Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing lesson 1. Let’s take this one exercise at a time, shall we?

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking mostly okay. They’re, for the most part, smooth, and all lined up at the start, but you’ll often alter their trajectory. This is not something we recommend. To put it another way, if you catch your line going off course, boldly continue onto that course, rather than course-correcting. The ghosted lines/planes take this to the next level, unfortunately – they’re so focused on accuracy, that they’ve become wobbly. But that’s the opposite of what we want: we want them to be confident, first and foremost. To that end, we ghost them until comfortable with the built-up motion, then commit.

The table of ellipses exercise looks really good. You’ve got your priorities in order, here, your ellipses being smooth, and rounded. You’ve drawn through them, too, though at times not enough; aim for a minimum of 2 rotations. Also, see if you can lift your pen off the page, at the end of said rotations, rather than flicking it off – it’ll get rid of those tails at the end. The ellipses in planes exercise looks mostly good. Your ellipses are a little bumpy, indicative of some focus on their accuracy, which, I’ll remind you, is not a priority for us. Nothing that won’t fix itself if you’re conscious of it happening, though, so don’t stress. The funnels exercise looks good, too, though the increase in degree is not quite as subtle as we’d like it to be. That aside, however, the more important aspects of it – the ellipses being confident, snug, and properly cut in half – are all well done.

The plotted perspective exercise looks clean – nice job.

The rough perspective exercise is not quite there, unfortunately. There’s 2 things to talk about. First, the linework. Your lines here lack confidence, and have been redrawn a few times. In regards to the former, give this section of Part 1 another read. Basically, what you’re doing here is no different from what you were doing in previous, simpler exercises: drawing a single line, from point A to point B, over and over. If it could be confident there, there’s no reason why it can’t be confident here, also. In the page previous, you’ll also find a note reminding you that each line is to be drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out, so please resist the urge to correct your mistakes. The second issue is in regards to the convergences; the lines here don’t seem to make much of an effort to converge towards the vanishing point. Be careful not to go on autopilot here, drawing a box that behaves how you think it should behave (3 sets of 4 parallel lines), rather than how it should behave (1 set converging, 2 sets being parallel/perpendicular to the horizon. Remember, also, that you’re allowed, and even encouraged, to plot a point, check it, and adjust it if necessary. Give this video a look, and perhaps consider drawing alongside it.

Solid work on the rotated boxes exercise. Leaving aside issues of confidence (which we’ve talked about in previous sections), the exercise is big, your boxes snug, drawn through, and properly rotating. Their far planes are, for the most part, correct, and though there’s issues with the convergence of your depth lines, these are things we expect to see, at this point. Feel free to come back to this exercise, as you learn more about boxes in the box challenge, and put some of that knowledge into context.

Finally, the organic perspective exercise is nicely done. Your boxes follow the flow line, increasing in size, but maintaining a foreshortening that’s consistent, and shallow, throughout. I’ll draw your attention to the automatic reinforcing, however. Here, in an exercise where there exists a very delicate hierarchy between the boxes, and we don’t want boxes in the back to pop up to the front, any degree of non-intentional lineweight is a problem, as it does just that to them. Be especially mindful of your automatic reinforcing habit in exercises like this.