as an example of how to do this exercise right.

If I had to say something constructive, I would maybe add some variety or some more extreme angles just to push your comfort zone, but really there's very, very little room for improvement here.

Tables of Ellipses

Perfect follow-through on all of these, 2-3 rotations, just as recommended. Lines are smooth and confident. There are a few floating edges here and there but for the most part these minor mistakes were corrected within the same bounds (which tells me you're thinking about each ellipse before drawing them, nice work!)

Again, you could maybe use just a bit more variety. I'd love to see some very shallow ellipses (as they are fairly common in nature) and maybe a little more lean/angle in some of these tables. I saw one DaB student turn their ellipses completely horizontal which is maybe a bit much, but you can always get creative with the shape and size of the tables to get a wide spectrum of ellipses and really get that muscle memory locked in with a huge array of possibilities.

Ellipses in Planes

Pretty much the same comments as the previous two exercises. Your ellipses are smooth and confident, perfect follow-through. A few floating edges but nothing that will create issues in more complicated drawings. Your cylinders should be a breeze!

Funnels

I didn't see any major issues with this, despite your comment. The arcs of the funnels even look really clean!

That being said, I would say this is your weakest link so far. Your ellipses seem a little less confident this time around, and the majority of them are either off-center from the major axis of the funnel (minor axes of the ellipses), or they are not fully perpendicular to this line. Make sure you're aligning them so they are cut in half right down the middle, rotate your page as needed, and take a moment after every ellipse to make sure you've got them straight. I see you're flattening the ellipses as they reach the center (which is great practice), and getting the alignment right with the major axis of the funnel will really help this perspective click.

Also, I'm not sure why, but the end ellipses on this exercise never quite reach the widest points of the funnels. This might be more of an issue with the construction of the exercise itself than it is with the students, but if you do funnels for warm-ups, it might be fun to try and really push the size variance on these ellipses and try to snug them up at the far ends.

Other than the minor points above, this really was a superb entry, and it can be a tricky exercise.

Plotted Perspective

No comments since we were provided tools here. Extremely clean compared to the other submissions I've seen though, what's your secret?

Rough Perspective

Another very clean submittal for this exercise. A couple notes:

1. These are easily the least confident lines I've seen in your submittal, which I find is common with this exercise. At this point in the lesson I like to remind folks to treat every ghosted line as a connection of two dots. Keep the whole box in mind while establishing the dots, then clear your thoughts for the ghost and especially for the final mark. Rinse and repeat. Very good lines still, don't get me wrong, it's just easy to get wrapped up in the bigger picture when working on more advanced exercises.

2. The furthest boxes tend to have perspective lines that fall short of the vanishing point (also common with this exercise). My solution was to give the furthest boxes more extreme angles, or a more "wide-angle" perspective. CAREFUL with that trick though, as the furthest boxes are not necessarily in the "safe zone" and could become heavily distorted, especially in one-point perspective, which is uncommon for a composition like this. You may have noticed this yourself, I just feel it's useful to keep in mind for any future perspective applications.

Rotated Boxes

This is very, very good. Not many students pull this off even half as well as you did. I'm especially impressed with the rotation and depth of the furthest boxes.

I know it would be almost useless to try to sneak them in at the angles you've established, but technically there should be one more box at each of the "corners" of the nightmare ball. You should just re-do the whole thing. (kidding!)

In all seriousness though, the only issues I see are some elongation and distortion errors on the interior faces of some of the furthest boxes (see the bottom-left and top-left areas, specifically).

This was VERY well done though and I only noticed mistakes because I had to look really hard. Excellent work!

Organic Perspective

Again, your depth, rotation, variation, confidence, cleanliness are all great. There are some perspective oddities, like distortion and twisting of the centermost cubes on page 1, frame 2 (which I honestly kinda like, it gives a nice dynamic feel). There are also some vanishing point convergence issues overall, but for freehand this is pretty spectacular.

- RECAP -

Normally I would mention working points here, but there's really not a lot you need to improve upon that won't already be addressed in future exercises. If I had to recommend any one exercise for warm-ups, I would do some more funnel ellipses. I would also love to see you put a spin on some of these exercises to throw into your DaB sketchbook (i.e. draw some floating houses similar to the organic perspective exercise). Your execution is fantastic, but the guidelines can be pretty strict and I want to see you push yourself creatively with some additional variety. Also, of course, don't forget the 50% rule.

You're definitely ready for the 250 box challenge (if you go that route), and I'm positive you'll see massive improvement. Your prerequisite understanding of 3-D space is clearly locked in, and what few perspective issues I saw were very minor, so this exercise would be perfect to get you really comfortable with these shapes. I hope you're excited as I am to see your progress!

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions regarding the review above, additional advice/tips, or heck, just to chat.

Cheers :)

• youenoh

Hi Candyheartlia, my name is youenoh and I will be critiquing your Lesson 1 assignment.

