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1:27 AM, Thursday December 16th 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. 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. Your ellipses in funnels are having some slight issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/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 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. 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 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 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 fairly consistent although this started falling apart a bit towards the corners which is why you may have hade some issues placing those boxes. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/guessing You are also running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/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 a bit of a mixed bag of solid constructions and wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

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

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:09 PM, Thursday December 16th 2021

Thanks Rob! I really appreciate all of the great info!

I knew the ellipses were off in regards to the entire plane not being covered and sometimes my brain tried to overcompensate but I tried to keep it consistent.

I recognized the issues with the 1 point perspective and I understood that the lines had to be parallel, but I think I was overshooting when drawing my diagonal connecting line, so I couldn't always make the lines parallel.

The rotated boxes thing killed me and my OCD. I actually took a break from that one and went back to it a day or two later. I was super unhappy with how uneven things were and drawing through my boxes made it super confusing. I actually thought I might not make it through this, so I'm just glad I got it complete, but I couldn't tell why it was way off when I was working on it.

The organic boxes were a bit confusing. I also saw a few boxes and I was thinking they looked good and others I couldn't tell why they looked so weird.

During my lesson, while I was trying to be confident with my lines, I had a reference picture of Scooby-Doo on a lego box and replicated it much larger on my page https://imgur.com/a/qusPxt6 I got distracted when I did the ear and I did it the same size as the original, which is why it came out so weird. I've tried to draw over the years and I have never been able to draw from my imagination or memory. I can look at pictures and replicate them sometimes like with the Scooby-Doo but there was always a lot of erasing and redrawing. I know, it's farm from perfect, the neck line was a bit short, so there is an extra line that shouldn't be there, there are lines around the mouth area that I know are off the to left a bit and I didn't quite get the rounded part by the nose perfect either. Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it came out. If nothing else, I think I'm picking up the confidence. :)

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A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

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