Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
5:51 PM, Friday November 7th 2025
thank you for this opportunity.
Welcome and congratulations on finishing the first lesson of Drawabox! I'm Mada and I'll be taking a look at your submission.
Overall you did a great job here, but I do have a bit to mention so let's break them down one by one. I'll write the most important things in bold.
Lines
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking good. Ghosted lines look correctly ghosted and confident too, and there are barely any arching. Try to make bigger planes next time with this exercise, as you have all these unused space that could've been great for practice. You've also demonstrated the same confidence in your ghosted planes with a great accuracy. Nothing much to say except keep up the good work!
Ellipses
Now with the tables of ellipses, you've demonstrated a great understanding of the concept in executing confident ellipses. The ellipses in planes are nice, you drew it confidently and snugly in their respective planes.
The funnels are also looking great; you've managed to fit them snugly and aligned to the minor axis and carried the same confidence as in previous exercises. I have no complaints here as your ellipses will tighten as you get more practice. Also this is optional, but you can attempt the optional step of varying the ellipse's degrees as you move outwards in your warm ups, as mentioned here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3
Boxes
You've shown a good understanding of how to make 2 point perspective in the plotted perspective. I did see some skewed back vertical lines here and there, which is usually caused by an accumulation of human error as you plot more and more lines. I assume that's the case and you understand that every vertical line is straight in 2 point perspective. Even if the points are not aligned correctly, try to find a middle ground and draw it as vertical as you can.
You've applied the ghosting method correctly for the rough perspective, but try to extend your lines only to the horizon line, as to not clutter the workspace too much (and the fact that you're supposed to compare where your line landed with the actual vanishing point anyway). You also drew the front/back faces rectangular, which is correct for 1 point perspective.
As the notoriously most difficult exercise in this lesson, you've done a fine job at doing the rotated boxes. You've used neighboring elements to deduce the next orientation of boxes, but I think you could've rotated them a bit more. It's very common for students to confuse rotation with convergence of the boxes, like this: https://imgur.com/a/gd10hkK. When rotating our boxes, at least one of the boxes' sets of parallel edges will have its vanishing point move - frequently it'll be two. If our boxes have the same vanishing point, then they're not rotating. (https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/21/notrotating)
I think you can also go bigger with this exercise next time. It's easier to keep your head around the 3D space exercises when they're drawn big, and this will ring even truer when you get into the later lessons.
Finally, organic perspective looks great as well. They look like they belong in the same page and the lines converge as they move farther away from the viewer. There are a few hiccups here and there where there are divergences that results in skewed boxes, but overall they're minor and they look pretty solid.
This will get more relevant as you get to the box challenge, but any hatching from this point on should also be done with the ghosting method. It will make your stuff cleaner and more practice is always good! Try to cover the whole area of the box with consistent spacing.
One last thing I want to mention is do not correct your lines by going over it with more lines. This will make your mistake stands out even more with how bold it is, and generally is against the concept of executing planned confident lines throughout this course. Unless it's waaaaay off the trajectory, accept the mistake and trust your muscle memory that it will get better with time and practice.
Anyway, I think you've grasped the concepts of the whole lesson and ready to put them into practice in warmups. Remember to keep working on your lines & ellipses confidence. Again, congratulations and keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
Move onto the 250 box challenge.
Do the lesson 1 exercises as your regular warmup and don't forget your 50% rule art.
Marshall Vandruff is a ubiquitous name in art instruction - not just through his work on the Draftsmen podcast and his other collaborations with Proko, but in his own right. He's been teaching anatomy, gesture, and perspective for decades, and a number of my own friends have taken his classes at the Laguna College of Art and Design (back around 2010), and had only good things to say about him. Not just as an instructor, but as a wonderful person as well.
Many of you will be familiar with his extremely cheap 1994 Perspective Drawing lectures, but here he kicks it up to a whole new level.
We use cookies in conjunction with Google Analytics to anonymously track how our website is used.
This data is not shared with any other parties or sold to anyone. They are also disabled until consent is provided by clicking the button below, and this consent can be revoked at any time by clicking the "Revoke Analytics Cookie Consent" link in our website footer.
You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.