Draw those characters anyway!, but also work on your fundamentals in parallel, is the key! Hello and welcome to drawabox. I’ll be taking a look at your Lesson 1 today.

Starting with your superimposed lines (of which I only see 1 page, by the way… They’re smooth and properly lined up at the start, but you’ll sometimes alter their trajectory. Remember that this should stay consistent! Rather than let your brain have a say in how the line manifests, simply follow the motion that your muscles have lined up for you. Otherwise, you’ll wobble. I’d have loved to see a few more ghosted lines than this (which you’d have been able to draw, had you allowed them to overlap), but that’s alright. What’s here is good. The planes look good, too, though I wonder – it’s hard to see because of the ellipses – if you’ve plotted start/end points for their non-diagonal center lines of not. If not, please do moving forward.

The table of ellipses exercise is not bad. Your ellipses are occasionally stiff, or bumpy, so they could do with some more ghosting (or some less stress, when you commit to the lines themselves), but either way, it’s a good start. You run into some issues when you try to apply these same ellipses to planes, however. Notice how you’re so focused on the ellipses touching all 4 sides of the plane, that they entirely deform? This is not what we want. We’re more interested in the confidence of our marks, than their accuracy, and should prioritize accordingly. This shouldn’t add any pressure to you, by the way. We’re not expecting our ellipses to be entirely smooth, and rounded, and touch all 4 sides of the plane – that’s too hard right now. But we want them to be smooth and rounded no matter what, and try to touch the 4 sides of the plane. But if they don’t do the latter, that’s not big deal. It’s only if they don’t do the former that we take issue! Speaking of, I also take issue with the funnels exercise being missing!

The plotted perspective exercise looks good (save for the hatching lines, which should’ve been drawn with a ruler, but that’s minimal). If you’re wondering about the back lines, the reason they’ve come out a little crooked is because little mistakes have accumulated as you’ve worked on each convergence. It’s not an issue, but usually we’d simply estimate the location of the back lines (such that they’re more or less in-between the points, but still perpendicular to the horizon (as they should be as per the rules of 2 point perspective!)) The rough perspective exercise also only has one page. Leaving its second frame aside, the first and third are okay. Their correction lines are, actually, incorrect (you should extend them to the horizon, not the vanishing point), but even as they are, I can tell that your convergences aren’t bad. Good attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. It’s missing 4 boxes (the diagonals), but what’s here is snug, and makes a decent attempt to rotate. It mostly accomplishes this out front, and struggles with it in the back, but that’s something we expect, and address in the box challenge, so no stress. On the subject of boxes, your organic perspective exercise isn’t bad. Your lines will often diverge, but this is normal for now. What’s important is that their sizes are such that they flow as we intend them to, anyway. On the subject of their construction, however, be careful that a box that overlaps another doesn’t hide its lines!