Whew, we've got a huge backlog thanks to it being the beginning of the month, so I've got to jump in to help some of the TAs.

Starting with your lines section, your work here is really solid. You've taken the importance of a confident execution to heart right from the beginning with the super imposed lines exercise. While there is fraying on the sides, this is totally normal and it shows that you're committing to the trajectory at which your mark has set out, instead of trying to fret over accuracy. You hold to this through your ghosted lines and ghosted planes with some added control. There's still some over/under shooting, but this is totally normal at this stage. One thing that can help us control where our line stops a little better is to get used to lifting the pen the second we want it to stop - lifting the pen off the page is something we do a lot faster and more reliably than actually slowing to a stop, so it can be much more effective.

Your ellipses are similarly well done. You're definitely putting effort into sticking to a confident stroke in order to achieve a smooth, even shape. You're also achieving a fair bit of accuracy in getting them to fit snugly within the space they've been allotted, without compromising the rounded shape. There are definitely areas where your ellipses get a little loose (in terms of the successive passes of drawing through the ellipse not quite running over each other). This is another one of those things that will improve with practice, but just be sure to keep it in mind, continually thinking about tightening up those ellipses whilst retaining the smooth, even shape as you move forwards.

Additionally, something to watch out for with your funnels exercise is that I do feel these start to get a little more uneven compared to the rest, and you also have a tendency for your ellipses to slant slightly relative to their shared minor axis. The slant is pretty consistent - this means that you're trying to keep the alignment correct (rather than just ignoring it entirely), but it's a little off each time to where you may think it to be. Try rotating your page a little further to compensate, or exaggerate the angle you're trying to achieve by pushing it a little further (or a little less) to compensate for the discrepancy between the ellipse you're trying to draw, and the one that actually comes out.

Moving onto your boxes, the first thing that jumps out at me isn't all that important on paper, but it is significant in terms of what it says about your thought process. You're aplying hatching lines on the faces of your boxes, which is fine, but you're doing so as though these marks you're drawing are of no consequence. They're frankly half-assed. I's understandable why this might ber the case, but you need to get into the habit of treating any and every mark you choose to put down on the page to be important, and therefore worthy of all the proper mark making procedures in order to execute them cleanly, stretching those marks across the plane from edge to edge.

Jumping down to your rotated boxes, for the most part you're doing okay, though I am noticing a dip in the quality of your ghosted lines. If you compare these back to what you've been able to achieve in your ghosted lines, it suggests that you're falling into the common trap of feeling that since you're drawing a whole box, the amount of effort that ought to be devoted to each individual mark that makes up that box should decrease. Students will often think in terms of "units of work" to be attributed to a task. If we're in the lines section, they'll spend one unit of work or effort on each line. In the ellipses, they'll spend one unit on each ellipse. And in the boxes section - despite there being 12 lines to each box, they'll spend one unit on each box. This is obviously an exaggeration, but it shows how our brains can trick us into thinking that it's okay to spend less effort on a given line based on its context.

At the end of the day a line is always just a line, whether it sits there on its own or if it is part of a grand masterpiece. It always demands the same amount of effort and time from you, so see that it receives its due.

Your rotated boxes are constructed okay, but again, your hatching is extremely sloppy and it shows that you're getting impatient. Don't be afraid to pace yourself, to spread things out over more time, and to give yourself plenty of breaks. The goal is not to finish the work in a certain time frame, it's to finish the work to the best of your current ability. Now, for all intents and purposes, you've done a good job of keeping most of the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent (except for towards the extremities where things start to fall apart somewhat, leading to more guesswork). The thing about narrow gaps is that they allow us to rely on neighbouring strokes to figure out how things should line up, instead of guessing as to the orientation of each and every line.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a great start. Your use of the ghosting method is still a little weaker than I know you to be capable of, but all in all it's a good introduction to the concept of rotating boxes freely in space. This is of course something I don't expect students to be able to do successfully just yet, and as such there is still plenty of inconsistency in terms of your sets of parallel lines converging towards their shared vanishing points. That is what we will be working on next, so that's not something to worry about.

All in all, you're doing pretty well, but you need to be more mindful of always putting your full effort into every mark you put down. Sloppiness is okay, because it's a choice you're making. You are the master of your own mind, and everything you do comes down to your own decisions. Accept that, and understand that even if a task takes several times longer than you'd like, that is just a tiny sliver of your life. What you ultimately gain from being able to put that time in will be far more valuable than the little bit of extra time you had to put in for it.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.