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10:41 PM, Monday January 31st 2022

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. 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. I'm noticing that you are getting some wobble in your ghosted lines and planes. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/wobbling This is also quite present in some of the later exercises although I am seeing a lot of improvement with your final exercise but I still want to mention this advice here so you can understand what the problem likely is.

This is the important part we need to be focusing on and the real problem I'm seeing:

You're hesitating as you execute the line, rather than drawing with a confident motion. Finally committing to a mark can definitely be quite daunting, but it's integral that you get used to accepting that mistakes do happen. Things go wrong - you can prepare as much as possible (and you should) but the moment your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake has already passed. Now you must commit yourself, push through with confidence, and execute your line. It's also worth remembering: we can still work with a line that is smooth and even, but there's not much that can be done with a wobbly one.

What's most likely happening is that you are worrying about accuracy too much while making your mark and it's causing you to slow down your stroke to compensate which is giving you quite a bit of wobble in your lines. The other possibility is that you aren't ghosting your lines or you are reverting back to drawing from your wrist on occasion. I can't be entirely sure of which specific thing is happening and it even could be combinations of all of them. So I might normally reassign some pages but since I did see the big improvement with your last exercise I'm just going to leave this in here as some more general advice when it comes to wobbly linework.

Your ellipses are largely suffering from the exact same issue which really just goes to show that once you fix this problem it will improve every aspect of your drawing and that improvement is very evident with your organic perspective boxes and the line confidence I see there. Your tables of ellipses is coming along okay. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and while you seem to be focused on consistent ellipse shape you are getting quite a bit of line wobble trying to be accurate. This is carried over into your ellipses in planes and you are still deforming your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed This is likely happening because you are too worried about accuracy and are probably slowing down your stroke to compensate. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. Your ellipses in funnels are having the same issues with wobbly linework but seem fine otherwise. There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and accuracy so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. There is some improvement here in terms of line confidence although I am still seeing pretty consistent wobble throughout this exercise. Once again 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. 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 pretty well. Although you drew this at a decent size a piece of advice I tend to give with this exercise is to simply draw 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 left and right side you are getting at least some rotation on the top and bottom) 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 where I'm seeing the biggest improvement in terms of line confidence. I'm still seeing a tiny bit of wobble here and there but for the most part this is a big improvement over your previous exercises. Nice work. You seem to be getting more comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are pretty solid for the most part and you seem well prepared for the 250 box challenge.

Overall this submission show solid improvement when it comes to line confidence. I know I mentioned that I wasn't going to assign any revisions but looking over this submission again I think I'd like you to be able to draw smooth ellipses without consistent line wobble before moving on. So as a revision I'd like you to do one more page of ellipses in funnels. Focus on smooth confident linework. Make sure you ghost your ellipses multiple times and then draw from your shoulder with confidence. Don't slow down your stroke to try and make an accurate ellipse but instead rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up ghosting. These ellipses will probably be less accurate than you are used to but don't worry about that and focus more on confident linework. Accuracy comes with mileage. Once you get that submitted and I take a look I'll most likely mark this as complete and you can move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

One page Ellipses in Funnels - Focus on smooth confident ellipses shapes and don't worry about accuracy too much

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:20 PM, Friday February 25th 2022

Thank you for the feedback! Sorry this took so long to reply to. I got ahead of myself and jumped into the 250 Box Challenge without realizing there was a revision I had to do first.

I think my lines are wobbly because it is challenging to draw from the shoulder when I'm so used to doing it from the wrist. It's been a struggle to keep forcing myself to do it and I'm seeing some progress but it's slow. Undoing 2 decades of bad habits. It is definitely the lack of confidence and not that I'm reverting to wrist or elbow drawing.

Ellipses in Funnels revision: https://imgur.com/a/1cPK423

9:31 PM, Friday February 25th 2022

Okay, I'm seeing a bit of improvement here. I think you know what the issue is and how to work through it though and it's just a matter of getting used drawing from your shoulder. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the rest of the 250 box challenge!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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