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6:15 PM, Friday December 24th 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 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. 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. 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 a bit 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 also 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 left side you are getting rotation on the other sides) but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/notrotating Obviously you are still struggling a bit with the rotations for this exercise which is perfectly fine given the difficulty. 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. I would say try and be a bit more subtle with your added line weight. Your box constructions are pretty solid for the most part and you seem well prepared for the 250 box challenge. Nice work.

Overall this was a really 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. 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.
5:24 PM, Saturday December 25th 2021

Hi Rob,

Thank you for the detailed feedback, especially on Christmas eve, I wasn't really expecting anyone to get back to be to be honest.

I actually felt like I was struggling with the ellipses with trying to get a good ghosting rhythm. I felt that if I went fast it would be smooth but the accuracy would be way off but then if I slowed down it would introduce some muscle twitches which I assume is my brain course correcting.

I figured I'd get picked up on redrawing the lines for the free hand boxes, It would get really frustrating when I would plot out a line with intent but then my arm would do its own thing and it would be way off. Felt like I lost a couple of good boxes to that. But yeah I learnt towards the end particularly when doing the rotated boxes it made it really hard to see what was going on.

With regards to the one point I knew in my mind that the vertical and horizontal lines should be parallel as they're going to infinite but I don't think I can tell when its straight. Is that something that will come in practice? I do struggle with seeing angles correctly. And then sometimes it would be literally down to my arm doing its own thing again how frustrating.

I could definitely tell by the end of it when doing my warms ups that my lines are getting way better and the accuracy seems to be getting tighter too. Thank you again, onto the daunting challenge. Merry Christmas.

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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.

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