Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. In regards to your question it's absolutely fine to write notes on these exercises as long it's not obscuring the exercise itself and it can still be properly critiqued. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. I'm noticing that you are getting a bit of wobble in your ghosted lines and planes. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling This is also quite present in some of the later exercises although I am seeing improvement with your final exercise but I still want to mention this advice here so you can understand what the problem likely is.

This is the important part we need to be focusing on and the real problem I'm seeing:

You're hesitating as you execute the line, rather than drawing with a confident motion. Finally committing to a mark can definitely be quite daunting, but it's integral that you get used to accepting that mistakes do happen. Things go wrong - you can prepare as much as possible (and you should) but the moment your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has already passed. Now you must commit yourself, push through with confidence, and execute your line. It's also worth remembering: we can still work with a line that is smooth and even, but there's not much that can be done with a wobbly one.

What's most likely happening is that you are worrying about accuracy too much while making your mark and it's causing you to slow down your stroke to compensate which is giving you quite a bit of wobble in your lines. The other possibility is that you aren't ghosting your lines or you are reverting back to drawing from your wrist on occasion. I can't be entirely sure of which specific thing is happening and it even could be combinations of all of them. So I might normally reassign some pages but since I did see the big improvement with your last exercise I'm just going to leave this in here as some more general advice when it comes to wobbly linework.

Your ellipses are largely suffering from the exact same issue which really just goes to show that once you fix this problem it will improve every aspect of your drawing and that improvement is very evident with your organic perspective boxes and the line confidence I see there. Your tables of ellipses is coming along okay. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and while you seem to be focused on consistent ellipse shape you are getting a bit of line wobble trying to be accurate. This is carried over into your ellipses in planes and you are still deforming your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed This is likely happening because you are too worried about accuracy and are probably slowing down your stroke to compensate. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. Your ellipses in funnels are still having the same issues but you work does appear to be getting more confident as you work through as exercises. There's still plenty of room for improvement here with your ellipses so make sure you keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. There is some improvement here in terms of line confidence although I am still seeing some wobble in your lines. Once again this is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. You are doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice.

Your rotated box exercise turned out decently. One thing that would have helped you here would have been to just draw this a bit bigger. Drawing bigger really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. While you didn't nail the rotations for this exercise this was a good attempt overall but I think this would have been a lot easier for you had you simply drawn it bigger. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great and this is a solid improvement over your previous exercises. Nice work. While there are a few decent box constructions here there are a lot of wonky ones throughout so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely just keep practicing those ellipses during your warmups. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge!