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2:20 AM, Monday May 25th 2020

Starting with your lines section, you're doing an excellent job of focusing largely on executing your marks with clear, purposeful confidence and maintaining a consistent trajectory in your strokes. As you get into the ghosted lines and plans, you continue to hold to this positive trend, and further reinforce your lines with proper use of planning and preparation to improve your overall control. One thing I often suggest to students who struggle with overshooting (which you apparently do not at all, but it's still worth sharing) is that getting used to lifting your pen off the page when you hit the end point can be a much more reliable approach to ending a line, as opposed to slowing to a stop. Slowing down can cause a slight wobble, so this alternative can help achieve an even more confident stroke.

Moving onto your ellipses, you maintain a similar focus on confident, smooth executions which help you to maintain a nice, even shape throughout each of these. You do have some issues in terms of getting your ellipses to fit more snugly within the spaces that are allotted to them, and there are some cases where you don't quite fully draw through your ellipses two times before lifting your pen (sometimes you stop at about one and a half), but these are still a very good start. In order to achieve greater accuracy/control without sacrificing the confidence of the stroke, be sure to keep applying the ghosting method here - it can, and should be applied to each and every mark we draw. This can also help you tighten things up.

For the most part your ellipse alignment to the funnels' central minor axis is pretty good. There's the odd one that slants slightly, but it's pretty minor, and the odd one out is not unexpected.

Skipping down to your rough perspective boxes, I think your linework does take a bit of a hit here. It's clear that you're able to produce fantastic, confident linework, given the proper time investment. It is however common for students to feel that once they're drawing a box, they can allot less time to each individual stroke than they otherwise would if the focus were on drawing lines. I explain this tendency in these notes. Remember that regardless of whether you're drawing a single mark or a complex drawing, every line is still a line and deserves the time and patience we'd afford it in any other situation.

Aside from this, your intent in the exercise is fairly correct - you're keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon line, keeping your verticals perpendicular to the horizon line, and you've done a good job of checking how your estimation of perspective drifts with the line extensions so you know what to focus on when tackling this exercise in the future.

One last thing to watch out for in regards to the linework - don't correct mistakes. Adding more ink to a problematic area only draws more attention to it, and it's best to just leave it alone. Drawing more reflexively can end up being something of a bad habit to develop as well. Every mark we draw should go through the process of planning, preparation, then a confident execution, and the sort of instinctual correction of marks breaks this pattern.

For your rotated boxes, you've done a pretty good job of keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork. The linework is again a touch wobbly (I suspect you're not employing the ghosting method here), which throws some of the gaps off, but all in all it remains fairly well structured. One thing to watch out for is that the boxes aside from the center one don't appear to rotate much relative to their neighbours. This issue is a common one, and is explained in further detail here.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a good start. Again, I think you're neglecting to apply the ghosting method here, but I've beaten that horse to death at this point. As far as getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, there is plenty of room for growth, but that is largely expected. It is something we'll continue to address and explore throughout the 250 box challenge.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Make sure that as you move forwards into the box challenge, that you make a point of applying the ghosting method fastidiously to every single mark you draw, without exception.

Next Steps:

Move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:26 AM, Monday May 25th 2020

Thanks heaps for the critque! I will work on focusing on ghosting for the next lesson.

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Ellipse Master Template

Ellipse Master Template

This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.

I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.

No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.

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