If this is your first time here, welcome aboard! I am fairly new as well so I am excited to contribute. Let's get started:

Superimposed Lines

Your lines look confident and fairly consistent, however I'm seeing some occasional wobbling and, interestingly, consistent wobbling, which suggests to me that you're probably still getting used to drawing from the shoulder. Make sure you are not relying on your elbow, and if you notice consistent arcing try to correct by arcing the opposite direction, as the lesson recommends. Eventually you will see straighter lines.

I would like to see more consistent lengths in your line segments so it's clear whether or not you are hitting your established end points. I see your starting points are clean and you're only fraying on one end (this is very good, and the fraying is minimal), but make sure to take your time to set up the start and end points so you know you're getting the length you want in your lines and not just the direction. This will be very, very important when you get to more complex objects. You may have just set up a lot of variety on your page - and that's great - but it's difficult for your reviewer (and your future self) to determine if these end points are accurate once you're done with the exercise.

Ghosted Lines

I'm seeing more wobble in these lines than in your superimposed lines, which tells me you're lacking confidence without the previously drawn lines to help guide you. Your accuracy of the superimposed lines was quite impressive, even when the lines weren't straight, but the point here is to be confident even in your mistakes. Pick a good rhythm for your ghosted lines. I like to say "one, two, three, four, five, SIX" in my head and only drop the pen the sixth time every single time. That rhythm should make it easier for you to do a nice, swift, clean line that has no wobble, even if it strays from the endpoint a bit. Once you're more comfortable with this, you can reduce the number of ghosted strokes you need to make that confident line (and you don't have to use six, how ever many feels right to you). Don't forget to draw from the shoulder!

If this was an official critique I would have you do this exercise over again. It's the basis for almost every single exercise after this, and if you don't fix it now, those wobbles will appear in everything you draw. In addition, there's plenty of room on your page to get more ghosted lines in. Please consider, at the very least, doing another, fuller page of ghosted lines before moving on to the 250 box challenge, and use this (or ghosted planes) as your warm-ups for a while.

Ghosted Planes

It looks like you put just as much effort into your lines here as you did in the previous exercise. That's great! I'm seeing some improvement here already as well.

I noticed with your midpoint lines you didn't always place starting and end points and this is extremely important. We need to establish those points and work through the planning phase before every line. I am also seeing a lot of planes with only one midpoint line. We need those in both directions, as it's very important for placing our ellipses. When we set up ellipses in future exercises (and cylinders as well), we will need to use these midpoint lines to locate the tangents of the ellipses (the four points where the edge of the ellipse touches the edge of its corresponding rectangle). These look good in general though and you filled the pages nicely.

Everything I said in the ghosted lines review applies to this exercise as well! I still highly recommend doing another page or two of ghosted lines and/or planes before moving on. Don't forget that planning phase!

Tables of Ellipses

Ellipses look pretty smooth and confident compared to your ghosted lines. You are drawing through the ellipses 2-3 times in almost all instances so excellent work there. There are a good number of "floating" ellipses that aren't snug with the tables themselves, however for the most part you are keeping the ellipses snug with each other and that's great. In the future, try to work on getting your ellipses correct in both directions (major and minor axes), so that you are snug on all edges. This will come in extremely handy in future exercises and it is important to develop early.

I like the idea you had in your last table of doing a variety of ellipses in sort of a "rock formation" if you will, but remember the core idea of this assignment is to be able to create ellipses in a predetermined set of bounds. It's very important to be able to set up a space for your ellipses and then fit them perfectly into these bounds.

Other than the last couple tables, your second page looks wildly better than your first when it comes to keeping the ellipses snug and consistent, so you should be very pleased with your improvement. Just don't lose sight of the point of the exercise and make sure you stay diligent on that planning phase!

Ellipses in Planes

To start, it looks like you fixed those midpoints I mentioned in the ghosted planes review, so nice work there. Again, don't forget to set up your dots before drawing any ghosted lines.

Ellipses look great here as far as confidence goes. You're drawing through the ellipse a couple times and they are very smooth. However, similar to the ellipses in tables exercise, you need to keep the ellipses snug in both directions. You need to hit ALL FOUR midpoints of the planes when you're constructing your ellipses or they will look very wonky and weird in more detailed drawings. The planes/rectangles we set up here are often used in perspective to make accurate ellipses and if you don't correct this now, it will be a very tricky habit to break. Along with your ghosted line planning/confidence, I would say this is a top priority when it comes to warm-ups and any additional practice.

Funnels

I'm seeing very snug ellipses in both directions and pretty great alignment with the minor axis in each case, so excellent work there. This is a tricky exercise so you should feel really good about this one.

Two thing I noticed that have room for improvement:

1. There is very little variation in the ellipses when it comes to their "height" (size of major axis), and while your ellipses are snug and mostly accurate, I would like to see if you can maintain that accuracy when the ellipses grow and shrink through the funnel. If you do this exercise again, or as a warm-up, try creating more extreme funnels (deeper arcs) to fit your ellipses into.

