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7:59 AM, Thursday May 25th 2023

Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on making it past the hurdle that is Lesson 1. Let’s see how you did!

Starting off, your superimposed lines look great. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your arcing lines are a tiny bit weak, but I’m willing to bet that this is due to their size, and nothing else. As you know, the smaller a mark, the harder it is to engage the shoulder for it, so aim to draw a little bigger, from now on. Your ghosted lines look confident, if a little unambitious, and your planes are quite nicely done, too. I especially appreciate that you’ve not forgotten to plot start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of your planes – most students do.

Onto the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise shows a good start. There’s not a great deal of variety to them here – either with respect to their degrees, or angles – but they’re smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. Or, at least, I can see that they’re aiming to be. Again, I feel like their small size has hurt you more than anything else. We see students do this a lot – especially with more complicated exercises like the rotated boxes exercise. They think that drawing small will give them more control, somehow, but the opposite is true; drawing big will give your brain some room to breathe, and think, and thus, you’ll find yourself making less mistakes. It’s also good for your shoulder, of course. The ellipses in planes look great. I’m especially pleased to see how boldly you’re missing your frames, here; it’s clear that accuracy was not a great priority of yours – at least, not any that comes at the cost of confidence – and that’s absolutely the right call. The funnels are quite well done, also. I’d perhaps spend another second or two ghosting them, to fix the occasional spacing/alignment issues, but they’re minor, so no stress either way.

The plotted perspective exercise is nicely done – especially good job with the back lines! The rough perspective exercise starts off a little lacking, but shows some great improvement throughout the set. By the end, your convergences are on-point, and your linework is quite confident, also. It seems like you’re even being mindful of the shapes of your far planes here, which is always great to see – keep that up! The rotated boxes exercise is actually not as small as I expected! It’s quite well done, too; its boxes are snug, and they do a good job of rotating. They do lose themselves a little near the back, but that’s entirely normal, and something that we’ll get into in a second, anyway, in the box challenge. Speaking of boxes, the organic perspective exercise is nicely done. Its foreshortening is a little dramatic, but at least it’s consistently so, and the increase in size does a good job of communicating the flow we’re after. I do wonder at the overshooting, however. Could it be that you’re using points to determine the direction, but not length, of your lines here? If so, it should be both. Otherwise, don’t stress about it too hard, because that level of accuracy will come in time – I just mention it because I don’t see it elsewhere in this submission.

Next Steps:

Either way, you’re good to move on to the box challenge. Consider this lesson complete, and good luck!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:39 PM, Thursday May 25th 2023

Thank you for your critique! If you don't mind, I have a few questions to ask:

  1. You said the ghosted lines looked unambitious; I just wanted to clarify what you meant on that so I can avoid repeating this mistake in my warmups.

  2. How do I use length to determine the direction of a line? Is this when a pair of converging lines has one line appearing longer than the other due to perspective?

Anyways, thank you again for your time and onwards to the 250 box challenge!

7:15 AM, Friday May 26th 2023

Of course~

  1. Quite simply, they're too short. Whenever we have you drawing lines, we like to start off small (an inch or two) and build up to the full page's width, so it helps to try some longer ones too.

  2. No no, you're misunderstanding. I said that in your organic perspective exercise, when you're drawing the 2 lines that make up one of your 3 planes, it seems as if you're extending one arbitrarily, and then extending the other, hoping that they eventually intersect. Because your points seem to denote the direction of the line only. But ideally, you'd have 2 steps there. In the first, you ghost to figure out the direction of each line, then in the second, you understand where they intersect, place a point there, and extend your lines to that point. Then, there's never any overshooting. Let me know if i misunderstood what you did, or if it still doesn't make sense, and i can illustrate this for you.

2:38 PM, Friday May 26th 2023

Thank you again for your time.

  1. I will keep this in mind when doing the ghosted lines exercise in my warmups.

  2. I think I understand what you mean now. I just watched the "how to draw boxes" videos by Uncomfortable and ScyllaStew. In the videos, they ghost from both ends, plot their points, then eyeball where they intersect and have the point of intersection be where we connect the lines together. If I'm misunderstanding something here, please don't hold back; I love to learn after all!

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