11:10 PM, Thursday August 19th 2021
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 when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing them during your warmups.
The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling 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. The other possibility is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist for some of these lines. Just something to keep an eye on. You should be drawing from your shoulder for basically every line you draw even shorter ones. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only.
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. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases (mainly the top) but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating 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. That said I do want to mention that added line weight should be much more subtle and you shouldn't go over a line so many times. You are also somewhat destroying your initially confident mark by going over it so much. Your box constructions are quite solid for the most part and you seem well prepared for the 250 box challenge.
Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice 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. To answer your question regardining awkwardness while drawing from the shoulder it's really just a matter of practicing doing it more and it should start to feel a bit more natural. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
The 250 Box Challenge