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6:34 AM, Thursday January 26th 2023

Welcome to drawabox, and a big congrats on making it past Lesson 1. Let’s see how you did!

Starting with your superimposed lines, these look great! They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory.

Your ghosted lines look quite good (and quite ambitious!) too. That said, their start/end points are a little too big. Remember that the goal is for an ideal line to swallow them both.

Your planes are quite well done, also (save for that aforementioned issue), but I’ll quickly remind you that automatic reinforcing – that is, the habit of redrawing an incorrect line – is not something we encourage. It’s usually best to just leave your mistakes be.

Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise is… a little mixed. I’ll start with the good – I certainly commend you for doing something as ambitious as to draw an ellipse horizontally. That said, that doesn’t work for 2 reasons. First, because it requires a tremendous amount of skill to be able to get that ellipse to be rounded (which a beginner student doesn’t have, therefore resulting in them drawing this weird sausage-like shape). Second, because it furthers the misunderstanding that what matters is accuracy. Looking at those particular frames, it’s obvious that rather than trying to draw said ellipse confidently, come as it may, you’ve settled for drawing it accurately, so you don’t make a mess of the frame itself. Instead, something simpler (more akin to the example homework) would’ve been best, I think.

The ellipses in planes look a little better (since there’s only one way to draw them! :P), but even here, it’s obvious that accuracy is a main concern of yours. Rather than have the ellipses become pointy/bumpy, in an effort to touch all 4 sides of the plane, try to be comfortable with them not making contact, and instead being fully smooth, and rounded.

The ellipses in funnels are similar in that sense (though in this case, the pressure seems to fall on keeping both rotations snug against each other), but beyond that, they’re well constructed – your ellipses here are upright (so properly cut in half by their axes), and snug.

The plotted perspective exercise looks clean.

The automatic reinforcing habit is especially problematic in the rough perspective exercise. It’s everywhere, so you may argue that this is meant to be lineweight, but whatever it is, it’s unnecessary, as it makes it difficult for me to judge the quality of your linework. Ignoring that, the convergences are fairly well done, but do be careful that the back lines of your boxes are parallel/perpendicular to the horizon, as they’re meant to. If they’re not, then the lines themselves are wrong, so don’t just say ‘I guess that’s how it should look’ – that’s not the case.

Solid attempt at your rotated boxes exercise. It’s big (huge positive!), and its boxes are snug. They don’t rotate quite as comfortably as we’d like them to, and there’s the expected issues with their back lines, but that’s quite normal for this stage, so I wouldn’t stress about it.

Lineweight, if you’d like me to call it that, is especially problematic in your organic perspective exercise, as it makes is so that boxes (that are meant to be) in the back, read as being up front, thus contradicting the illusion we’re trying to convey as per their size. If I ignore that, however, the exercise is nicely done. The boxes are well constructed, and you’ve done a good job with their size, and foreshortening.

Next Steps:

I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, and moving you on to the box challenge, but please do take note of my critique, so as to improve during your warmups. Good luck!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:05 AM, Thursday January 26th 2023

I was not expecting such a detailed explanation of the issues I've encountered. Thankyou so much and I'll do everything in my power to improve on the warm-ups!

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