2. The ellipses in the bottom-right corner aren't drawn through and aren't snug at the ends of the funnel. Was this your first or your last attempt? If it's your last attempt, don't get lazy! If it's your first attempt then that's great, just make sure you're developing consistency with these ellipses. You've done well on this exercise so I want to make sure you're reinforcing good habits.

Plotted Perspective

These look fairly good, although there's a few points where your box edges are not going to the vanishing points at all. This exercise should have zero guess-work and you're allowed a straight edge so there should be no mistakes. I also see some wobble in the box edges and some of the vertical edges tilting. I wouldn't say you necessarily need to redo this exercise, but you could really benefit by going over your original drawings with a red pen and straight-edge to correct your errors so you can see where you went wrong.

Rough Perspective

This is the one exercise I think you should absolutely do over. Here's why:

• Your perspective lines are going directly to the vanishing point This is exactly what the lesson asked you not to do. When you draw your red perspective lines, you need to follow the box edges that you drew to see where they would land on the horizon line. You need to see your errors very clearly so you know how to correct them in the future. Use your straight-edge! if your lines are wobbly, do your best to follow them anyway. Remember, these perspective lines don't need to return to the vanishing point, just the horizon line. It's okay if they wind up too far to the left or right. Check the example in the exercise explanation (about halfway down the page).

• Your lines are wobblier than any of your previous exercises. Be confident! It's okay if your lines are off as long as they are clean and straight. This will become more and more of a glaring issue when you start working on more complex objects (and a lot more boxes) so it's imperative you get this right early. Try to keep this in mind at all times, no matter how advanced the exercise is.

• Your boxes are in the same position in every frame Try some variation. Lift the boxes up above the horizon line, drop the boxes down below the line, you'll get a better understanding of how your boxes work in 3-D space and you'll be able to draw from any angle, high or low (and how sweet will that be?)

Rotated Boxes

This exercise is really tough, but I see that you have drawn through all the boxes and have a rather good understanding of your boxes in 3-D space. The only major problem I can pinpoint is a lack of rotation and depth. We're using the edges of the boxes we've already drawn as hints for the edge of the new, adjacent boxes (you did that very well), but as we get further from the center point of the drawing, we need to push that far edge further. We want the two opposing edges of the front face of each box to be drastically different in length to get more extreme rotation and depth. Don't forget, the boxes will also shrink as they move away from the viewer.

I can tell from your organic perspective exercise that you have a good grasp of these concepts, so hopefully the above comments are just reminders. This is all much easier to see when the boxes are isolated and not crammed together in a nightmare sphere. Great attempt on this overall!

Organic Perspective

I see a lot of improvement in the ghosted lines here but I want to echo what I said before just because it's so important: Take your time with every line. There's still a bit of wobble and hesitation here and it will hurt to break this habit down the road.

Otherwise, these look pretty darn good. I can tell you have an understanding of 3-D space and depth, especially with the relative size of your boxes. I did notice in some instances that your box orientations are very, very similar. Especially in the first image you posted on imgur. If you're having trouble with variation, try the "Y" method offered in the exercise explanation, but rotate that "Y" so it's upside-down, sideways, etc. and experiment with the length of each leg of the "Y". Make one really stubby, make one really long, make two really long, etc. and you'll start seeing a lot of new orientations and new shapes. Remember, boxes don't have to be perfect cubes.

Also, (and this technically wasn't required per the exercise explanation) I think it would benefit you to draw through these cubes. Most of these are close to making spatial sense, but when you draw through the boxes to show all 12 edges, your understanding becomes so much deeper, and you can start to construct all kinds of interesting shapes rather than go into autopilot with the boxes (and orientations) you're already comfortable with.

- RECAP -

Overall, great work! There is also clear improvement as the exercises progress.

Key points:

• Redo the Rough Perspective assignment with correct perspective lines. I highly recommend reviewing some examples to get a better understanding of how the finished product should look.

• Work on your ghosted lines. Focus on confidence, not accuracy. Work on drawing from your shoulder if it feels off to you. There are a lot of drawabox students (and other folks) that have posted to youtube with questions or tips regarding drawing from the shoulder.

• Fit your ellipses into all four sides of their corresponding planes. This will be very important in the future.

This critique came out a lot longer than I expected so I apologize for the lengthy read, but I think those three points above should be your biggest takeaways. Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions regarding the review above, additional advice/tips, or heck, just to chat. Stick with it, your work shows a lot of promise and I look forward to seeing your progress!

Cheers :)

• youenoh

Thanks for the warm welcome and the thorough critique, Zakinithos! I forgot to ask any reviewers to pinpoint weaknesses so I would know what to focus on during warm-ups, but your mention of the rounder/more circular ellipses was precisely what I was looking for and definitely something I could improve on.

Apologies for not including the planes exercise, I scanned the first 3 exercises, read that photo submissions are often easier to review than scans, and then re-took all the photos after drawing over the original planes exercise. My mistake for not including the original scan with this submission, but thank you for pointing it out so I can be more careful if that comes up again.

I look forward to working with you and this great this community and greatly appreciate your effort.

Thanks!