Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on having completed Lesson 1. I’ll be taking a look at it for you.

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are unfortunately a little lacking. You’re still wobbling a little, the lines have some fraying on the left, and you’ll often adjust their trajectory mid-line. That’s having your priorities backwards, however. What we’re interested in is not an accurate line, but rather a confident one. In other words, it’s perfectly fine for the line to be off, if it’s straight, and smooth. It’s not fine for it to stick to its guideline, whist sacrificing that straightness/smoothness however. What I’ll recommend you do is, first off, start simple – don’t jump into full page width lines on your second ever page – with some shorter lines, and draw them quickly. Still line up your pen, of course, but execute the line quickly, such that there’s no wobbles. Then, slowly try to decrease the speed, until you see some, and you know that the previous one was just right. Keep going at that speed, until you feel like you can decrease it without sacrificing confidence, and then feel free to. This way, your speed makes up for your lack of confidence while you’re still starting out, and then you can remove is as a crutch. The ghosted lines/planes are a little better in that respect, but here, too, I notice some focus on accuracy at the cost of confidence. If you’re wondering, the same principle applies: it’s more important for your lines here to be smooth and straight, than it is for them to hit, or stop at, their end points. So make your decisions accordingly.

Onto the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise is a little mixed. Your confidence is, more often than not, good, but you’re a little stiff when drawing these. Ghost until the movement feels natural, rather than an arbitrary amount of time. A little more time spent ghosting will also help with some of the spacing issues you have here, so be sure to! And when you do commit, do so in a single, confident motion. If you halfheartedly lower your pen, and are surprised by its contact with the page, the line will not turn out confident regardless of how much time you spend ghosting. The ellipses in planes have a habit of deforming in order to fill as much of the plane as possible. That’s not necessary, however – what is, is that they’re smooth, and rounded, so again, prioritize accordingly. It helps to think of the frames here as the ones in the previous exercise – you didn’t have any of those issues there, so there’s no reason why they should be here, either. The ellipses in funnels are a little wobbly. This is understandable, given how complicated this exercise is at first glance, but also unnecessary, because it’s not really. Here, too, you’re not doing too much different from what you were doing in the first exercise. Nonetheless, I will recommend that you make your funnels a little bigger in your next attempt. Students think that drawing small is the answer, when they’re overwhelmed, because they feel like it gives them some control back, but it ends up having the opposite effect.

As for the box section, the plotted perspective exercise is a little hard to look at – the lines didn’t need to extend past the boxes, here. Also, you’ve complicated things unnecessarily by drawing some of your boxes outside of the circle, but that’s alright. The rough perspective exercise starts off a little rough – which is expected – but unfortunately it doesn’t show a great of improvement throughout the set. I will note that you are also increasing the difficulty with each frame, it seems, so it could be that, too, but just to be safe, we’ll linger on this one a little longer. What you want to focus on is, after all, the convergences. To get those to be the best they can, you want to adjust your point (after plotting it), rather than sticking to your first guess. It might be helpful to watch someone on YouTube work on this exercise to understand their thought process, going into it. Good attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. The boxes don’t quite rotate as they should, but you’ve kept them snug (both up front, and in the back), and seen the exercise through to the end. For now, that’s all we can ask for. We’ll be going into more detail on box construction in a second, anyway, so the rest of the issues will be addressed promptly. The organic perspective exercise is well done. You didn’t need to draw through your boxes for this one, but you did well to – it’s helped you quite a bit. Though their increase in size is a little subtle, it, as well as their foreshortening, do a good job of suggesting the flow that we’re after. I notice, however, that you still have some issues as far as the confidence of your lines is concerned, so we’ll definitely need to work on that a little before you move on.