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5:12 PM, Thursday March 5th 2020

Nice work! Starting with your super imposed lines, you're doing a pretty good job of keeping your executions confident, so as to maintain a consistent trajectory throughout each stroke. I definitely think that the following two exercises build on this through the introduction of the ghosting method - initially your results are still a little wobbly, but you quickly start to get your feet under you and achieve straighter and smoother marks whilst continuing to hit your intended targets. By the time you hit the ghosted planes, your linework starts looking really solid.

You carry this through into your ellipses, which frankly are looking fantastic. They're confident, evenly shaped, and fit snugly within their allotted spaces. You do a great job, for the most part, of keeping them from getting distorted or deformed as you fit them into the ellipses in planes, and your funnel ellipses are aligning quite nicely to their minor axes. There are a handful here and there where I think you might be drawing through your ellipses a little too much, so try to pull that back a little while maintaining the same confidence. I generally recommend doing it no more than 2 or 3 times around the elliptical shape, with 2 being ideal.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, you've done a great job with the core focus of this exercise, but I am noticing a definite drop in your line quality. I think because we're drawing boxes now, you're thinking more in terms of investing less time into each individual stroke as you focus more on the "big picture" rather than each individual component. We both know you can draw lines that are straight and smooth, so always remember back to how the ghosting method separates the markmaking process into three distinct stages (planning, preparation and execution) and don't try to tackle all of those things while actually making the mark.

Your rotated boxes are coming along well - you've kept your gaps nice and narrow so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, and you've covered a pretty good range of rotation. It would definitely help to exaggerate the rotation along the outside a little more, but again this is coming along well.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are looking good, but watch out for that tendency to go back over your lines when you make mistakes. This only draws attention to them - generally it's better to just leave them alone. There's also room for improvement with getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but we'll continue to work on that as it's expected at this stage.

All in all, great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

The 250 box challenge is your next destination!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:33 AM, Friday March 6th 2020

Thank you for taking the time to give such an in depth review! I really appreciate it.

I'll keep your advice in mind when I re-practice the pages, intermittent with the box challenge.

See you at 250 boxes!

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Sakura Pigma Microns

Sakura Pigma Microns

A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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