Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

12:41 AM, Friday December 23rd 2022

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Hello, I'm back from busy life in college and decided to switch to getting an official critique. So I will resubmit my lesson 1 homework and 250 boxes with an extra 50 in the next two weeks. I made many mistakes while drawing the lines, and I should be calmer and take my time.

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12:22 AM, Saturday December 24th 2022

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. Soem of your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. There is plenty of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and smoothness so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.

The plotted perspective looks good although a few of the vertical legs on your boxes are slanting a bit. It's important to realize in a two point perspective drawing like that all of your vertical box legs should be perpendicular(straight up and down) to the horizon line. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. 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. You are also 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. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

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 did a good job drawing through your boxes but you didn't keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent towards the outer rows and corners. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/guessing Keeping the gaps narrow and consistent really helps with inferring information about neighboring boxes rotation and proportion. 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 are getting mostly confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced. Your box constructions are decent for the most part and I can see you are developing a sense for how box lines converge to vps but there are still some wonky convergences here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along well but keep practicing those ellipses during your warmups as there is plenty of room for improvement there. Otherwise, I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. 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

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:15 PM, Saturday December 31st 2022

Thank you for your amazing critique Rob!

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