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10:27 PM, Monday April 6th 2020

Hi mackattack, I'll be going over your work today so let's get started.

Your super imposed lines are showing a lot of wobbling indicating you are still trying to mindfully guide your pen. This will be a recurring theme throughout your critique so I'll state it here: our focus should be on smooth lines and confident execution. Letting your mind steer the pen causes all sorts of issues with our lines, as fancifully illustrated by uncomfortable in this comic. So make sure to keep practicing using your shoulder for confident, swift strokes. A lot of the same goes for your ghosted lines.

For your ellipses you are getting there, but still a lot of confidence needs to be built up. You have done a good job keeping your follow up passes in drawing through tight on the initial ellipse, but the overall shape leaves some to be desired as there are a lot of wobbles, flat portions, and points due to not confidently executing your marks with your shoulder. Remember to always be ghosting and practicing using that shoulder, as difficult as it is at first. You're showing a good grasp of the concepts - your ellipses are tightly packed in the planes with good points of contact, your ellipses in tables are also tightly packed to leave no room for ambiguity, and your ellipse minor axes in the funnels exercise are close to being aligned to the funnel axes.

A quick note regarding your plotted perspective, you have scribbled your hatching instead of carefully and considerately applying each line. Don't do that. Any form of rushing is only detrimental to your growth and build up bad habits, so it would have been better to leave your box faces blank rather than scribble.

Moving on to your rough perspective, your lines are still very shaky and lacking confidence, but I won't keep belaboring that point. Your horizontal lines are parallel to the horizon and your verticals are perpendicular which results in properly oriented boxes. Your converging lines are right on track as they should be as indicated by your correctly applied check lines

Now I've already typed this much of a critique and now see you have not included your rotated boxes so please send that in as a reply to this so we can mark you as complete, but for now I'll move on to your organic perspective.

Your compositions are lively and you have a good sense of depth in your frames due to the scaling of your boxes. Theses small boxes appear to be going back in space due to the appropriate scaling so good job there. Your perspective is still developing, but that's expected here so no worries. You could have further sold the illusion of depth by having more large forms in the foreground to set the scale and more overlapping of said forms to make them appear to coexist in the same space. Overall though you are on the right track and I'm glad you enjoyed this exercise.

Next Steps:

Go ahead and post your rotated boxes so I can go over that and then we'll go from there.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
12:22 AM, Thursday April 9th 2020

https://imgur.com/a/ZIY7yEM

Apologies, here is the rotated boxes. Thank you for the feedback! I'm working on the 250 box challenge and will focus on drawing my lines confidently without over thinking.

1:28 AM, Thursday April 9th 2020

Alright thank you for this. So you did a good job pushing through to finish it. Your lines are shaky but like you said, you'll improve your confidence with mileage. You are not rotating your boxes so much as just skewing them so give this gif some more attention and try to study how the rotation is driven by the motion of the vanishing points. You did a good job keeping your boxes tightly packed to be able to leverage adjacent lines as perspective guides. Overall, you pushed through to the end, you were exposed to these new types of spatial puzzles and solution methods, and that's our only goal for students right now.

Next Steps:

Continue on with your 250 boxes.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.

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