Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

5:49 PM, Sunday March 23rd 2025

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Hello Uncomfortable (or anyone else),

I'm an enthusiastic new student with an intent to get through the course. Drawing is a hobby for men I really want to get good at. I already have a stable career that has nothing to do with art but after learning perspective from Perspective made easy (Ernest R. Norling) and Sketching the Basics (Koos Eissen & Roselien Steur) I knew art could be a secondary career for me.

So here's hoping your course will take me to the next level by taking my knowledge of perspective to the next level. I look forward to the rest of the course!

Pure Pencil.

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2:08 AM, Wednesday March 26th 2025

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. A few of your ellipses in funnels are having some slight issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. You are also 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 notice that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your boxes.

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. While the rotations here aren't perfect 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 to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking quite 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 solid for the most part and I can see you are developing a good sense for how box lines converge to vps. Nice work!

Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a good 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. Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:25 AM, Wednesday March 26th 2025

Thanks for the critique, much appreciated.

Also, I just read my initial message where it said "Drawing is a hobby for men". It's suppose to say "Drawing is a hobby for me" lol. That's definitely not the kind of typo you want people reading because drawing is for everyone.

Anyway, I'll get through the challenge and see you in two weeks!

Pure Pencil.

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