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6:57 AM, Saturday April 27th 2024

Hey ChaoChao! Good job finishing part 1 of Lesson 1.

Superimposed lines looks good. Your staring points are all close together; as you increased the length of each line however, they fray more and more towards the end. Make sure to focus the end point, and avoid trying to steer the line after settling on where you want it to end. You also made good use of the space of the page!

Ghosted lines also looks good. Using another color for the points is smart. Some wobbling here, which makes me thing you're course-correcting mid-line. Some more line length variance would have been good.

Ghosted planes/eclipses suffers a result of a lack of planning. Each plane seems to have points for each corner which is great. Remember that with the ghosting method, you only have to think about the start and end of your line, which you've established here. You need to focus on reaching your goalposts. Curvature and wobbling are also probably related to the lack of ghosting and technique not based in the shoulders. This is especially pronounced in the smaller planes. Drawing from the shoulder will help you achieve straigher lines, no matter how long they are. Eclipses frequently don't touch each side of their enclosing plane. Try ghosting an eclipse a couple times above the plane, and when you/re confident that you'd touch each edge, put your pen down. There is limited benefit to having them not touch any of the guidling lines. The eclipses have the proper amount of lines.

The table of eclipses looks good. You do a good job of having them touch each other and the sides of the boxes. They all have the correct amount of ghosted lines. As you increased the angle of your eclipses however, they become noticably sharper, which isn't the goal. Try rounding them out in your mind by ghosting them with your finger. You'll notice how sharper they are, and the motion that you should avoid in order to get rounder eclipses. The sharper they are, the less likely they are to touch one another in your case as well. As you progess it seems like you're lifting your pen off the paper while ghosting, which leads to noticeable gaps in your eclipses. This is probably may due to a lack of focus. Try taking a break if you don't think you can put all of your attention into your exercises. This may have been an attempt to make your tilted eclipses less sharper, in which case see my comment earlier.

The eclipses in your funnels rarely touch each other and the guidelines. Putting them closer together would allow you to fit more eclipses on the page, which is always good. Since they don't touch the guidelines you drew, they don't really follow the shape of the funnel. The lack of size variation also add to this effect. Focusing more on the planning stage may help. Your priority here should not be the shape of the eclipse, which you've done well here, but getting them to touch the necesssary lines. Having everything so far apart really hampers the usefullness of this exercise.

Plotted perspective looks great! Some wobbly lines probably as a result of trying to correct unexpectedly off points, but overall it looks good. Try to avoid second guessing yourself. Confidence is king.

Rough perspective suffers from a lack of ghosting/drawing from the shoulder. Even if your points are wonky, you should make an effort to have good, ghosted lines. Curving your lines to reach your points makes your boxes suffer significantly. Using a different color for the lines you used to check was smart! Biggest issue here imo is the curved lines. Focus on drawing form the shoulder and really ghost out these lines.

Rotated Boxes has issues, but I want to emphasize that I'm proud of you for persevering and finishing part 1! I think the biggest issue is that you used a wonky proportions, and you didn't make use of any "landmarks" throughout your process. After making your big cube in the middle, your next step was establishing the near corners of the next cube. This was done haphazardly all over this exercise and as a result it's heavily distorted. In addition to the curved lines, which likely made it difficult to rotate along 1 axis during this exercise. Moving forward, make sure your putting all of your effort to starting off on the right foot. This means that you're ghosting all of your lines and planning where you put your points. Even if you make a mistake here or there, you must proceed with confidence and make another good effort to place good points. I believe you repeatedly didn't do this after 1or 2 mistakes which snowballed. I suspect that the more and more each cube rotated, the harder it was for you to keep track of where exactly the next points were supposed to be, so you winged it. It's better to wing it than to quit, but proper planning should make it easier to keep everything under control moving forward.

Organic perspective suffers due a lack of consistent convergence and issues with line making previously discussed. Before I get into it, I'll mention that these issues are certainly exacerbated by fatigue. If you're tired or bored while drawing, then your work will suffer. If you can't put your best work forward, consider taking break and getting a drink of water before continuing. I'll focus on the convergence, since I've repeatedly commented on your issues with line making. Throughout this exercise, there are boxes that have extremely poor convergence. I believe this is made glaring by the fact that most of the boxes have the exact same orientation. This defeats the point of this exercise. The emphasis is on planning and compromise, both of which can be ignored if you draw the same box each time. This also makes the accumulated inconsistence and mistakes more apparent. I'd like to go back to go back to my point about fatigue and boredom. You'll do yourself more good if you just take a break instead of mindlessly drawing boxes without planning. You'd gain more from it if you drew more, large boxes with different orienations and carefully planned corners. Make sure to watch out for angles smaller than 90 degress in your "Y". This leads to distorted boxes. Most of your converging boxes seem to be a near-infinity, which is fine, but, again, I think some variety in orientation would have been nice. I think this exercise would really benefited from you drawing larger boxes, and perhaps only did 1 or two thirds of a page in a day. I like how you followed your guidelines.

Congrats again on finishing ChaoChao! Please take some time to relish your accomplishment before moving on.

Next Steps:

I'd recommend you try 1 organic perspective page again with a heavy emphasis on body orientation and size variety as well as convergences a closer than infinity. Line-making should be a concern as well. Ghosting is key.

Best of luck ChaoChao!

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:23 AM, Sunday April 28th 2024

Thanks for the very in depth review. I think I'm having a lot of issues with the ghosting of my lines because when I ghost I naturally shift from doing a straight line to just trying to get to the target location and I can't really tell when that happens which causes my lines to curve and I don't really know what to do about that, though I suppose I might need to ghost more since I'm not really sure how many times your supposed to do (for reference I only do it 2 - 4 times) and when it gets to smaller distances I have a hard time not accidentally switching to using my hand or elbow. As for my ellipses I just figured out how to do them so I was more focused on the shape but now I'll start working on the getting them to touch more while trying to round them out. For the rotated boxes I thought I knew where certain corners were supposed to be and didn't really double check so I'll be more careful to go over them a 2nd time before placing, also I'm not really sure what you mean by landmarks? Because I thought I had used the other boxes as reference but I suppose I also was trying to move them closer to the vanishing points at the same time which might of made them drift farther than they were supposed to from the other boxes. And for organic perspective after going through it again I realized I heavily misunderstood the exercise as I thought the lines that led to the corner had to mimic the other lines in the y rather than converging towards a vanishing point dictated by the original lines, here is the updated organic perspective https://imgur.com/a/RYaoUHo

once again thanks for your critique

9:23 AM, Monday April 29th 2024

No problem. I'm a beginner as well so just mention what I noticed.

I struggled with ghosting as well. I personally did it too much, to the point were I was hesitant to even put a mark down at all.

I think the most important thing is a straight line. Missing the mark is fine at this stage in our development since we're practicing beginners after all.

Eclipses are also tough. I feel like if you're too concerned with touching the edges you get a rhombus or a big circle, it's definitely a balancing act.

By landmarks, I meant the corners of the adjacent cube.

Great work on your organic perspective! The convergences have massively improved from your last attempt, though you still have some wonky cubes. The curved lines also add to that effect.

Next Steps:

I'll ask that you do one page of ghosted lines with an emphasis on straight, confident lines. Don't worry about missing your points.

Good luck!

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:48 AM, Tuesday April 30th 2024

Thank you and here's the updated ghosted lines :https://imgur.com/a/CGYtNOZ

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