Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

1:30 AM, Monday January 18th 2021

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Took me awhile to get through all of lesson 1. I'm glad I stuck with it and cant wait to see the new concepts to learn and practice in lesson 2.

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2:05 AM, Tuesday January 19th 2021

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. 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 well. Once again I'm noticing quite a bit of improvement as you worked through these pages. 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 a smooth shape. 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/1/13/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/step3 Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement when it comes to accuracy so keep practicing these during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspectives turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. 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 straight up and down. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise turned out decently. 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 fairly consistent. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in a lot of cases here but instead you were 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 a bit of a mixed bag. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. However, your box constructions could definitely use some work so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

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!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:49 PM, Tuesday January 19th 2021

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm excited to start the 250 boxes and see where I end up.

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