Hi there, I'll be handling your lesson 1 critique.

To start things off I'll just say that while you posted your original community critique I won't be reading or referencing it. While we have a lovely community of helpful people, it's not official critique and they may make mistakes or may/may not point out certain issues we see. The last thing we want is someone else's critique contaminating our thoughts while writing yours, or causing you yourself to second guess what we write so when it comes to the course content basically just assume that we're starting completely fresh from this point forwards.

With that out of the way let's start off with your Lines section.

Your super imposed lines are off to a good start, you do struggle with longer and curved lines in regards to your amount of fraying but this is to be expected. You'll find that with more mileage you'll grow more comfortable with using your shoulder and your accuracy will improve while reducing the amount of fraying occurring.

Once you get to the ghosted lines and planes exercises you're demonstrating confident smooth lines which is great, you do have the occasional wobble or arc while trying to maintain your accuracy but I'll stress that confident lines are your first priority at the moment and accuracy will come with mileage. That being said you are pretty accurate the majority of the time and just have a few cases of your lines overextending their intended stopping point, this is better than undershooting for sure and a possible solution (if you don't already) is to lift your pen from the page while moving rather than stopping on the page. It will take a bit of time to get the muscle memory down but once you do you'll build an understanding of when you should be lifting your pen resulting in confident lines that are also accurate.

On to your Ellipses.

I'm glad to see you experimented with shapes and proportions across these exercises but there are a few things to make note of. You're on the right track to getting your ellipses round and smooth, you do end up with some pinched ends and squared edges however. This is a sign that you may be slowing down, most likely in an attempt to keep your ellipse within the boundary you've established for yourself. Remember that right now smooth round ellipses using the ghosting technique are our first priority and much like with lines accuracy will come with mileage, so if you need to break the boundary a bit to keep your ellipse shaped correctly then do so. It also appears like the looseness of your ellipses varies quite a bit, this may be the result of you not taking the time to ghost and plan your ellipse correctly and instead you may be getting a bit hasty and rushing.

Your funnels are well done, you're close to keeping the ellipses aligned equally by the funnel's central minor axis which is your goal. Just don't forget that it's your goal while attempting this exercise as a warm up in the future, people often do. Just for a reminder you can read about that very common mistake here.

Lastly let's go over your Boxes.

Great job on the plotted perspective exercise.

In the rough perspective exercise your correction lines are converging mostly in the general area of the vanishing point which is good to see, it shows you have some understanding of perspective. The only things I can see that you should address are that while you're close you could put a bit more working into having your horizontal lines be parallel and your vertical lines be perpendicular to the horizon line. You do a get a bit of wobbling and arcing occurring which is most likely in an attempt to keep them accurate while focusing on the task at hand, people tend to lost a bit of grip on the previous exercises and techniques at this point so it's not uncommon to see people's line quality drop here. Just note that everything builds upon each other in this course which is why it's stressed to take your time so that proper muscle memory builds.

The last two exercises are meant to throw students into the deep end to see how well they can handle a challenge, and while there is always room for improvement you handled them well and had solid attempts.

In the rotated boxes exercise you did achieve some rotation and managed to keep your spacing mostly. Even spacing helps you keep the overall image together which you mostly managed to do, it does drift apart in a few places most notably and commonly in the corners as a good example. I'll also note that while your did a good job keeping the planes facing the viewers evenly spaced, the planes facing away from the viewers could use a bit of work, the box on the left of the central row is a decent example of how the spacing and size of boxes can vary. Overall though good job.

You managed to show that you understand the further away from the viewer a box is the smaller it should be in the organic perspective exercise. You do show that you're attempting to redraw lines here which isn't a habit you want to build. Redrawing lines doesn't erase mistakes and instead just makes things look messy. Working with mistakes is critical to helping you build an understanding of your mistakes, other then that this exercise is well done. Your boxes could use some assistance in appearing more solid as they can be quite skewed at times but this will be addressed in upcoming material.

Overall you've shown that you have a good grasp on the lesson material so far so I see no reason not to move you on to the 250 box challenge.

I did see that you said you completed it already, and I took a look at your submission to get an idea of where you're at. I will say that you went through it much more quickly then we recommend and it does show in your work as well. While your boxes aren't awful by any means it is clear that you're going about them much faster then you should instead of using each one as an opportunity to learn from your mistakes.

You mention that you were completing pages in about 8-10 minutes which is often what people will find themselves spending on a single box. There is a mandatory 2 week wait period between each official submission and by no means is that a guide line either, some people will spend a month or two on the box challenge alone.

With all of that being said I don't think you need to do all 250 boxes again, but I will say that you should draw an additional 50 boxes given that you have a waiting period anyways. Spend your time and put your best effort into each one, as mentioned your boxes weren't bad and you did grow but also due to the nature of speeding up you did plateau a bit where there was still plenty of room to you improve your consistency in regards to convergences and your overall understanding of 3D space.

Keep doing previous exercises as warm ups and use the additional 50 boxes as a chance to improve your line confidence, strengthen your grasp of 3D space which will result in your boxes appearing much more solid overall. You may want to experiment with proper line weight application as mentioned in the 250 box challenge lesson material as well.

Good work so far and good luck with your additional boxes.