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1:38 AM, Tuesday April 4th 2023

Congrats! Let’s take a look at it really quickly, and you’ll be right off to the box mines!

Starting off, your superimposed lines look fantastic – smooth, properly lined up on the left, and of a consistent trajectory. The ghosted lines, too, look quite confident. It does seem like you’re making some contact with your page during ghosting, so be mindful of that (try to be more deliberate about your movements!) Also, don’t neglect to plot start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of your planes, please – they’re important!

Onto the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise is mostly good. I suspect that you’re perhaps drawing your ellipses here a little too fast – be careful that you’re not confusing speed with confidence! – but they’re smooth, and rounded, and properly drawn through, which is all that matters really. Your ellipses in planes look quite good, also; you’ve done a good job of maintaining their prior smoothness/roundness, despite these more complicated frames. Finally, nice job on the funnels. Do be careful, however, that your minor axes here extend all the way through the funnels. If they don’t, either extend them further in a separate stroke, or, quite simply, don’t add another ellipse. But adding one that’s aligned to nothing isn’t especially useful to us.

As for your boxes, the plotted perspective exercise looks… interesting. I’m guessing that you used a ruler for everything except the lineweight, and hatching? Generally, the entirety of this is drawn with a ruler, but it’s of little concern. On the rough perspective exercise, on the other hand, the line quality is a concern. It need not be, however. When you get down to it, there’s no difference between these lines, and the ones in the ghosted lines exercise. Both are lines extending from point A to point B, drawn one at a time. Be careful, also, to really take your time on the plotting stage. Unlike lines, with points, it’s perfectly fine to redo something that you find to be lacking, so be sure to not move on until you’ve, through ghosting, found your point to be completely correct. Otherwise, you end up with boxes whose far planes are bigger than their near planes, as some of them here. The rotated boxes exercise seems to have been rough. That’s expected, so there’s no need to stress. That’s, actually, the whole reason we have you draw those reminder boxes – because your brain doesn’t like to draw boxes that are rotating in space. It seems like yours really didn’t like it, because it resisted the urge, even despite the reminder. No matter – we’ll address this in a second in the box challenge. Speaking of boxes, the organic perspective exercise is well done. Some of the lines have a habit of diverging, or converging at a faster rate than necessary, but that, too, is expected, and something we’ll discuss in more detail in the challenge. Your job here, is simply to keep them consistent in terms of foreshortening, and be mindful of their increase in size; both of which you’ve done.

Next Steps:

I’m marking this lesson as complete, and moving you onto the challenge, but do take note of the points I’ve raised, in order to revisit them during your warmups. Best of luck!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:33 PM, Tuesday April 4th 2023

Thank you for the critique on lesson 1! I will take all of your advice into consideration as I'm doing the sections over as a warm up. Also, you were completely right on the way I went about doing the exercises, and on how my brain truly hated the rotated boxes exercise. I swear it gave me a headache and had me drawing on my wall just to figure out how to rotate the box diagonally. Once again, thank you for the advice!

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Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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