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10:57 PM, Friday May 15th 2020

So! I mentioned that my TAs would get to your homework some time tomorrow, but as I'm just starting a vacation from work, I've decided to start it off with a big push on clearing out our Lesson 1 and box challenge backlog. This will be my 8th critique of the day, so I clearly don't know the meaning of 'vacation'. Let's get started!

Your work here is, by and large, very well done. You're demonstrating exceptional confidence behind each of your superimposed lines, showing that you clearly understand and respect the focus of this exercise being on maintaining a consistent trajectory and not worrying about accuracy. You carry this through into your ghosted lines, where you're doing a good job of hitting your end points. You do certainly overshoot, but you're maintaining the smoothness of your execution very well.

One thing that can help with the overshooting is trying to lift your pen when you hit that end point. Often students will try to slow to a stop, which can cause our lines to waver. Lifting the pen up however is something we can do much more reliably and rapidly, with a faster response time and no visible impact on the flow of the stroke. Either way, you improve on the overshooting throughout your ghosted planes.

Your ellipses definitely maintain that same focus on confidence, and as such, you're doing a good job of maintaining even, consistent shapes with no signs of stiffness or hesitation. They are a little loose, so you'll want to continue working on tightening them up, but as a start this is very good. The use of the ghosting method here can certainly help with tightening them up and decreasing the deviation between the two passes around the elliptical shape, so keep working on integrating it into how you draw your ellipses.

When we hit your funnels, you do have a bit of a tendency to draw through your ellipses too much - remember that we want to aim for 2 to 3 times around the ellipses, with 2 being ideal. Also, you do have slight slants here relative to the minor axis, so keep working on getting them to align correctly.

Jumping down to your rough perspective boxes, you've done a pretty good job here in getting your horizontals to run parallel to the horizon line and your verticals to run perpendicular to it. This tells me that you're aware of and thinking about the specific behaviours each line should follow before drawing them, rather than rushing in.

For your rotated boxes, you've done a good job of keeping the gaps between the boxes narrow and consistent (so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork), and of covering the full range of rotation on each major axis. Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a really good start. This exercise is meant to introduce students to the challenges of rotating boxes freely in 3D space, and so you do have room for growth in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge towards their shared vanishing point, but that's entirely expected and normal. It's what we will work on in our next step.

So! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:57 PM, Wednesday May 20th 2020

Hey, thanks for the very thorough critique! I much appreciate it especially right before your vacation. I hope you’re actually off to it by now lol.

I had actually started 250 box challenge so I will continue with that. I’m right around box #80, and still have a hard time matching those vanishing points. I’ve experimented with rulers and while that did improve the accuracy significantly, I didn’t help with my understanding. So back to how this exercise was meant to be done – freehand and doing my best to increase my estimation.

Thanks again, and I look forward to completing 250 boxes and moving on to the next lesson!

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