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10:31 PM, Thursday January 12th 2023

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 well. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on a consistent smooth ellipse shape. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes although you are deforming some of your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/deformed You are compromising your overall ellipse shape by adjusting for accuracy midstroke. 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. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always consider when drawing your ellipses. There is plenty of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and smoothness so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling 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. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced. 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. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize 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 constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out decently. 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. Some of your rotations here are very slight overall bordering on not rotating at all. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. I'm also seeing line wobble throughout this exercise so 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. 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 decent. My main concern after the last three execises is your line confidence hasn't really improved that much and I'd like to rectify that before moving on to the 250 box challenge. I really think your issue is that you are hesitating while making your mark out of a concern for accuracy. When you slow down your stroke while making it trying to be more accurate that tends to lead to the type of line wobble I'm seeing throughout these exercises. So I'd like you to do one more page of this exercise with a focus on confident linework. Make sure you place your dots. Ghost your line multiple times and then draw from your shoulder with confidence. It's okay if your line slightly misses the mark as accuracy is not our priority and comes with mileage. Your box constructions are somewhat solid but you are relying heavily on parallel lines for your box constructions which is leading to divergences in some cases. The 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you in order to develop a better understanding of how box lines need to converge to vp's.

Overall this was a good submission but the main issue is that your line confidence dropped during the box exercises because you became more wrapped in thinking about accuracy and I'd like to address that before moving on.

Next Steps:

One page of the organic perspective exercise - Focus on confident linework

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
5:31 AM, Friday January 13th 2023

Hello and thank you so much for the feedback!

I have a lot of problems with drawing from my shoulder as I often do doodles and with that Im always using my wrist. So as soon as my mind wanders off just a tiny bit - I resort back to wrist-drawing.

For this re-do I forced myself as good as I could to draw from my shoulder, even if the shorter lines felt incredibly weird to draw like this.

I believe it turned out much better than the last attempts :)

Thank you again and I hope you have a nice day!!

https://imgur.com/a/qmx4WTH

3:22 PM, Friday January 13th 2023

Great job! This is much much better. Remember to keep drawing from your shoulder and you will get used to it eventually and not even notice you are doing it naturally. 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.
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