Habits are tough to build, but once they’re built, they’re tough to break! Keep this up, and you will! Welcome to drawabox! Let’s take this one exercise at a time, shall we?

Starting off, your superimposed lines are looking good. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The arcing ones are a little wobbly, at times, but this is not necessarily unexpected. Still, I’ll remind you that, rather than them being accurate, it’s more important for them to be confident (in other words, it’s perfectly fine for them to miss their guidelines, so long as they’re smooth!) The ghosted lines/planes are, unfortunately, quite wobbly. A lot of it is concentrated near the end, which suggests to me that you’re slowing down as you’re approaching the end point, in an effort to stop at the correct place (don’t!), but there’s quite a few of them that are wobbly from the start, too, so the issue is a general one of prioritizing accuracy over confidence. That’s, again, not something we encourage. Not only that, but we deliberately have the two occupy two entirely separate steps. You can concern yourself with accuracy during the ghosting stage – by all means, ghost for as long as you want! – but once you decide to commit, do so confidently, and don’t concern yourself with accuracy any longer. Another thing you can do is experiment with your speed, to find one that’s more suited to you. To that end, consider drawing some lines at different speeds, and seeing which of them is the most accurate, confident one. That’ll be the one drawn at your ‘ideal’ speed.

The table of ellipses exercise shows a similar misunderstanding, unfortunately. Here, you’re more concerned with the ellipses fitting snuggly within their frames, than them being smooth, and rounded (which is what should be your priority). The ellipses in planes are more of the same; these even go as far as to deform, and become obviously-pointy at the 4 points where they’re supposed to touch the plane. That’s not necessary! Let’s talk a little about why, also. A smooth mark is effective in communicating solidity, and its issues in accuracy, we can ignore (in the context of the full piece, they’ll likely be inconsequential), or even incorporate into our piece. A wobbly mark, on the other hand, won’t read as solid, and all the accuracy in the word make your weird sponge read like a rigid box. Furthermore, accuracy will improve over time, anyway. So, is it not wiser to focus on what you do have a control over – confidence? The funnels are quite similar, so the same advice applies to them. One more thing I’ll recommend, for this exercise in particular, is to draw bigger!

The plotted perspective exercise is nicely done.

The rough perspective exercise is a little mixed. It has confidence issues, but I expected them (and we’ve already addressed them in a previous exercise). I will, however, add a discouragement towards automatic reinforcing, to the linework section. Remember that each line is to be drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. Resist the urge to go over a line that you consider to be ‘incorrect.’ Adding more ink to it won’t correct it, anyway – it’ll just make it easier to spot. As for the convergences, they’re well done, so keep up the good work!

The rotated boxes exercise is as expected – starts off solid, then slowly loses its way, until we come to the diagonals, where it’s completely off the rails! This is perfectly fine! What’s important is that you’ve seen it through to the end, properly drawing through all of your boxes, and attempting to keep them snug.

Speaking of boxes, leaving aside any issues of linework, the organic perspective exercise is well done. As a result of their size, and foreshortening, your boxes flow well, and (save for those ones that have inner angles of their Y be less than 90 degrees (we’ll learn why that’s bad in the box challenge!)), are well constructed, too!