Alright, lesson 1 done! I'm going to do a personal reflection on these exercises to help gather my thoughts.

Despite all of the practice that I went through ghosting my lines, I still found that my hand sometimes didn't like to obey my brain when applying lines in the box exercises. I'd end up ghosting one movement, but the moment I actually go down to draw the line, I produce a different movement and so create a different line.

The ghosted planes exercise was kind of the one that made me realize, "Oh, they weren't kidding when they said this would be challenging." It wasn't a hard exercise, but it was very grindy. I spent probably around two hours on it, and I had a hunch that I'd be in for longer exercises later on down the road. I found the "ellipses in planes" exercise extremely satisfying as a consequence, because I got to go back to each and every one of my planes and cover each one in an ellipse, which took a lot less time than it took to draw the initial planes.

The table of ellipses proved to be quite fun, although I kind of regret not taking one of the table entries and just filling it with one big ellipse. I found that I struggled more with the larger shapes, and I wanted to practice them more. The funnels exercise, to contrast, was more annoying. I was less bothered by the part that involved drawing the ellipses, and more bothered by the part that involved drawing the funnel. I labored over my ghosted arcs for a while, paranoid that I wouldn't get a nice symmetric curve. By the looks of it, it appears that I probably didn't need to worry so much about it: I was still drawing funneled ellipses in the end. As long as I kind of had the axis line reasonably flush in the center, that was what mattered.

The boxes were more of a nightmare than I had thought. It wasn't that I couldn't draw them, but rather that I couldn't draw them very quickly. In many of the exercises, I started out very meticulous and precise, and then slowly grew more and more impatient as I continued drawing. I was able to remain fairly consistent when I was attentive and focused and patient, but I eventually started to get impulsive and drew the edges with a bit less deliberate intent (despite ghosting each segment).

The rough perspective exercise was interesting. I didn't realize that I was supposed to stop the extension line until it hit the horizon line, and so five out of six of my rows have boxes with extension lines converging in a jumbled mess. I think the message still got passed on, though; I seemed to get better and better with each set of boxes. By the end of it, it seemed like I was within the margin of error for my ghosted lines, so I think I got the vanishing point concept down internally.

I'm actually really happy wiht how I did on the rotated boxes exercise! The final object is kinda sort of spherical. And while it is a bit wonky at the edges in some places, I think I made calculated decisions with how I drew each box. It was just hard to see what was going on for the hardest rotated boxes, since there were already so many lines on the page and it was hard to keep track of where my new box was.

I'm also kind of surprised by how I think I did for the organic boxes. A lot of the boxes, from where I'm sitting, look genuinely nice. There are some bad ones for sure, and the larger ones were especially off. But over-all I think I got the main idea well-established. The biggest struggle I had with it was that sometimes I would want to try drawing a slightly rotated box, where one side was dominating the angle of view. But every time I attempted to do so, the resulting box would be much less cube-like than I wanted. Pretty much every really flat box in that exercise set was from me trying to draw a cube and it not working out. I'm hoping I'll learn a bit more about that when I do the 250 box challenge.

One last thing that I'm beating myself up for: I have this terrible nasty habit of repeating lines that I don't like. Sometimes I'll draw a line, and immediately my brain will go "actually maybe that wasn't the right line; I think THIS one is the right one." And on impulse I'll just draw the "corrected" line without thinking about it. I'd like to kick this habit, but I think in order to do so, I'm going to need to give myself permission to keep pushing through the mistakes I made, even when they're mistakes that I noticed RIGHT when I made them. (This is counterintuitive for me, as I come from a writing background. Telling me to keep drawing despite obvious mistakes in the lines I just drew would be like telling me to write up a paragraph without using the delete button.)

Okay, essay has been written. Time to draw a box, and then another, and then another, and then 247 more.