3:05 AM, Tuesday May 4th 2021
Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.
Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are looking fine. You could have done a slightly better job keeping some of these tangent to each other. Another thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/step3 The good news with your ellipses is that you aren't really deforming them much and are avoiding wobbly linework which is a great first step. You still have a ways to go when it comes to accuracy though so make sure you keep practicing these regularly during your warmup as consistent practice is the best way to become more accurate.
The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. Once again this is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. The other possibility is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist for some of these lines. Just something to keep an eye on. You should be drawing from your shoulder for basically every line you draw even shorter ones. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only. You are doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be straight up and down. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.
Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework for the most part. You are still getting the occasional wobbly line and it could be either because you are becoming too concerned with accuracy which I spoke about earlier or you are reverting back to using your wrist. I am also noticing that you are redrawing lines on occasion and this is a habit you should try and get out of. Try and stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read. Your box constructions are decent for the most part but there are some wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.
Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Working through the drawabox lessons will give you a solid foundation in confident draftsmenship as well as a good understanding of construction and form which are both necessary drawing skills. You can already even see a large improvement in line quality and confidence from your rough perspective boxes to your organic perspective boxes. Drawing is a hard skill to truly learn so don't be too hard on yourself and hopefully the drawabox curriculum will provide you with a solid foundation to build upon. You criticized your line quality but I think you are being a bit too hard on yourself as I've critiqued hundreds of these submissions already and yours is far better than many I've seen. So try and relax and enjoy your drawing a bit. Drawing from imagination is also an extremely difficult thing to do and I've been drawing for about as long as you and it's not something I can do either and it tends to be something that takes years and years to get decent at. Anyways, I'm going to mark this as complete and you can move on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!
Next Steps:
The 250 Box Challenge