Hello Rooksana, and welcome to drawabox! I’ll be taking a look at your Lesson 1 submission today, and giving you some pointers before I send you off to the box challenge.

Starting off, your superimposed lines look great. They’re smooth, and properly lined up at the start, but not always of a consistent trajectory, so do be mindful of that. The page-width ones, in particular, tend to course-correct a lot throughout their length, but there’s no need for this. After all, we’re more concerned with a mark’s confidence, than its accuracy, so it helps to prioritize accordingly. To put it simply, it’s more important for us that our marks are straight, and smooth, than it is for them to stick to their guideline. Your ghosted lines look smooth, and quite ambitious, too! As for your planes, these are mostly alright, though you’re at times a little too conscious of your end points, I notice. What I mean by this is that you’ll sometimes catch yourself stopping short of them, and try to limp to the finish line, either by giving the line one final push, and changing its trajectory, or arcing it, in an effort to be more accurate. Again, however, that’s misunderstanding our priorities. An inaccurate mark is fine; we can either ignore it, or try to incorporate that mistake into our piece. An insecure mark, on the other hand, will never be able to convey an illusion of solidity – something we’re after in this course – so it’s of no use to us.

Onto the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise looks mostly good. There’s not as much variety (I’m referring to their degrees/angles) as we’d like, to your ellipses, but they’re all smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through, so you’re on the right track. If I were to recommend anything it would be to push their confidence even further – sometimes you’ll stiffen up, in an effort to have your rotations match up – but it’s a minor thing for now. It remains minor in the ellipses in planes exercise, too. Which is to say, you’ll sometimes stress about touching all 4 sides of the plane, which leads to your ellipse coming out a little deformed (recall that the smoothness and roundness of our ellipse is our #1 priority, not its accuracy), but this seems to be the exception more so than the rule, so no stress. But do try to keep our priorities in mind, so that every decision you make takes them into account. Nice work on the funnels. These are definitely the weakest of the ellipse section, but they’re also the most complicated, so that’s understandable. For now, I’ll say that if you’re struggling with their confidence, feel free to take it easy and have them all be of the same degree. Focus on nailing that, and then worry about having those degrees increase as they move away from the center. Also, try to draw a little bigger! It seems counter-intuitive, but you’ll find yourself having an easier time if you do, if for no other reason than it being easier to engage your shoulder for those nice, wide marks.

The plotted perspective exercise starts the box section off well. You’ll sometimes hatch a far plane of a box, but that’s something we’ll get into at a later time, so no stress about it right now. What’s important is that your work is clean, and correct. Your rough perspective exercise starts off a little lacking, but shows great improvement throughout the set. Chief among that, the fact that you’re now stopping your correction lines at the horizon, rather than continuing them past it; it makes it much easier for me to tell what’s going on, ahah. By the end, your convergences look quite good, as does your linework. My one recommendation would be to be a tiny bit more mindful of their back lines, to ensure that they’re properly parallel/perpendicular to the horizon. Remember that you’re not only deciding where a point falls based off of whether it’s in the path of a line heading to the vanishing point, but also on whether it connects with the other points around it to form lines that are at infinity – this is to say, parallel to the horizon if they’re horizontal/perpendicular if they’re vertical. A point that satisfies both these constraints is the one you’re looking for. Good attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. The first thing that I’ll say is that you should’ve used a pen to fill in, similar to the plotted perspective exercise. And when I say fill in, I mean hatch. I can see that you did so (perhaps a little sloppily), and then went over it to fill in; at that point, I’d have not much bothered at all. Hatching is optional, and it’s something that can really clean things up, if done diligently, or really mess them up, if not. Simply because bold marks stand out to us. So unless your hatching job is so uniform as to blend into the background, it’ll do the opposite, and draw attention towards itself. Anyway, that small thing aside, I can tell that you struggled with this exercise. The boxes on the axes lines aren’t bad; they struggle to rotate, but the attempt is there. The real issue are the boxes on the diagonals, which suffer because, the further in we go, the less they respect the edges of their neighbors. This is understandable – the boxes on the axes are at times a little extreme in their convergence, so had you had these ones be super snug to them, they’d have come out a little strange, but as that’s the only avenue we have to make sure that they rotate right now, it would’ve been the right call. As it stands, you were forced to construct boxes without necessarily knowing how, so they’ve not turned out very well. Of course, them turning out well is not something we care much about with this assignment. It’s more about seeing whether a student faced with a challenging task that they will most likely fail at will choose to, just the same, see it through to the end, or give up. We find that the former learn a lot faster, so good on you! Finally, great work on the organic perspective exercise. You didn’t have to stick to cubes, here, but looking at them for what they are, they’re well constructed, and flow well, as a result of their increase in size, and consistent, shallow foreshortening.