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3:03 PM, Wednesday October 5th 2022

Welcome to drawabox, and a big congrats on completing Lesson 1. Let’s see how you did, shall we?

Starting off, your superimposed lines are look good. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your ghosted lines look quite confident, too, as you do your planes, but I notice in the latter that your start/end points are a little too big. Remember that the goal is for a perfect line to swallow them both.

Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise is mostly good. There’s not a great deal of variety to your ellipses (I’m referring to their degrees, and angles), and they’re at times a little wobbly, but I assume that this is mostly due to their size (it’s mostly the smaller ones that are, and, as you know, the smaller a mark, the harder it is to engage the shoulder for it). The rest of them are smooth, rounded, and, more often than not, properly drawn through. As for the ‘not’, be sure to rotate around them a full 2 times, not 1 and change. This goes for the ellipses in planes too, as you might expect. These ones are fairly solid, and though there’s the occasional ellipse that goes so far as to deform, in a misguided attempt to fill as much of the plane as possible, that seems to be the exception, rather than the rule, so I don’t need to remind you about how the priority is for them to be smooth/round, not accurate. As for the funnels, these look good, too, though the comments regarding the size of the ellipses (and how they shouldn’t be too small) certainly apply to these, too.

The plotted perspective exercise looks clean.

The rough perspective exercise looks good, as far as its convergences are concerned. Linework, on the other hand, is a different issue. I will remind you that, regardless of the big picture, a lot of these exercise consist of nothing but single lines, no different from the ones you drew in the ghosted lines/planes exercises. If so, and if they could be confident there, why not here, too? Generally, the answer is: because students get overwhelmed. In those cases, then, it’s helpful to remind yourself that, after all, it’s only lines.

For the rotated boxes exercise, you seem to have forgotten about the reminder boxes (the ones we have you draw first!) Unsurprisingly, your boxes don’t do a great job of rotating, here. Nonetheless, you’ve been careful to keep them snug, and, even – I’m sure – yourself aware that the exercise wasn’t progressing as well as it could, you stuck with it. That, indeed, ends up being the important part. You won’t always know how to do something, but choosing to do it nonetheless, is an important skill to have.

Speaking of skills, the organic perspective exercise is really well done. Some of the boxes, especially the smaller ones, end up looking a little similar to each other (they’re, most of them, cubes), but that’s not a huge issue, and you’ll have pleeenty of chances to practice with their shapes. Beyond that, they flow well, as per their size and foreshortening, and add up to some interesting compositions, to boot.

Next Steps:

I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, and sending you off to the box challenge. GL!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:05 PM, Wednesday October 5th 2022

thank you

3:06 PM, Friday October 28th 2022

Hello Benj,

I have completed the 250 Box challenge. The assignment checklist calls for loading up images for all of the boxes. Is that absolutely necessary, or may I load up a random sample of 12-15 boxes from each set of 50? I drew three boxes per page, so 250 boxes would be 84 page images.

Ted

5:52 PM, Friday October 28th 2022

Unfortunately you are required to upload all of your work. While we certainly trust that you have completed it all, we don't want to end up in a situation long term where as a byproduct of allowing students to submit only part of the work, people take advantage and stop completing the entire challenge. Given that the 250 box challenge is a notably unpleasant part of the course, it'd put us in an unpleasant quandary.

6:17 PM, Friday October 28th 2022

no problem. i uploaded them all

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