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10:55 PM, Tuesday October 18th 2022

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are having some issues with tilting off the minor axis. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/notaligned This is something you should always start considering when drawing your ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. It's great that you are keeping up with the confident linework on these. I am noticing that you are redrawing lines on occasion and this is a habit you should try and get out of. Try and stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read. You are also doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise is frankly unfinished. One thing that would have helped you here would have been to just draw this a bit bigger. Drawing bigger really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/notrotating I understand that this is a difficulty exercise and is probably too difficult for where you are at with your current level of drawing but every exercise must be attempted to completion in order for these lessons to be marked as complete. A big part of learning how to draw is getting used to working outside of your comfort zone. So as a revision I'd like you to give this exercise another. Make sure you draw it nice and big and remember to draw through all of your boxes and make sure to keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent as that will help with inferring information about a neighboring boxes rotation and proportion. I'm not expecting it to be done well but you I want to be completed fully. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are a bit of a mixed bag. While there are some solid constructions here there are also some wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you in order to develop a better sense for how box lines converge to vps.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'd like you to give the rotated box exercise another shot and make sure to complete it this one. Once you get that revision submitted and I take a look you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

One page of the rotated box exercise - Draw this bigger and give it another shot. Make sure to complete it fully.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
10:03 PM, Saturday October 29th 2022

Hello, I'm submitting the rotated box exercise. I felt better completing it this time around, once getting more practice in. Any feedback is appreciated!

https://imgur.com/a/Jg9dOqs

12:17 AM, Sunday October 30th 2022

Okay, this looks great! You drew this nice and big keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. While the rotations aren't perfect this is very well done for the most part. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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Framed Ink

Framed Ink

I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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