Hey, congrats on finishing the first assignment. I can tell you took special care to be extra thorough with the exercises. Full disclosure I am still on the 250 boxes challenge but I believe I can help you. I'm going to recommend you redo some of the exercises but keep in mind I'm not an official critic so following my recommendations is up to you entirely.

Starting off your superimposed lines look consistent and you're making sure to accurately hit your starting point. You seem to be having some issues with wobbling on those really long superimposed lines, probably due to the issues you talked about with being unsure of where your marks are going.

Also, just in case you didn't know, this course requires that for most of these early lessons you are to be making every mark with your whole arm- shoulder and elbow, and not with your wrist. Even when making small marks. I believe the first time you are allowed to use your wrist for fine detail is during the texture exercise in Lesson 2.

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/2/pivots

You are probably going a bit slow judging by the amount of wobbling, try thinking of drawing superimposed lines with your "whole arm" and moving a bit faster, aiming towards that 2nd point mark. You can practice this by focusing a bit less on whether or not your superimposed line is touching your original line, and instead looking ahead of your line and aiming for your 2nd point. You may see some curving lines or more fraying at the beginning, but the arm motions I'm recommending will see you to improve overall as you develop muscle memory with practice. Otherwise your lines are still very consistent and accurate and show excellent line confidence in your later exercises, so good job.

Your planes show a lot of improvement in your line confidence. You do a great job at centering the intersecting lines. Unfortunately you seemed to have missed the Ellipses in Planes exercise, which has you filling in all those planes you made with ellipses touching each edge. It's a very quick assignment you should finish in a few minutes. Otherwise good job on the planes.

Your ellipses are looking good. You are getting very consistent closeness with other ellipses and you're keeping them fairly uniform. You're making motions with a good deal of confidence which is great. The axis line on your funnels looks like you ghosted them, for this exercise you can use a ruler or straight edge to measure the axis to keep them consistent. They're just a reference point. Not much more to say here, keep incorporating ellipses and funnels in your warmups.

Plotted perspective looks good.

You seem to have missed some instructions on the Rough Perspectives exercise. You are meant to be ghosting every box in that assignment without any perspective lines, and then plotting the parallel lines of your box towards the horizon line to see your inaccuracies and tendencies in your mistakes. You should probably redo this exercise.

Refer to "Mistake: Plotting Lines back to VP" :https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/15/plottinglines

You don't seem to be getting rotation on some of your boxes in your Rotated Boxes exercise. It seems this is because you are plotting your boxes to a VP. You are meant to use NO VPs other than the axis you made in the center. Every box is ghosted in this assignment and has different VPs along the axis which allows for rotation. The boxes at the end are simply for rotational reference, not for plotting VPs. I would recommend redoing this exercise. Don't get discouraged though! This exercise is meant to be extremely difficult at our level and it's just an exercise to get us familiar with rotating boxes.

Refer to Uncomfortable's article on not rotating: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating

Your Organic Perspective boxes look really good. They're consistently proportional, to my eye at least. You seem to be using a lot of parallel VPs for these boxes, which is totally fine, but try practicing boxes with some more dramatic foreshadowing by using multiple close VPs. You'll have plenty of time to practice this in the 250 box challenge though.

All in all great job! Don't get discouraged on redoing the assignments, it's hard for a lot of us to fully comprehend all the lessons, it gets overwhelming and that makes following instructions very confusing. But that's what the critiques are for! I see a lot of growth and strengths in your exercises. Keep up the good work and don't forget your 50% time!

Hi Timothyfet,

I looked through your assignment before I realized Lilego had written a critique for you, they caught nearly everything I had to say, including the most important items like the Rough Perspective and Rotated Boxes exercises.

A couple other things I wanted to note:

• Remember that for the ellipses in tables assignment, we want to force ourselves to build ellipses in the established space we have made for ourselves beforehand with the tables. There's only a few locations where you didn't do this, see the 7th rectangular frame down in the right column, page 1, and the lowest frame in the right column on page 2 for examples of what I mean. We want to fit the ellipses into the rectangles/curves we've already established rather than "freestyle" the ellipses in open space before snugging up the new ellipses. This will be important in the future when we get to stuff like cylinders. We want to be able to nail the minor AND major axes when we build our ellipses. Your ellipses are very impressive otherwise, so I doubt you'd have any issues with this (and no need to redo the exercise), I just want to stress the point of the exercise for future warm-ups, etc.

• I also noticed you're extending some of your lines when it comes to stuff like rotated boxes. Remember to ghost every line, establish your starting AND end points beforehand, and try to nail those line lengths so they don't continue off into space. This will keep your strokes very clean when we move on to more complicated drawings. Your rotated boxes are spectacular and it looks like you have a really good grasp of 3-D space, but we don't want to rely on visible vanishing points or reference lines to create every box. I know, when you're doing pencil or digital, we can always erase or remove these reference lines, but a major point of this program as a whole is to establish confidence in our linework so we don't always need to rely on those reference lines. This will be very important for your 250 boxes! I'd hate to see someone recommend you do the challenge over because you were drawing out your reference lines. We want to eyeball it first and check our work after so we get comfortable with NO reference lines.

Also, just wanted to note that I really dig your style. Your ballpoint technique looks super rad, and while the rotated boxes wasn't technically correct in a perspective sense, it's one of the more impressive drawings I've seen in Lesson 1 submissions. I also really enjoyed the creative ways you tried to push your comfort zone on a lot of these exercises (even if Uncomfortable doesn't typically approve of that). I really hope you stick with this program and that I'll get to see some of your future work. Keep at it!

Cheers :)

• youenoh