Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
12:48 PM, Saturday November 15th 2025
These images might look a little artifical, because I went ahead and scanned them in. Rest asured, they were all drawn on real paper, with a real fineliner.
Welcome and congratulations on finishing the first lesson of Drawabox! I'm Mada and I'll be taking a look at your submission.
Overall you did a great job here, but I do have a bit to mention so let's break them down one by one. I'll write the most important things in bold.
Lines
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking good. Ghosted lines look correctly ghosted and confident too, and there are barely any arching. You've also demonstrated the same confidence in your ghosted planes with a great accuracy. Nothing much to say except keep up the good work!
Ellipses
Now with the tables of ellipses, you've demonstrated a great understanding of the concept in executing confident ellipses. The ellipses in planes are nice, you drew it confidently and snugly in their respective planes.
The funnels are also looking great; you've managed to fit them snugly and aligned to the minor axis and carried the same confidence as in previous exercises. I have no complaints here as your ellipses will tighten as you get more practice. Also this is optional, but you can attempt the optional step of varying the ellipse's degrees as you move outwards in your warm ups, as mentioned here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3
Boxes
You've shown a good understanding of how to make 2 point perspective in the plotted perspective. I did see some skewed back vertical lines here and there, which is usually caused by an accumulation of human error as you plot more and more lines. I assume that's the case and you understand that every vertical line is straight in 2 point perspective. Even if the points are not aligned correctly, try to find a middle ground and draw it as vertical as you can.
You've applied the ghosting method and lines extension correctly for the rough perspective. I've noticed that some of the back faces of your boxes are not rectangular. By rectangular, we mean that they should be composed of horizontals that are parallel to the horizon line, and verticals that are perpendicular to it. While this could also be caused by the sometimes inaccurate lines, it's worth mentioning that there should not be any arbitrary guesswork or random angles. Don't forget that these rectangular front/back faces are the unique characteristics of 1 point perspective. Also try to do the line extensions with a different colored pen like you did in the second page rather than doing dotted lines (which we never really do in this course!).
As the notoriously most difficult exercise in this lesson, you've done a great job at doing the rotated boxes. You've rotated them pretty well (while making sure to move the converging lines) and used neighboring elements to deduce the next orientation of boxes, which is the whole purpose of this exercise.
Finally, organic perspective looks great as well. They look like they belong in the same page and the lines converge as they move farther away from the viewer. There are a few hiccups here and there where there are divergences that results in skewed boxes, but overall they're minor and they look pretty solid.
This will get more relevant as you get to the box challenge, but any hatching from this point on should also be done with the ghosting method. It will make your stuff cleaner and more practice is always good! Try to cover the whole area of the box with consistent spacing.
Anyway, I think you've grasped the concepts of the whole lesson and ready to put them into practice in warmups. Remember to keep working on your lines & ellipses confidence. Again, congratulations and keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
Move onto the 250 box challenge.
Do the lesson 1 exercises as your regular warmup and don't forget your 50% rule art.
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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