Hello!
Before we start, I’d like to congratulate you on completing your first lesson in DrawABox! It’s easy to get tripped up on the first step, so good job on making it to this point!
To begin, let’s take a look at your linework. All in all, it looks solid. There’s some minor instances of wobbliness or arcing taking place, but I'm honestly nitpicking something that doesn’t need to be nitpicked. One small thing, and I’m guilty of this as well, might be the situations where you “repeat” or “redo” lines that weren’t quite right the first time. This isn’t necessary, and each line should be treated as perfect the first time around, even if it isn’t. Finally, I would like to have seen a greater quantity of planes put into your ghosted planes assignments. While it’s not encouraged to spend time grinding your lessons, it’s equally important you’re giving yourself enough opportunity to learn what is being taught.
Transitioning over to your ellipses, there’s a few concerns I’d like to mention. First off, there are recurring signs of wobbliness with your ellipses. This suggests that you’re giving your brain too much time to “correct” your line’s path, and is the antithesis of confidence. We want to draw our lines quickly and confidently. Utilizing this strategy might result in difficulties at first, but the long-term benefits to your accuracy will eclipse any that had been drawn without this method.
Continuing on with your ellipses, I would have been interested in seeing a larger variety of shapes in your tables assignment. The majority of your tables contain shapes of similar angles and sizes, and I feel deviating between sections helps broaden our understanding of this exercise.
Before we start with your boxes, I just want to place a quick reminder that these exercises are hard. The box assignments are where Lesson 1 hits its zenith, and it’s not expected of anyone to complete these perfectly.
So! Boxes. There are a few spots in your rough perspective exercises that show guesswork happening, whereby your lines are neither vertical, nor horizontal in reference to the horizon line. But, overall they look good. Continuing on to your organic perspective pages, though, I must admit it strikes me as a bit of a mixed bag. From what is there, it honestly looks great. Unfortunately, I’m more concerned about what isn’t there - more boxes. Again, we don’t want to grind, but we also need to guarantee we’re giving ourselves a chance to fully appreciate the assignment. Learning by rushing is a fast track to burnout.
As we move back to your rotated boxes, I can’t help but notice that it appears incomplete. The space on the far right where the heavily rotated boxes would be is missing. Like I said before, these exercises are tough, none more so than the rotated boxes. However, DrawABox (and learning in general) is all about breaking out of our comfort zone and trying out new things, even if those new things lead us to failure - especially if it leads us to failure.
I’d like to offer a few suggestions to help you with this exercise. Keeping the corners of your boxes close to one another helps significantly with this assignment. If your boxes have only a small amount of room between them, you can use each neighboring box as reference as you move onto the next. Moreover, and I cannot stress this enough, don’t ever be afraid to return to the course page for reference, or even just as a refresher.
I will mark the lesson as complete, as it’s silly to stop you from moving on to the 250 box challenge simply because you missed a few boxes that you’ll be doing a bunch of in the challenge anyway. Just remember to always try, even if it’s tough.
Sorry about how long of a critique this ended up being, it wasn’t my intention going into this for it to end up being a page and a half long. But I hope it can be of help to you in your artistic journey! Congratulations again, and good luck in the 250 box challenge and beyond!
Next Steps:
Finish your rotated boxes exercise.
Add your choice of box exercises to your 10-15 minute warm-ups.
250 Boxes.
I mostly agree with @CHEESENEEPS, but would like to add that if you can, please use proper A4/letter sized printer paper instead of your sketchbook. It is much more comfortable to draw on.
Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"
It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.
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