Hey, and welcome to drawabox! I’ll be looking through you submission today~

First, let me address your notes. #1 is normal, though something to work on, nonetheless. It’s important to realize that these assignments are no different from your warm-ups. They don’t need to look pretty, or presentable, and I believe Uncomfortable even recommends tossing them in the trash when you’re done with them. All they need to do is show me you at your best, and for that, it’s important that you don’t see them as special. #2 is a mistake, as I’m sure you know. Try to resist the urge, please. It doesn’t help you, since adding more ink to a mistake just draws the viewers attention to it, and it doesn’t help me, as it’s hard to judge the confidence of your lines when there’s so many of them superimposed over each other. In regards to #3, absolutely leave them be, yes. Again, touching on #1, there’s no such thing as a mistake. Just something you’re yet unfamiliar with, which I need to be aware of, so I can talk to you about it, and help you be better at it. Hiding your mistakes from me doesn’t do you any favors- in fact, it guarantees that you’ll make those same mistakes again later. As for #4, that’s fine, for now. It’s just there for you to get your feet wet, and there’s no expectation that you’ll have an understanding of it this early on- don’t worry.

Now, onto the critique.

Starting off, your superimposed lines look good. They’re smooth, and properly lined up at the start, but not always of a consistent trajectory. It’s important for them to be, so if you notice one going off course, resist the urge to course correct. The ghosted lines/planes look good, and improve throughout the set (I felt like you were drawing them a little too fast in the beginning, though not so much later), though I’d still recommend spending a little longer on the ghosting stage, as there’s still the occasional stiffness. This is likely the result of issue #1, that I touched on earlier, but even for that, the solution is ghost more, and become comfortable with the motion, before committing to it.

Your ellipses are… hard to judge. You’ve rotated around them too many times. You’ll recall that the recommendation was 2-3 times, and, ideally, you’d stick to 2. What I can say is that, though you’re on the right track, there’s still too much of a focus on accuracy here, sometimes at the expense of confidence. If you look at your table of ellipses exercise, you’ll notice that your ellipses often start off a little stiff, before stabilizing. This is as a result of 1 of 2 things (or perhaps a combination of both.) The first is a lack of ghosting- that is to say, you committing to a line before you’re comfortable enough with it, thus hesitating. The second is a misunderstanding of our goals. Goal #1 is confidence- that is to say, the resulting ellipse should be smooth, and even. Only if it is, can we think about it properly fitting within the confines of its frame, and what have you, but only if it is. This applies to the ellipses in planes exercise, too. Prioritizing touching all 4 sides of the plane, before you’ve got your smoothness/evenness in check leads to bumpy/pointy ellipses, as is the case here. It’s perfectly fine for them to fall short of, or overshoot the plane, so long as they’re confident. In addition to all of these issues, as well as the automatic reinforcing issue we covered in point #2 on that first paragraph, the funnels exercise also suffers from ellipses not aligned to the minor axis. Though this is sometimes the case for the ellipses near the center of the funnel, I’m mostly referring to the ones near the edges. And the reason they’re not aligned to it, is that there’s no minor axis to align them to. Clearly, there’s no more room there for another ellipse, but you’ve added one just the same. Since the entire point of this exercise is to align ellipses to a minor axis, those ellipses are pointless, and quite dangerous in their pointlessness, too. Either extend the axis, or stop one ellipse sooner. That said, most of these look solid, so there doesn’t seem to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the lesson. I’ll still have to assign you some more, however.

The plotted perspective exercise looks solid, though I wish you’d used a ruler for the hatching, too (or did you?). In regards to the rough perspective exercise, I won’t note the UFO, since we talked about that in that first paragraph, but I will note the whiteout- there’s no need for it. As for the boxes themselves, they’re fine, in the sense that you seem to understand the goal of the exercise, but a little sloppy. Remember that you’re the one who decides when a point is good enough to commit to, so do so when it is- no sooner. For example, if you notice that your points connect in such a way that they don’t form sets of parallel/perpendicular lines, as per the instructions, then consider re-doing them. Similarly, if you ghost your lines to the horizon, and notice that they intersect it nowhere near the vanishing point, then, rather than say that those points are good enough, ignore them, and plot some others. Nonetheless, the exercise looks fine, and improves over the set, so nicely done. Solid attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. You’ve definitely struggled with its rotation, and, especially near the end, your boxes aren’t always as snug as we’d like them to be, but that’s fine. What’s important is that you’re done your best, and seen the exercise through to the end. As a bonus, you’ve even taken some time to add some line-weight/hatching to it- nice job. Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks… okay. Your boxes are a little skewed, indicating to me that you’re not spending enough time thinking about each specific vanishing point, and at what rate of foreshortening the line needs to converge towards it to properly intersect with it, but that’s not an issue, being the topic of our next lesson (or, well, challenge.)

Before I have you move on to that, however, I’d like to see: