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2:35 AM, Tuesday January 19th 2021

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point but you are getting pretty significant wobble in your lines here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/8/wobbling I'm also seeing quite a bit of wobble in your ghosted lines and planes. I did see some improvement in your terms of line confidence as you did your ghosted lines. As as you started the ghosted planes though it seems to have went away. Looking at some of your later exercises I can still see that this is an issue that needs dealing with before moving on. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling

This is the important part we need to be focusing on and the real problem I'm seeing:

You're hesitating as you execute the line, rather than drawing with a confident motion. Finally committing to a mark can definitely be quite daunting, but it's integral that you get used to accepting that mistakes do happen. Things go wrong - you can prepare as much as possible (and you should) but the moment your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has already passed. Now you must commit yourself, push through with confidence, and execute your line. It's also worth remembering: we can still work with a line that is smooth and even, but there's not much that can be done with a wobbly one.

What's most likely happening is that you are worrying about accuracy too much while making your mark and it's causing you to slow down your stroke to compensate which is giving you quite a bit of wobble in your lines. The other possibility is that you aren't ghosting your lines or you are reverting back to drawing from your wrist on occasion. I can't be entirely sure of which specific thing is happening and it even could be combinations of all of them. So that said I think your line confidence needs to improve before moving on so I'm going to reassign a few more pages to do before you go on to the 250 box challenge. The first revision being another page of ghosted lines. Make sure you ghost your lines multiple times and then draw from your shoulder with confidence. Don't concern yourself with accuracy for now and instead focus on getting a confident line.

Moving onto your ellipses the table of ellipses despite these looking a bit rough this is a pretty big improvement over your line confidence in the previous exercises. This is extremely evident in your ellipses in planes. You also did a good job drawing through all of your ellipses for these exercises. Ellipses are hard to draw and require a lot of practice and I'm already seeing big improvements with your ellipses in the planes and funnels. With the ellipses in planes it's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting a smooth shape. 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 you are still struggling with the ellipse shape at times but your overall motion is still much smoother than your linework. There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses so make sure you keep practicing these during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks fine, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises definitely could use some improvement. I'm noticing some occasional confident linework mixed here which is an improvment but you are still having large issues with wobbly linework. Once again 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. You extended your lines back correctly when you actually did it but I'm seeing quite a few spots where you missed extending lines. Make sure you take your time a bit more and don't rush through these exercises. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. I want you to do one more page of Rough Perspective Exercises. Make sure you go for more confident linework and make sure you extend all of your lines back and don't skip any.

Your rotated box exercise was clearly a bit of a struggle. 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 that tended to fall apart at the corners. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/guessing You are struggling quite a bit with the spatial thinking required for the rotations for this exercise which is perfectly fine given the difficulty of it. 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/1/16/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 a bit of a mixed bag. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework but there's still quite a few wobbly lines throughout this exercise. Your box constructions could definitely use some work as well so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Before that though I think you need some more practice with line confidence to get that under control a bit better before moving on. I really think that once you take care of this issue you will be well on your way. Get those revisions in to me and I'll take a look and we'll go from there.

Next Steps:

One Page Ghosted Lines - Focus on Confident Linework

One Page Rough Perspective Exercises - Focus on Confident Linework and Make sure you extend all of your lines

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
7:25 PM, Tuesday January 26th 2021

https://imgur.com/a/ISOIvm2

I typed up a whole big response and lost it to a bad connection. Im gonna call it a blessing in disguise because I'll probably be able to make the same points in way fewer words this time!

The real issue I keep encountering is the transition from ghosting to making the stroke. The way my hand seems to hit the paper always throws off my trajectory and sometimes makes me panic a little. The ghosted lines exercise went pretty smoothly but I actually took a step backwards with the rough perspective exercise since I started experimenting with all of the different factors such as speed and pressure. The difficulty of the exercise also contributed to the mess, I'm sure.

Typing my thoughts made me realize that I could likely benefit from keeping my elbow closer to my body so I'll definitely try that next time. I move for my job a lot and the hotel I recently moved into is old and cheap so the table is actually bowed inward and not perfectly flat so that may have contributed to curves in the lines. I don't consider it likely though. Thankfully I move again this weekend to a newer place.

I also got the impression that I was using my elbow far too much between doing both of these exercises so you see the result of me trying to be more shoulder heavy. But in hindsight I think I had an okay balance before.

Thanks for the feedback!

7:45 PM, Tuesday January 26th 2021

Hi, these are an improvement for the most part but you are still getting some really wobbly linework on these rough perspective boxes. One of the reasons we use the ghosting method is to break up the drawing process into several steps.

  1. Put Down your points (This is where all of your thinking about the line accuracy should happen)

  2. Ghost your line multiple times

  3. Execute your line with confidence and don't concern yourself with accuracy during this step and try and rely on the muscle memory you built up ghosting

This process can take a while to get used to especially if you are grappling with learning to draw with your shoulder at the same time. Another possible thing that could be happening is that you are reverting to drawing with your wrist for some of these lines. That is another thing you should look out for. You are showing improvement but there's still plenty of work to be done so make sure you keep practicing line confidence during your warmups.

The one real issue I have with your rough perspective boxes is that you didn't extend your lines back on any of these. I mentioned it in the critique but perhaps you missed that part.

I want you to do one more page of Rough Perspective Exercises. Make sure you go for more confident linework and make sure you extend all of your lines back and don't skip any

So I still would like you to extend the lines back on these boxes to check your work as this is something you are going to have to get used to doing for every single box you draw during the 250 box challenge. Once you do that and take another photo I'll mark this as complete and you can move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

Extend the lines back on your Rough Perspective Exercise to check your work

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:49 PM, Thursday July 1st 2021

Sorry for the delay. Life got hectic but I'm trying to get back on track. Thankfully, it doesn't seem that I've regressed much. But I still find myself having trouble at the same exact moment of each line, the part where I actually go to make the mark. The act of moving my pen onto the paper is what throws me off. How do I know how hard to lower my pen? How do I know what angle to come in at?

Noticing this has caused me to hesitate and it's just making things worse.

Thank you for your time.

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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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