After a long pause started again doing Draw A Box and finally I finished Lesson 1, thanks in advance to anyone who critiques all of this, I hope you don't see this as a waste of time, I'm actually going to go through the whole thing and this is just the first lesson, I declare it as a way to challenge myself and put myself out there, so let's see if my resolve is enough to do the whole Draw a Box course.
Hello Fokkusu, firstly congratulations for finishing Lesson one, and my best wishes for your journey. And please do not think like its a waste, we all are here to grow and infact it was quite a remorse I have that it has been a month and you have not recieved a critique, but then again community critiques are not guaranteed at all. I do hope you are still willing to practice DaB and that you stay consistent with at least your fifty percent rule no matter what. Also note, do not hesitate to use discord channel, if you need feedbacks or want to get your lesson in the priority sheets then you can definitely use Discord as a good tool to take advantage of.
With that said, lets have a look at your attempt.
Lines:
Your Superimposed lines have a good confident strokes with little to no fraying at beginning in most and you have also given a try to superimposed arches as well which will further help you to achieve a good markmaking practice so that is a really nice attempt, now as for the fraying at end and trajectories deviating away from the end points, do not worry about accuracy for now, that will improve over time with deliberate practice(or warmups).
Same goes for your Ghosted lines, good confident strokes, a slight wobble is present here and there but I think you got the gist of the exercise and the methods to use, so do not worry it will improve with deliberate practice as well.
Same again for Ghosted planes, good confident strokes, and also it seems you have taken good care of placing the start and end points(dots) for the lines going through/inside the planes that is the middle and diagonal ones, which most students miss, they are crucial part of the process so kudos.
With that said, your Lines are done in a neat and confident way.
Ellipses:
Your Table of Ellipses contains good confident ellipses as well which are drawn through at least twice, and you have taken good care to keep most of the ellipses in each section to have similar or same degree of openness and angle of orientation, if you want, you can further introduce more variations to different sections of your table to get used to drawing ellipses of varied degrees and openness, you have also tried to take good care of keeping most of the ellipses within bounds, that is they are touching the borders as well adjacent ellipses(mostly), there are gaps in some sections but do not worry a little bit of deviation is acceptable as the accuracy will improve over time, so another good attempt.
Your Funnels exercise also contains good confident strokes, some ellipses are being bisected by the minor axis equally as well, but others are not and few of them are even rotated off the axis, so do take care that the minor axis(middle line) is supposed to bisect "each" ellipse into two equal parts, it is difficult at first as it relies heavily on accuracy, but don't worry for now, with enough deliberate practice that will also improve over time. What you can do for now is to try keeping the minor axis right in the middle of funnel, then try drawing ellipses over it, further if you want you can also try varied degree of openness of ellipses, being the narrowest ellipse emerging from centre and they gets more open as you move towards the end points.
The Ellipses in Ghosted planes adds another level of difficulty, but you have done great to keep most of your ellipses smooth and confident while also going over them atleast twice, a slight wobble is present here and there but do not worry about that as well as the accuracy for now, deliberate practice will help with those.
Boxes:
The boxes are difficult to attempt at first if you are not used to them, so again kudos for attending them nonetheless. And apart from things mentioned above:
Your Plotted Perspective is done neatly.
Your Rough perspective, the strokes are mostly confident with little to no wobble at all and you have taken care to keep the width parallel to the horizon and the height perpendicular which is yet again a good point, and do not worry about accuracy that much right now. Further, you have added linewieght as well which is another good point, but just to point it out "Lineweight should be added with confident ghosted lines, going over the silhouette once, and solely to the silhouette only, not to whole lines." So if you have gone over them more than once, then do take care of this as well.
Your rotated boxes, it turned out pretty well. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps mostly consistent. While the rotations here aren't perfect still 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 or the boxes challenge to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved.
Finally the organic perspective, besides the points mentioned earlier, it is a good attempt, kudos. And I see a little bit of drawing another line here and there so I will just add this regarding correcting your lines, you should absolutely avoid correcting your inital mark, as that song says "you have only one shot", so no matter how inaccurate your initial mark is, treat it as the correct one and move forward with that, no correcting at all, so do take an important note of this for your future exericses and warmups.
With that said, its an overall good attempt and it seems you have gotten a good gist of all the exercises in this lesson, and the only thing left for now to do is to practice deliberately regulary(that includes your warmups), staying consistent, even if it means five minutes a day or a week, to take care of the fifty percent rule and to take care of your health.
Next Steps:
Congratulations, now you can move towards the famous 250 box challenge.
Some points before moving on:
Do regular warmups, they do wonders, even if you think you won't be able to draw much, then also try to squeeze atleast five minutes per day for warmup, while keeping the aforementioned points in mind for your exercises.
Do not hesitate to revisit lesson zero, or the lesson texts and videos if you have questions or want to recall about the exercises and warmups.
Do follow the fifty percent rule, you might enjoy it or you might not even feel like doing it but do it nonetheless, you will appreciate its value over time.
Do not isolate, regularly post your updates in the appropriate section or the appropriate lesson channels on discord to get feedback on the work in progress.
And to take good care of your health and sleep(This is the most improtant one in my opinion).
With that said, my best wishes for your future endeavours, have great time.
Thanks you so much for spending your time giving a critique this well thought out! I am incredibly happy to see that my efforts were effective, I will continue to work, this one on the 250 boxes challenge, to be honest I already started it after a month of posting lesson 1 which I spent painting for fun (you can see my finished paintings here if you wish to see them :) ).
Happy to help, and I looked at your paintings, they are done really nice! I like all of them, especially the mining at aberdeen doodle
Thanks you so much for the kind words ^-^
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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