Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on getting through Lesson 1. I’m TA Benj, and I’ll be taking a look at how you did.

Starting off, your superimposed lines are looking good. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and more often than not, of a consistent trajectory. I notice that they tend to fray a little too quickly, however. So I wonder if you’re not perhaps drawing faster than you need to? Take some time to experiment with different speeds. It’s true that if you draw super duper fast then your line will be as confident as it can be, but you might be able to draw a little slower, thus giving yourself a little more control, but still not hurt its confidence, so see if perhaps that’s not the case. The ghosted lines/planes look good, and I’m pleased to see how ambitious you’ve gotten with some of them. That said, see if you can make your start/end points a little smaller. Remember that the idea is for a perfect line to swallow them both.

The table of ellipses exercise looks good – your ellipses here are smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. I notice that you’ll sometimes make contact with the page, without meaning to. Though this isn’t a huge problem, try to be a little more deliberate with your movements, from now on. See, also, if you can introduce some more variety to the degrees of your ellipses – ideally, to feature mostly larger ones, since those are the more difficult ones (and thus need the most practice). The ellipses in planes look fantastic! Despite how ambitious your planes are, your ellipses do a great job of fitting into them, while at the same time maintaining their prior smoothness/roundness. Your funnels look good in that respect, too, but the spacing of your ellipses is a little off, as you might’ve noticed, so see if you can ghost these ones for a tiny big longer, from now on.

The plotted perspective exercise looks clean.

If I’m reading it correctly (the pages don’t exactly have numbers), the rough perspective exercise shows some solid improvement throughout the set. Your convergences starting off a little rough, and then improving by the end is normal, of course. The linework, on the other hand, we expect to be good from the start, since you’ve already had plenty of practice with it. That said, I’m pleased to see that what felt a little rushed in the beginning looks a lot more patient by the second page, so you’re good.

The rotated boxes exercise is a little small. This is a good time to mention that though your instinct, when faced with something overwhelming, is to draw as small as possible, you’ll see more success by doing the opposite. Indeed, it’s when giving your brain a lot of room to think through its problems that you’ll find it come up with solutions for you – not the opposite. Nonetheless, you’ve done well here. Your boxes are snug, and they do a good job of rotating, and this seems to be the case in the back, too.

The organic perspective exercise also starts off looking a little rushed, then improves. Though the improvement is good to see, I’ll request that you be patient with exercises from the start. We recommend 2 pages of this because that’s what we estimate is needed to get what you’re meant to get out of the exercise. If the first one is rushed, then you’ll find yourself having learned less as a result. But nonetheless, you’re in a good place by the end, here; your boxes flow well, as per their size, and foreshortening, and are well constructed, too.