Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

9:42 PM, Friday January 16th 2026

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Dear DrawABoxers,

May your day bring whatever you most need, and thank you in advance for your feedback!

Melissa

2:54 AM, Sunday January 18th 2026

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. 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. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good although it's unfinished. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. The major issue here is that you skipped the final step of the exercise and didn't extend your depth lines on your boxes back to the horizon line to check your work. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/20/step9 So as a revision I'd like you to do this final step. I am noticing that you are redrawing lines on occasion and this is a habit you should try and get out of. Try and stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read.

Your rotated box exercise turned out pretty well. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. While the rotations here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. 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. Your boxes are pretty solid for the most part but you are relying somewhat heavily on parallel lines for your box constructions which is leading to divergences in some cases. The 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you in order to develop a better understanding of how box lines need to converge to vp's. You are also still redrawing lines far too often.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. Once you get that revision submitted and I take a look you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

Rough Perspective Boxes - Extend your depth lines on your boxes back to the horizon line to check your work for both pages

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:25 PM, Sunday January 18th 2026

Thank you, Rob!

I completely missed the second part of the rough perspective instructions, so thank you for catching that - it really is an eye opener (which is the point, I know!)

The organic perspective exercise was definitely the most challenging, as the Y method took me some time to understand even a little bit, and even now my mind doesn’t really “see” how to vary the Y shape to produce more varied boxes. The jump from one point perspective to 3-point was very hard (as we are warned it would be.) Hoping the 250 box challenge will help clarify the Y method.

Thank you again for the feedback!

Melissa Wrenne

3:10 AM, Monday January 19th 2026

Alright, this looks good. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete and you can move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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