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1:01 PM, Friday July 21st 2023

Hi Rancher! I'm going to have a go at marking your submission!

In the superimposed lines exercise you've got a really solid understanding with the lines, the wobbles and fraying is pretty minimal, and you can see improvement towards the end. You know how to move your pen to give a confident, straight line.

When doing the planes exercise, it looks as though you were thinking hard about hitting the mark and as a result your lines are a bit hesitant, where you've gone to over correct it mid way. It's better to miss and keep the line straight and practice that than to give in to overcorrected/ hesitant line. Your ellipses in planes are having similar issues, you ghosted which is great, but you hesitated and corrected midway through making the mark. Envision your mark, put it down, and eventually your muscle memory will execute them and you will hit more bullseyes with mileage! https://drawabox.com/comic/1 Confidence is more important than accuracy.

Your ellipses tables are good, you're drawing through them 2-3 times, though some of your awkward angle shapes are irregular or egg shaped, don't hesitate to rotate the page to get the right angle. Eventually you'll be able to draw any line, in any direction, but for now just rotate the page and accommodate the angle that's most comfortable/ natural to you for DaB exercises. But awkward egg shapes also happen because drawing them is new to us.

Your ellipses in funnels doesn't really show the understanding of the degree shift https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/5/degree because they are all the same width. You're over correcting at the end ones, make sure you are ghosting and you need to trust what comes out of your body movement after that. Adjust your ghosting, practice, and movement for the next one, but never midway through the line or ellipse you are currently drawing.

Your plotted perspective boxes are good!

Your rough perspective/ freehand boxes struggled the most I think, I don't see any evidence of you placing dots as you estimate and form the box in your mind onto the paper, before you draw it. You should be placing several dots before you draw any lines, check them, check the ones that need to be parallel are parralel with the horizon, and ghosting back to that vp. I don't see any dots you missed, or that you replaced or fixed as you went, leading me to believe you need to give this exercise more time in the planning and ghosting stage. This is the most important skill you need to take with you before you get to the 250 box challenge, because the 3 VP's instead of just 1 will be much more difficult than this exercise. Because of this, I'd like you to redo 1 page of rough perspective, taking your time to ghost the lines to the horizon vp you place, and changing the dot locations as you need to. A great example of what I mean, Scylla is ghosting and drawing and rotating the page here, adjusting the dots as she is course correcting, before drawing a line. Starting around 1:01:49 in particular https://youtu.be/DjQdPZsnok4?t=3709

I feel like this issue seeped into your rotated boxes, though I can see alot of effort went into the front faces and course correcting, it looks like you may have struggled to focus on one box at a time and jumped around a lot, causing you to lose on the back part, either being heavily influenced and compounding errors, or not drawing the rest of the boxes. Try to copy one quadrant here from the picture example https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/21/step8 . Start and finish one box at a time. Please don't redo the whole thing though! Just one quarter is fine.

The last exercise of the boxes on a string you've got a good amount of boxes in, and it shows when you're considering and plotting your marks compared to when I think you might be going to fast or being hesitant. It's alot to remember at once, but it's knowing the line you're placing via ghosting, rotating the page, and should be one continuous single stroke. Overall good job though, and the errors I think you'll overcome with the redo's I've assigned and definitely in the 250 box challenge.

If you have any questions I'll keep an eye out for replies.

Next Steps:

What I'd like from you is:

1 page of rough perspective. - more dots on the page, rotate the page.

1 quarter of the rotated boxes exercise - complete one box at a time, copy the example as best you can, but don't stress about this one too much it doesn't have to be perfect, I want to see if there's anything I can address before sending you off.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:12 AM, Thursday July 27th 2023

https://imgur.com/a/cCTRbJG

As you can see, the closer that the box I am drawing is to the VP, the easier (by a large margin) it becomes to properly and reliably ghost back to the VP. I am worried about Organic Perspective. I can draw the box. If I am looking at it from a 0 degree angle head on, I can rotate it. The issue comes when I am trying to rotate it in 3d space - I don't feel as if I have much control over how it is going to rotate when I draw the box. The same goes for my Rotated Boxes - both submissions. I feel like I am under-rotating and additionally am having trouble drawing boxes past a certain degree. As I am sure you can see, my circles are sort of wobbly & inconsistent - does an improvement come with time, or should I put some more time into dedicated practice to fix the issue?

3:22 AM, Thursday July 27th 2023

Overall really good job on improving. I'd like to push you into the 250 box challenge now because I think that exercise will refine any of your current struggles in a way that is more clear than in lesson 1 exercises. I think alot of your concerns are good indicators that are definitely going to improve with mileage. Make sure you are warming up occaisionally with an exercise with ellipses to help you practice them, but ellipses are definitely something that requires mileage to see improvement. Feel free to post your warm up pages to lesson 1 channel if you want critique too.

I think you're concerned so much about rotating in an exercise that only wants you to focus on one VP in your rough perspective. Your parallel lines are much more straight and the correcting and ghosting you did really shows, even though you struggled to hit that VP on the horizon line, you got much closer and less erratic than your first attempt.

The lines themselves look a bit small, but I think show good confidence and you've drawn them once, nothing I could call chicken scratching at all.

Your rotated boxes quadrant, you're right that you've struggled to rotate them, but it's a very difficult exercise on purpose that you're expected to struggle the most with. Your lines in rotated boxes you've added line weight/ redrawn lines that don't help your drawing, it's better to attempt a line once and leave it than to redraw it again if it goes against your drawing. There is a place for selectively adding line weight with an additional stroke in 250 boxes however, which I recommend you practice even if it's not compulsory, it will help you greatly in your accuracy and in establishing the form. https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/1/lineweight

The entirety of 250 boxes focuses on rotation, and will give you the tools and ability to check after each page exactly how you can do the next one better. All that's asked is you try your best and it's really great because I can already tell you're going to push the limits of rotation, scope and experiment with different boxes. At the start it will be hard. Post a page (or every page if you like) in the discord #basic_challenges often to get feedback when you can, some people don't 'get it' in 250 boxes until further down the line so don't be discouraged early on.

Scylla (that video I linked you on rough perspective) has some videos of her doing the 250 box challenge that I found useful if you wanted more examples after going through the Challenge videos and articles, but I think your self awareness and curiosity will serve you very well in improving.

Next Steps:

Move onto 250 boxes! Congratulations!

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.
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