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6:54 PM, Sunday May 23rd 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 although you are slightly deforming some of your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed This is likely happening because you are too worried about accuracy and are probably slowing down your stroke to compensate. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. Your ellipses in funnels are having the same issues and you are also tilting your ellipses off the minor axis at times. Your ellipses in funnels are looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. One 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 Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing them during your warmups.

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.

Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. You 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 (very noticeable on the bottom) 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 which is great. Your box constructions are definitely a bit wonky here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a well done submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
9:03 AM, Monday May 24th 2021

Hi Rob! Thank you very much for your feedback. Drawing from my shoulder is something new for me and sometimes I tend to use my wrist unconsciously which makes some of my lines a bit wobbly.

I felt quite confident with the lines and ellipses exercises. I think that my lines become wobblier in the perspective exercises as I was more worried in getting a realistic depth for the boxes. Too many things to keep in mind I suppose! I'll get used to it over time :)

I have a question. What kind of warm up exercises do you recommend before starting to draw? and for how long?

Many thanks Rob,

Jaime

3:12 PM, Monday May 24th 2021

I typically warm up for 10 - 15 mins and you can use any of the exercises you've already completed. So currently you can use any of the exercises from lesson 1 (Superimposed Lines, Tables of Ellipses, etc) but once you finish lesson 2 you can use some of the new exercises introduced there.

9:13 AM, Tuesday May 25th 2021

Great! Thank you Rob :)

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