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4:03 PM, Thursday May 7th 2020

Starting with your lines section, your work here is looking really solid. You're demonstrating a great deal of confidence behind each and every stroke, and I'm pleased to see that in your super imposed lines you're not getting caught up in trying to match things up with perfect accuracy, and are instead focused on maintaining a consistent trajectory from the moment your pen touches the page. Through the ghosting method, you're reinforcing those marks with a great deal of control. There is still some overshooting here and there, but one thing that can help is to get used to lifting your pen as you reach the end point, rather than trying to slow to a stop. This is a more reliable action than slowing down, and will eliminate that sort of wavering that occurs when we hit the brakes.

Moving onto your ellipses in tables, I am noticing a stiffening of your linework here, which suggests to me that you're not necessarily applying the same principles here as you were with your straight lines. Specifically, you're hesitating when you execute the marks. It's that hesitation that manifests as a wobbly line, and throws off the evenness of the elliptical shape. Remember that the ghosting method should be used with every single mark we draw - straight lines, curved lines, ellipses, etc. The focus is on splitting up the mark making process into individual stages (planning, preparation, execution). When executing the mark our only focus is on doing so with a confident stroke, so as to keep maintain a consistent flow.

You do show improvement with this through your ellipses in planes, but as we get back into your funnels you're showing stiffening once again. So you are definitely capable of drawing those ellipses without hesitating, but the circumstances seem to get to your head a little bit. Also, for the funnels, keep an eye on the alignment of your ellipses to that central minor axis line - yours tend to slant a little bit. The slanting is pretty consistent though, so you may want to just try adjusting the angle of your page as you're drawing to counteract it.

Jumping down to your rough perspective boxes, your work is really solidly done here. Your horizontals are running parallel to the horizon, your verticals are perpendicular to it, and you've done an excellent job of appyling your extensions to the lines receding into the distance to identify where those alignments can be improved upon in your next attempt. As a whole, your margin of error with those is quite small as well, so well done.

With your rotated boxes, you're doing a great job of keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, but when it comes to the rotation of your outermost boxes relative to their immediate neighbours, you really do need to push and exaggerate that a little further, as explained here.

Lastly, you've got a good start with your organic perspective boxes. As these are intended to introduce students to the concept of rotating boxes freely in 3D space, there is still room for improvement (specifically in terms of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points), but this is totally expected and normal. It's something we'll continue exploring in our next step.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You'll definitely want to focus your warmups on keeping those ellipses confident and evenly shaped as you move forwards, but all in all I think you're moving in the right direction.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:23 PM, Thursday May 7th 2020

Really appreciate the feedback! I really had a hard time with the ellipses. Will keep on practicing!

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Sakura Pigma Microns

Sakura Pigma Microns

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.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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