Hello Smoldino,

Congrats on starting your Dab journey, today I will be reviewing some of your work, I hope that my critique helps you with your next attempts and future lessons.

Starting with

Lines Section

Superimposed Lines

You're doing a great job of drawing confident, continuous and smooth lines from the shoulder. Keep that up.

What I wish to point out is that you didn't always take the extra time to line the tip of your pen to the start of your line, which caused some fraying on both sides. Remember: the fraying should be kept on one side only, even though this doesn't happen often, the presence of fraying on both ends still shows that you become impatient or careless sometimes.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/8/fraying

It's normal to become impatient during these exercises, but rushing will only hinder your progress and get you worse results, it's crucial that you always take the extra care before starting a new line. It's very important since it's how we apply proper lineweight later on.

Ghosted Lines

You have confident lines, they're smooth and you already have great accuracy. However you have arching even in small lines, which means you're defaulting to drawing from the wrist, since the shoulder pivot allows for a much wider range of motion before arching occurs.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/2/pivots

Remember to always use your shoulder, even for small lines, and don't forget o practice all sizes of lines, since you mostly practiced in this exercise smaller lines, you should also try lines that are as big as your page.

Ghosted Planes

Great work. Your lines are nice and straight, and the perspective of most of your planes is good, however some of them feel distorted.

You did a good job at placing the lines that cut your plane horizontally and vertically, they aren't perfect but they're good enough and help the illusion that your planes are flat objects moving through a 3d space. Keep that up and always remember that these lines should cut your planes into two equal halves ( with perspective in mind ).

Ellipses Section

Table of Ellipses

What stands out immediately is that you're drawing through your ellipses too much, sometimes you draw through them 5 times when you should only draw 2-3 times. The reason we stick to 2-3 times ( and ideally 2 times ) is because more than that makes our ellipses look messy and uneven.

You do improve upon this in the second page, so good job, but you end up not drawing through some of your ellipses at all.

You're doing a good job of keeping your ellipses symmetric, within bounds and with no overlapping. You've also got a good variation of ellipse sizes and degrees, although you can try to push it even more.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/5/degree

Ellipses in planes

You start drawing through your ellipses too much again, but you do a good job on smoothness. You don't seem to be sacrificing smoothness and confidence for an accurate ellipse.

Speaking of accuracy you do a good job for the most part, but there are some ellipses that are not aligned properly to the plane, and are tilted when they should be straight. This might happen for two reasons, either because you don't fully grasp how the ellipses relate to the plane underneath, or because you rotated your page and have a natural tilt to your ellipses.

Either way, keep practicing, remember to always rotate your page and ghost as much as you need to make sure tour ellipse will turn out well, keeping in mind that an ellipse in a plane should reach all the 4 walls where the little + meets.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/step2

So other than these points, it's solid work.

Funnels

I feel like while the rest of your work is well executed, this is the weakest part of your submission, it almost feels like you just wanted to get it done with and so you did a single big funnel so you could move on to the next part.

On top of that, you didn't draw the curves that are required for this exercise.

Reread the instructions for this exercise and look over the example homework.

Boxes Section

Plotted Perspective

You forgot to draw the back face for two of your boxes, one in the second frame one in the last. Some of your boxes also don't have their height lines completely straight.

You could also have added some lineweight around your boxes to help distinguish them from the background better.

Overall, while I think you understood the purpose of this exercise, you could have done better if you had taken some more time.

Rough Perspective

I must commend you for the improvement you show in this exercise, while your boxes start out distorted, with height and width lines tilted, you quickly grasp how to draw them properly.

So good work on keeping your width lines mostly parallel, along with your height lines perpendicular to the horizon. Don't forget to not rush and use the ghosting method as many times as you need, it's also okay to make another dot and ghost towards it if you think your initial dot is less accurate.

You extended lines are difficult to analyze due to the yellow color being too light, which makes it difficult to check your convergences. But again you got the point of the exercise.

So just remember next time to use a color that will appear better, the colors that usually don't show up well are pink and yellow.

Rotated Boxes

Many of your boxes barely rotate in this exercise.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/example

Even though you kept the spaces between boxes narrow, you didn't use them as guidelines for your next boxes, which makes the edge boxes feel especially distorted.

Don't worry about this too much however, this exercise is made to throw you into a pool before you've learned how to swim, you'll get much more practice with rotating boxes in a 3d space during the 250 boxes challenge, and then you can revisit this exercise with more experience under your belt later.

Organic Perspective

Remember that one of the core principles of Drawabox is facing our mistakes, next time don't cross out a frame simply because it didn't start out how you'd like it to.

Other than this your organic perspective pages are good. Your linework is confident and your boxes are good for the most part, although they can use some work you'll get plenty of practice during the 250 boxes challenge.

Final Thoughts

You've shown a great deal of improvement during these exercises and while I feel like you're ready to continue this course, I will not be passing you onto 250 boxes yet, I feel like revisions for funnels is necessary as you didn't actually follow the instructions for that exercise.

I would also like you to take your time and try the corner variation as well, make good use of your page.

Please reply with

1 page of funnels exercise.

If you're not in it, have you considered joining the Drawabox Discord?

https://discord.com/invite/FtSS4hhqSu

The Drawabox discord server is the best place to ask for critique on partial work as you move along the exercises, and with the Critique exchange initiative you can make sure that you're always guaranteed a critique even though you're a community member.