Welcome to drawabox and congrats on completing Lesson 1. Let’s take a look at it shall we?

Starting off, your superimposed lines look alright. I think you missed the part about having to draw a straight line with a ruler first, and then superimpose on top of that, however. That, or your paper is not flat, because there’s a couple of lines here that arc this way and that, and I can’t imagine a single straight line being under those (for instance, the long ones in the first page). Anyway, your lines are smooth and properly lined up at the start, but not always of a consistent trajectory, so be mindful of that, too. It’s more important for a line to be smooth and straight, than it is for it to stick to its guideline. The ghosted lines have a similar issue. Namely, you’re a little too focused on their accuracy, and not enough on their confidence. It should be the other way around, however. You might consider ghosting these a little longer, as a way of fixing that problem, or simply realigning your perspective. A confident line that misses its mark is correct. A wobbly one that doesn’t, is not. On that note, do also be mindful of your automatic reinforcing habit. It’s bad here, but it’s especially bad in later exercises, so I’ll just bring it up once, now. Each line is to be drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. This doesn’t just refer to drawing a line over, a second time, in an attempt to fix the mistake of the first, but it also refers to extending a line that stops just short of its end point. Anything that includes making an addition to an existing line, we don’t like to see.

The table of ellipses exercise shows a good start. Your ellipses are a little small, and I credit a lot of their issues to that (it’s harder to use your shoulder if your marks are small). They’re also a little same-y, too – their degrees and angles, I mean – but that’s not a huge problem, either. They’re smooth, and mostly rounded, so you’re on the right track. You’ve also been sure to draw through them (though sometimes a little too much – I’d stick to 2 rotations, total), but be careful that you don’t flick your pen off the page at the end of them, but rather lift it. Save for issues I’ve brought up before, the ellipses in planes are not bad, but you’re a little too focused on accuracy here, too. Notice how they tend to deform, in an effort to touch all 4 sides of the plane? Similarly, they seem more concerned with their rotations matching each other, than them being circular, but that’s also misunderstanding our priorities. Our #1 concern lies in the smoothness and roundness of our ellipses. Same as with a mark, a smooth/round ellipse that’s inaccurate is correct. A wobbly/bumpy one that’s accurate, is wrong. Good attempt at the funnels. I’d recommend a plate (or something similar) for the arcing lines, since they’re a little too tame here, and what you’re essentially doing is a slightly modified version of the first exercise, but your ellipses are snug, and properly cut in half, so you understand the concept, anyway.

The plotted perspective exercise looks good, if its lineweight a little overt. You always need a little less than you think, I find. Save for the automatic reinforcing issues, which we’ve talked about, the rough perspective exercise looks pretty solid! I do suspect that the pages are out of order, since your convergences get worse as they go along, but if that’s so, then you’ve shown some nice improvement, and, by the end, your convergences are on-point. Do be mindful of your linework, though. Remind yourself that, despite the big picture, all this is is a collection of lines, that you draw one at a time. In that sense, it’s no different from the ghosted lines exercise, so if your lines could be confident there, they can be confident here, too. Solid attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. You’ve not kept your boxes as snug as we’d have liked, but you’ve been mindful of their rotation, despite that. More than that, I notice that the quadrants are different from each other, so rather than stick to what you know, you’ve attempted to improve in each one – that’s the right attitude! The backsides of your boxes are a little flat, and there’s the expected errors with their depth lines, but those are things that we don’t get into until the box challenge, anyway, so no stress. Speaking of boxes, the organic perspective exercise looks mostly good. Their foreshortening is at times a little dramatic, and their increase in size too subtle, and sometimes inconsistent, but I can see a clear attempt to have them flow through the scene, which is all we’re looking for, anyway.