Hi there, BLVD,

Congrats on completing lesson 1! And thank you for setting everything up everything for an easy critique. As a general comment overall: you followed the instructions as given across all exercises so, unless specifically mentioned otherwise, there are no issues there.

1. Superimposed lines:

There is a little bit of wobbling in some of the lines, but I can see you are already correcting this in the second page. Your curved lines are really good and there is impressively little fraying at the starting point. Overall this looks very good.

2. Ghosted lines

Another really good page. You are very accurate in hitting both the start and end points – the only ones that seem a bit off are closer to the edges of the page (I found these to be a bit awkward). A few lines show a tiny bit of curving (looks like an odd reverting to drawing from the wrist / fingers). Overall, you seem to be hitting level 3 consistently on this.

3. Ghosted planes

Really good. Your lines connect neatly and the diagonals and bisectors meet really neatly in the centre of each plane. A few lines look a bit wavy, this may be because the paper appears to not be entirely flat in a couple spots (so feel free to disregard this whole sentence if your lines look straight IRL).

4. Tables of ellipses

These are some neatly and snugly packed ellipses! Your ability to draw over the initial ellipse a second time is also excellent. Looking at the different “cells” in the table, it looks like you are a bit more comfortable with ellipses with a smaller degree (the narrower ones). Your wider ones and your circles are a bit less evenly shaped in comparison. You could lean towards doing more of these when you pick up this exercise as a warm-up, to further improve your excellent skills.

5. Ellipses in planes

Another very good couple of sheets again, overall. Your ellipses connect really nicely with all 4 edges of the planes in general. When you don’t hit the edges 100%, you seem to overshoot rather than undershoot, on average, so I’d suggest going for a slightly tighter movement than you think you need, to counteract that. There are very few instances of your ellipses being deformed and you are again showing a lot of skill in drawing through them.

6. Funnels

Your ellipses fit really snuggly in the funnels and are nicely drawn through again. They overall line up pretty well along the minor axis and are smoothly executed. One thing to watch out for: except in the funnel in the bottom right, the degree of your ellipses does tend to increase as you move away from the centre of the funnel (I’ve found it’s really tricky to maintain the degree of the ellipse as it gets longer). As mentioned before, the bottom right funnel is much more consistent on this – so if this is the last (or one of the last ones) you drew on this page, you are definitely going in the right direction!

7. Plotted perspective

This is a solid page. The only thing to watch out for is some of your vertical lines being a little bit off sometimes. The rest of the construction is solid. On the hatching: some of your hatching looks a little bit loose / rushed: watch out for any reverting back to drawing these “on auto pilot”. Another very minor point relates to your choice of which face of each box to hatch, which is not always consistent. If you deliberately chose to mix which faces to hatch, you can disregard the previous sentence.

8. Rough perspectives

One thing to watch out for in your line extensions (in red) is that in a few instances, you are drawing a line from a corner to the VP rather than extending one of the edges of the box – see for example page 10, top frame, bottom left box, bottom left edge: you have a red line going from each of the corners rather than extending the edge. There are a few more examples throughout the pages. Beyond that, these are good pages. Some of your lines are a bit more wobbly or curved than in earlier exercises (ghosted lines / ghosted planes) – maybe check whether this is the result of focussing a bit less on ghosting and more on placing corners?

9. Rotated boxes

This is really neatly done on a tough exercise! A few things I noted:

• you seemed to add an extra 3rd box on each side on the horizontal axis. Not a huge deal since you added the correct number of “corner” boxes, but it does add some extra complexity and makes the overall shape look a bit more ovoid.

• The gaps between your boxes look like they get a bit wider as the boxes rotate. Try to keep them tighter, even though it makes it harder to keep track of all the points and edges as you go!

• Some of your “corner boxes” tend to have slightly bendy lines, following the rotation: watch out about this and try to concentrate on keeping those lines straight, even if you intuitively want to curve them to make the rotations smoother.

10. Organic perspective

Let me start by saying you did an excellent job on creating a sense of depth along the path by making the boxes bigger or smaller depending on where they fall on the path. The things I noticed that you might want to look out for are:

• Placing corners for convergence: several boxes are off, with parallel edges in the same set diverging (rather than converging) as they move farther away from the viewer. Based on what I’m guessing is the initial “Y” in each box, I think your error is – on average – placing the other 4 points too far away from the initial “Y”, which distorts the box. When you go on to the 250 boxes challenge, I’d suggest you take a bit more time planning your placement and, in the first instance, you may want to place the new points juuust a bit closer to the initial “Y” than you think is “right” to compensate the error.

• Same comment as in the Plotted Perspective exercise regarding the hatching: it is not always consistent (this may be on purpose) and feels a bit rushed in places – make sure you stay deliberate and focussed when adding these

• Similar to a previous comment, your lines look a little bit more haphazard (curved, not quite hitting the corners) than in the ghosted lines and ghosted planes. I know first-hand how tempting it can be to rush these lines juuust a bit in these later exercises, since there is so much to draw. But you did such a lovely job in these early exercises around ghosting lines that I think you would really benefit from taking a moment to shift back into “ghosting / drawing lines mode” once you have placed your points.

Conclusion

This is my first critique ever in Draw A Box, so I hope it’s useful to you. I think you definitely have a good enough grasp of the material to progress. Keep up the good work!!

Hello I'll be covering your lesson 1 submission

Superimposed lines: A few having fraying at both ends, but most don't show this. Nice Job

Ghosted Lines: Solid straight lines

Ghosted Planes: These appear to be solid. Well done.

Table of Elipses: Good attempt keeing everything tight. But a number are breaking out of bounds.

Elipses in a Plane: Still quiet a few brekaing out of boundries. But you do seem to understand the direcitons.

Funnels: A lot better with keeping things in boundries.

Plotted Perspective: Overall no issues here.

Rough Perspective: This one is tricky. I think you do undrestand the concept.

Rotated Boxes: This one is tricky, this looks less like a sphere. But I do think you understand.

Organic Perspective: Solid work.