Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
11:43 PM, Sunday November 9th 2025
I had to redo some of these cause I lost my original doings of the exercise
Hello!! First off, huge congrats on completing Lesson 1! Let's jump right in and get started!
Lines
Super Imposed Lines - You correctly prioritized a smooth straight line over accuracy, which caused a lot of fraying on the other side, but that's fine and expected. Good job trying out a variety of both long and short lines. One thing I do notice is that it looks like there is fraying on both sides of your curves. There should only be fraying on the further side of the line: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/superimposedlines/fraying Try taking an extra second to place the fineliner correctly before taking off!
Ghosted Lines - Looking great! The lines are smooth and straight and again you have a nice variety of long and short lines. The longer lines tend to curve slightly. This is super common, as your arm figures out the motion of how to draw from the shoulder. I think this will take care of itself with practice and it's nothing to worry about, just something to note. If not, you could try to intentionally slightly going the opposite way to compensate for the natural curve. This should help train your brain to feel what an actually straight line feels like.
Ghosted Planes - Your lines are super clean. Even though we built up complexity here, you thought through each stroke and gave each line the time it needed for a clean execution of the stroke. There are a few places where it looks like a line was drawn over again. Try to avoid redrawing a line, even though it didn't turn out the way you wanted. Doing this, and drawing in pen, is what helps train our brain to draw exactly what you wanted the first time. When we redo a mistake, the brain might think that it fixed the mistake and can draw with the same mistake the next time, but when we draw in pen with no retries, the brain registers that as a mistake and tries to correct it the next time. This helps train our brain to draw confident strokes, exactly how we wanted it to, the first time though and brings us to the next level. Okii, enough rambling. Moving on... lol
Ellipses
Table of Ellipses - Ellipses are drawn though twice, and fit fairly snugly to the borders of the table and against each other. You also have a nice variety of circles, ellipses, and different slants. The strokes do wobble slightly, but the ellipses are generally smooth and well shaped. Generally, the same principles for a straight lines applies here as well: ghost beforehand and prioritize a confident stroke over accuracy. Oh, but remember to draw through twice for ellipses, and not for our straight lines xD I think ellipses tend to be more challenging to execute than straight lines.
Ellipses in Planes - This exercise upped the challenge even more, but you got the ellipses to touch all four sides. The ellipses themselves have a tendency to be wobbly and misshapen. This might suggest that you could be worrying about the accuracy of the ellipse touching all four sides over a confident stroke. For this exercise, remember to prioritize the smooth confident stroke over accuracy. Just like with straight lines, there are different levels for this. It's okay if we try and miss the mark, but still end up with a confident stroke. Think of it like this: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/ghostedlines/levels but try applying this concept to ellipses as well. It's perfectly fine for our ellipses to be on a different level from our lines as it's much more challenging to execute, just like curves are harder to superimpose than straight lines.
Funnels - Ellipses are drawn through twice, fit snugly to the sides and each other, and try to align to the central minor axis line. You also have some nice and smooth confidently draw ellipses here.
Boxes
Plotted Perspective - Nice, you used a ruler and your vertical lines are fairly perpendicular to the horizon line. Nice job keeping track of the lines while plotting back to the VPs. It looks like there might be a few places where the line was gone over again (which we try to avoid), but overall you have a good grasp on how this exercise works.
Rough Perspective - Nice work here! Lines look well ghosted and the execution is clean, you're working with one VP in each box, the front and back faces of your boxes are fairly rectangular, and you correctly applied line extensions.
Rotated Boxes - Good job completing this notoriously difficult exercise. You followed the core steps of the exercise, your gaps between boxes are fairly consistent, and you drew through the boxes (except for the veryyy corner boxes). You did get each and every box though, so good job! Sometimes submissions will be missing the very corner boxes. The boxes in the middle only show the tiniest bit of rotation, but I'll count that.
Organic Perspective - Your boxes here look extremely solid, well thought through and constructed. They go back in space gradually creating that believable illusion of space. One thing for when you get into the 250 box challenge, all these boxes tend to have the same orientation with minimal rotation. Try experimenting with different rotations, so you don't end up having to practice the same box 250 times. Here is something to help with that https://imgur.com/Kqg6uMX A quick tip is to change up the angles and kind of Y shape you use to form the box, mostly what you don't want is to reuse the same Y shape for your boxes.
Alright, and that's a wrap! Overall this is a really solid submission. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete and move you on to the 250 box challenge. Let me know if you have any questions about anything, or if I could explain something better, and congrats on completing lesson 1!
Next Steps:
Drop all of these exercises into your warmup pool https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/3/warmups and move on to the 250 Box Challenge! Don't forget your 50%!
Heads up, you'll need two agrees to this critique if you want to earn the completion badge, but you can go right ahead and get started on the box challenge without waiting for those.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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