It looks like you are ready to move on to the 250 box challenge. There was a bit of distortion with your boxes for the organic perspective exercise but that will get better with practice and the 250 box challenge will help.

This is not an actual critique for this lesson and should be used purely for reference only'

Source: https://imgur.com/a/naXmTQz'

Hi "..." , I'll be doing your critique today. Forgive me if I repeat a lot of what you already have heard - that critique was very thorough

Starting with your super imposed lines you are doing a good job of executing your lines confidently and swiftly. With time and practice in your warm ups you should start to try and tighten up your grouping by finding a speed that works for you but overall you're off to a good start. With your ghosted lines you are generally understanding and applying the core concepts with only a little bit of arcing. Your lines tend to have a hiccup at the end as you try to stop at your target. Instead of stopping your line abruptly try to lift your pen up at that end goal. It is easier to lift the pen up than it is to fight the inertia of your arm and the muscle memory ghosted has put into it. It also has the added benefit of giving your lines a nice taper at the end which adds visual interest.

Moving on to your ellipses you've made some good progress overall. They are shaped nicely, with no points or flat regions and you are understanding how to draw through them the correct number of times. Your follow up passes are relatively tight on the initial ellipse and things aren't getting too sloppy. With your ellipses in planes you do a good job hitting all the appropriate points on the edges to make the ellipse sit snugly within the bounds. Your ellipses in tables are also nicely packed to leave no room for ambiguity and you do a good job exploring different sizes and orientations. With your ellipses in planes, your ellipses are a little more challenged due to having so many constraints but you do a good job keeping your minor axes aligned to the funnel axes.

Your rough perspective boxes are quite nice. You do a great job being mindful of the orientation of all of your lines - keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon and verticals perpendicular and the result is a box oriented correctly for one point perspective. Your converging lines are on the right track and you have correctly applied your extension lines. With time and practice your accuracy to far off points will increase but for now the accuracy is right where we expect. Some of your lines are wobbly showing that it's harder for you to draw these short lines with your shoulder. This is totally normal and just keep practicing. You do a good job not redrawing any of your lines and you are keeping things neat.

You really knocked the rotated boxes out of the park, to be honest. We don't require nor expect students to do a "good" job on this exercise and our only goal is for students to finish it to the best of their abilities so they can be introduced to new types of spatial problems and ways to go about solving them, but you went above that and are understanding all of the underlying concepts introduced and applying everything taught in this section. Your boxes are clearly rotating, you keep your boxes tightly packed so you can leverage adjacent lines as perspective guides, and you drew through all of your boxes. You kept everything neat despite it's complexity and you drew everything nice and big. The only thing I can find to nit pick is your overall line quality - continue practicing ghosting and confidently executing those short lines with your shoulder. Overall though great job here.

Finally let's take a look at organic perspective. Your boxes are well drawn and your compositions are energetic. You do a good job conveying three dimensional space through a combination of scaling your boxes for a clear foreground and midground as well as overlapping your forms to make them appear to occupy the same space. One thing that breaks that illusion is some of your boxes have too much foreshortening which makes them appear to exist in a different space. More on that is explained here. Your understanding of perspective and sense of convergence is on the right track and will continue to improve with the box challenge. One thing I do want to point out is here you start to redraw some lines and that is a habit you should get out of before it sets in. Redrawing lines only serves to draw more attention to mistakes and instead we must prepare each line carefully and only execute when ready to live with the results. This is one of many reasons we use ink in these lessons.

This is not an actual critique for this lesson and should be used purely for reference only'

Source: https://ibb.co/album/nakZYv

Starting with your lines, your work here is really solid. You're executing your marks with clear confidence, not hesitating at all, resulting in lines that maintain a very consistent trajectory throughout their length. You then go on to reinforce this with the ghosting method to imbue them with additional control without sacrificing that excellent flow. Very nicely done.

Your ellipses aren't quite as strong - they're still reasonably well done, but there's a visible tendency to slow down and hesitate as you draw them, which suggests to me that you're generally ever so slightly more preoccupied with nailing your accuracy - that is, getting them to fit snugly within their allotted space. Remember that the principles of the ghosting method (and the use of it) applies with all the marks we draw, ellipses included. It means we invest our time into the planning and preparation phases, which is where we establish the nature of the mark we want to make, then execute with a confident pace in order to keep the trajectory consistent. The result, in the case of ellipses, is that we achieve a smooth, evenly shaped ellipse with no wobbling or rigidity to it. Once we're able to achieve that, we can adjust our first two steps to improve the accuracy, but ultimately that confident execution is paramount.

I do think that you improve upon this throughout this section though - once you hit the funnels, you're doing visibly better at keeping them evenly shaped.

Skipping down to your rough perspective, you're generally doing pretty well but I think what's missing is that you need to take an extra moment at the beginning of each individual mark to determine the specific behaviour you're looking to achieve with a given mark. That is, each line in this exercise falls into one of three possible categories, each with its own specific behaviour. Horizontal lines run parallel to the horizon, vertical lines run perpendicular to the horizon, and lines that recede into the distance converge towards the vanishing point. This last one is the obvious focus of this exercise, but it's easy to slip up a little with the first two categories, resulting in lines that slant slightly and undermine the solidity of the boxes themselves. I explain this further in these notes.

