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5:21 AM, Wednesday April 12th 2023

Hello CatNamedRey, firstly if you have a cat named Rey in your vicinity atm, do give them love, treats and pats from me haha and congratulations on finishing your Lesson one.

Now let's have a look at your attempt.

Lines:

Your Superimposed lines have a good confident strokes with little to no fraying at beginning and you have also given a try to superimposed arches as well that is a really nice attempt, now as for the fraying at end, do not worry about accuracy for now, that will improve over time with deliberate practice(or warmups). Another thing to mention, in longer lines we can see an arch going in your trajectory, this can be due to:

a) Not using shoulder as pivot: Since we are used to handle pen/pencils,etc with our wrists for most of our life, it can be difficult and even painful to start using shoulders, but deliberate practice can generate a good adaptation as well as muscle memory so try to engage yiyr shoulders more while also giving proper rest;

b) Not being used to using shoulder as pivot: It is indeed difficult at first to get used to, but with time it will become more natural ,or

c) Having a natural innate arch in your movement: This can be dealt with by consciously making an effort to draw a negative arch of similar degree to get a straight line.

d) Other reasons: There can also be other factors and reasons which might be unique to your own, so do give it a thought about if you can identify and tackle those, also do make sure to revisit lesson texts and videos, you might stumble upon something that is helpful.

Same goes for your Ghosted lines, good confident strokes with little to no wobble in them and the trajectory seems to reach within the close proximity of the end point as well so that is another good point, but just in case, let me tell you, accuracy even though is important, you should focus more on confident stroke, as to not forgo confident and smooth strokes over accuracy.

Same again for Ghosted planes, mostly good confident strokes, and also it seems you have takend good care of placing the start and end points(dots) for the lines going through/inside the planes that is the middle and diagonal ones, which most students miss, they are crucial part of the process so kudos.

With that said, your Lines are done in a neat and confident way.

Ellipses:

Your Table of Ellipses(apart from things mentiond above) contains good confident ellipses as well which are drawn over at least twice, and you have taken good care to keep most of the ellipses in each section to have similar or same degree of openness and angle of orientation, further these degrees and angles are varied mostly in different sections that is again good for practicing variations, you have also taken good care to keep most of the ellipses within bounds, that is they are touching the borders as well adjacent ellipses(mostly), and do not worry a little bit of deviation is acceptable as the accuracy will improve over time, so another good attempt.

Same goes for your Funnels exercise, good confident and smooth ellipses, also you have taken care of the fact that the minor axis(middle line) should bisect each ellipse into two equal halves, yes that there are some ellipses which are not following that rule, but as mentioned earlier, the accuracy will improve over time, getting enough mileage with deliberate warmups and practices.

The Ellipses in Ghosted planes adds another level of difficulty, but you have done great to keep your ellipses smooth and confident while also going over them atleast twice and most of them even are touching all borders without losing their smoothness, which is again great. But still I will state that its okay if you do not touch all the edges for now, accuracy is important goal but for now we want to work on getting those smooth ellipses.

Boxes:

The boxes are difficult at first, so again kudos for attending them nonetheless. And apart from things mentioned above:

Your Plotted Perspective is done nicely.

Your Rough perspective, the strokes are mostly confident with little to no wobble at all and you have taken care to keep the width parallel to the horizon and the height perpendicular which is yet again a good point, and do not worry about accuracy that much right now. but, I witnessed that in one box in particular you have drawn over another mark(inside the box) to rectify the trajectory of original mark, so I have to say that you should absolutely avoid correcting your inital mark, as that song says you have only one shot, so no matter how inaccurate your initial mark is, treat it as the correct one and move forward with that, no correcting at all, so do take an important note of this for your future exericses and warmups.

Your rotated boxes, it turned out pretty well. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps consistent. While the rotations here aren't perfect still this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons or the boxes challenge to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. It seems you have tried going over some lines to give them lineweight, they are decent but try to go over them only once, going over once over the silhouette is sufficient, and I will just add this regarding lineweights "Lineweight should be added with confident ghosted lines, and solely to the part of lines to overlap, not to whole lines." for future reference.

Finally the organic perspective, besides the points mentioned earlier, it is a nice attempt, kudos.

With that said, its an overall good attempt, as for the things I mentioned above, do take note of them while doing your future warmups and exercises especially the point of not correcting your initial mark, it might take time to get used to, sure, but improvement will be there, just stay regular!

Next Steps:

Congratulations, now you can move towards the famous 250 box challenge.

Some points before moving on:

  • Do regular warmups, they do wonders, even if you think you won't be able to draw much, then also try to squeeze atleast five minutes per day for warmup, while keeping the aforementioned points in mind for your exercises.

  • Do not hesitate to revisit lesson zero, or the lesson texts and videos if you have questions or want to recall about the exercises and warmups.

  • Do follow the fifty percent rule, you might enjoy it or you might not even feel like doing it but do it nonetheless, you will appreciate its value over time.

  • Do not isolate, regularly post your updates in the appropriate section or the appropriate lesson channels on discord to get feedback on the work in progress.

  • And to take good care of your health and sleep(This is the most improtant one in my opinion).

With that said, my best wishes for your future endeavours, have great time.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
3:27 PM, Saturday March 16th 2024

Hello Niels,

I know I'm a bit late on the reply, but still I want to thank you for your critique on my first lesson. I have taken a long break from this course, but intend to come back to it now. I will keep everything you said in mind and hope to be more consistent this time.

Again thank you very much

5:53 PM, Monday March 25th 2024

Glad to hear from you again and godspeed with your art journey!

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