Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
7:30 AM, Tuesday December 9th 2025
Really looking forward to receive my first homework critique. :-)
Thank you so much Team Draw a box!
Welcome and congratulations on finishing the first lesson of Drawabox! I'm Mada and I'll be taking a look at your submission.
Overall you did an excellent job here, but I do have a bit to mention so let's break them down one by one. I'll write the most important things in bold.
Lines
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking good. Ghosted lines look correctly ghosted and confident too, and there are barely any arching. You've also demonstrated the same confidence in your ghosted planes with a great accuracy. Nothing much to say except keep up the good work!
Ellipses
Now with the tables of ellipses, you've demonstrated a great understanding of the concept in executing confident ellipses. The ellipses in planes are nice, you drew it confidently and snugly in their respective planes.
The funnels are also looking great; you've managed to fit them snugly and aligned to the minor axis and carried the same confidence as in previous exercises. I have no complaints here as your ellipses will tighten as you get more practice. This is optional, but you can attempt the extra step of varying the ellipse's degrees as you move outwards in your warmups, as mentioned here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3
Boxes
The plotted perspective has no problems, you've shown a good understanding of how to make 2 point perspective.
You've applied the ghosting method and lines extension correctly for the rough perspective. You also drew the front/back faces rectangular, which is correct for 1 point perspective.
As the notoriously most difficult exercise in this lesson, you've done a great job at doing the rotated boxes. You've rotated them pretty well (while making sure to move the converging lines) and used neighboring elements to deduce the next orientation of boxes, which is the whole purpose of this exercise.
Finally, organic perspective looks great as well. They look like they belong in the same page and the lines converge as they move farther away from the viewer. There are a few hiccups here and there where there are divergences that results in skewed boxes, but overall they're minor and they look pretty solid.
This will get more relevant as you get to the box challenge, but any hatching from this point on should also be done with the ghosting method. It will make your stuff cleaner and more practice is always good! Try to cover the whole area of the box with consistent spacing.
Anyway, I think you've grasped the concepts of the whole lesson and ready to put them into practice in warmups. Remember to keep working on your lines & ellipses confidence. Again, congratulations and keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
Move onto the 250 box challenge.
Do the lesson 1 exercises as your regular warmup and don't forget your 50% rule art.
THANK YOU SO MUCH MADABU! I really appreciate this deailed analysis of my homework. I was able to understand my strengths and weaknesses well. I will practice these again aligning with the path that you have shown me, for building more confidence in the lines and ellipses. (for about a week daily)
and then i will be moving forward with the 250 box challenge. :-)
Marshall Vandruff is a ubiquitous name in art instruction - not just through his work on the Draftsmen podcast and his other collaborations with Proko, but in his own right. He's been teaching anatomy, gesture, and perspective for decades, and a number of my own friends have taken his classes at the Laguna College of Art and Design (back around 2010), and had only good things to say about him. Not just as an instructor, but as a wonderful person as well.
Many of you will be familiar with his extremely cheap 1994 Perspective Drawing lectures, but here he kicks it up to a whole new level.
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