You definitely took a good swing at the rotated boxes, though I think a similar issue gave you trouble here. Towards the center and the main axes, you did a good job of both keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent (so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork), and you also did a pretty good job of covering the full range of rotation along each axis. as you drift towards the corners however, the gaps become less consistent (resulting in more guesswork), and as a whole I think you struggle to keep your lines entirely parallel/perpendicular to the main axis lines, resulting in slanting that throws off the set as a whole.

Now, of course this exercise is intended to be extremely difficult at this stage, and merely exists to introduce students to the challenges involved in starting to more freely rotate their boxes in space. This is the same with the organic perspective exercise which takes this concept even further. You've similarly had a good start with these, though there's plenty of room to improve your ability to get your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points.

Jumping back to the rotated boxes though, I did want to point out that you neglected to draw the boxes at the far diagonal corners. Remember that regardless of whether or not an exercise turns well, your responsibility is merely to complete it to the best of your ability. In this case, you made a conscious decision to fall short of that. That is the only real mistake you made, because it was entirely within your control. Remember that as you move forwards - your responsibility is not to do the exercises well, or to impress anyone. It is merely to do them, and to put forward your best effort.

So! All in all, you are doing pretty well, and based on what I'm seeing, I believe you'll have ample opportunity to improve as you move forwards. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

This is not an actual critique for this lesson and should be used purely for reference only'

Source: https://imgur.com/a/Virp7WH

To start, I want to let you know that as I write this critique, I have not read through your self-assessment. This is so I don't neglect to mention things on the basis of you already pointing them out yourself, or make any other changes to how I would have otherwise written my critique. I'll look through it afterwards to check for any questions you may have - but for the future, while self critique and self-analysis is excellent, you should keep it to yourself.

Starting with your lines section, you're doing an excellent job of applying the concepts covered in the lesson. Throughout the super imposed lines you present a clear focus on maintaining a consistent trajectory and a confident stroke, and you reinforce that with the ghosting method in the next two exercises to add control and precision to the mix. You accomplish this without sacrificing the previously established confidence, so your marks are executed without any hesitation, but are generally doing a great job of hitting their mark.

You carry these principles over into your ellipses, to keep them both accurate and evenly shaped. There are definitely some places where your ellipse start to get a touch unwound - always remember to draw through them only 2 to 3 times, with 2 being ideal to be able to get that confident motion in there without losing the intended ellipse you're looking to draw. There are some cases where I can see you going around the ellipses 4 times.

I'm very pleased to see that in your ellipses in planes you generally don't allow the ellipse to get deformed in order to fit in its container (except the few cases where you didn't draw through your ellipses a full 2 times, and a few cases on the second page). The key here is that, just like with the ghosted lines, the first priority is to ensure that our ellipses are evenly shaped, and actually ellipses, then worrying about whether or not they touch all four edges of the enclosing plane.

Your funnels are coming along well, though I'm catching a very slight tendency to slant your ellipses, so keep an eye on that.

Jumping down to your rough perspective boxes, it seems to me that here you've stopped applying the ghosting method to your linework, and instead slipped back to simply drawing them all in one go - no separate preparation or planning. Your lines suggest that you're taking more time during the execution phase and making the marks more slowly and carefully. It's important that you apply the full 3 stages of the ghosting method to every single mark you draw for these lessons. It is time consuming, but it will ensure that your lines are smooth and controlled. Your current lines in this exercise do show a tendency to wobble (due to you drawing them more slowly), and also show a tendency to press a little harder with your pen, which makes them feel more stiff and clumsy.

For your rotated boxes, you're doing a great job of keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent (so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork), but I am seeing at least to some degree the issue explained in these notes - that is, your outermost boxes on the major axes don't rotate much relative to their immediate neighbour, and instead run parallel towards the same vanishing points.

Lastly, you've got a great start on your organic perspective boxes, though there is room for improvement in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points. This is totally normal and expected however, and it is exactly what we will focus on in our next step.

So! All in all, really great work - just remember to apply the ghosting method to every single mark you put down. Feel free to consider this lesson complete.

Addressing your self-critique there, it seems to me that your expectations for the work are largely different from mine. This isn't uncommon for students, because where they focus on their results, I'm focusing on what the work tells me about what you understand, what you don't understand, and where you're investing your time and effort. As I've said here that your use of the ghosting method is solid (aside from the rough perspective), and that your ellipses are generally very well done, and those statements are entirely true. Continue to focus on simply completing the exercises to the best of your current ability, and don't worry about judging the results for yourself. It's easy, when one is overly self-critical and too focused on minor issues that are expected to occur and will improve with practice and mileage, to end up investing their time where it is not best spent. So far it doesn't seem to me you're doing that, but there is certainly that risk, especially when you think of exercises like the organic perspective - something that is merely an introduction to a concept, not a test of skill - in terms of "hate".

Long story short, leave the judgment to the party critiquing your work.