Hi,

I am a student at Drawabox currently on Lesson 4. I'll be giving some critiques on your homework.

Keep in mind that I'm not an instructor so feel free to reach out and gain more opinions for varying in-depth critiques on the forums here and on Discord.

• Lines Homework

Overall you've done your exercises well. Looking at your *Ghost Planes, I can hypothesize that you are striving for accuracy over your quality of your lines. Here on this page in lesson 1 to review:

Beginners often prioritize accuracy first, thinking that it's more important that their lines reach their intended points - but this is incorrect. The most important thing you need to focus on first is keeping your marks smooth and consistent.

-Uncomfortable.

Be mindful of this quote and incorporate it towards your next exercises in the future. In the moment of doing your exercises, if you ever start striving over accuracy over consistency, focus on consistency entirely. Consistent and straight line-work from your shoulder is often a skill that we don't work on into our daily lives so it will be a skill for you to start developing as of right now. These concepts from your lines homework will be important towards future lessons, especially in the next one you will be doing. Be confident and don't let your mind slow down your hand to conform to accuracy on the page.

As a side note before I move on, I see in your Super-Imposed Lines losing ink. Make sure you don't press to hard on your pens, as you may damage the felt tip. I assume that you've changed the pen looking back at your next exercises, but do keep in mind that if you have to change the angle of your tip to bring out the ink- change it. It would be best for you to draw at and angle where you are most comfortable. In my personal experience I had a very bad habit of pressing down too hard which pushed the felt tip back into the pen. This in turn made me hold my pen upright (which was different from what I held it before) for the ink to flow. For nearly a year I had basically partially relearned to draw with an alternate grip unintentionally. This wastes a lot of time developing your muscle memory when it could have been best to focus all my practicing into one single grip. It would have been more useful to me to have one highly trained grip, than two mediocre grips. Uncomfortable makes a reference to the late and great martial arts cinema pioneer in one of his videos at lesson one:

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

Bruce Lee

Pretty cheesy, but highly applicable. Play it smart focus on making one thing the best it can be.

• Ellipses Homework

I can see you've struggled with ellipses on the first batch of your Tables of Ellipses but looking ahead, your Ellipse Planes and Funnels tell that you've improved. Keep at it, and next time put your consistency ahead of your accuracy. All of the same mindset principles apply with ellipses, so warm up your ellipse every once in a while to keep yourself from getting rusty when you go through the 250 boxes challenge.

• Boxes

You understand the concepts of perspective relatively well, but your line quality dramatically suffers from trying too hard to strive for accuracy. One big thing that stands out is how you consistently do near little dots on your Organic Perspective. This gives us a limited palette towards gaining understanding from exercises. Keep your exercises with intention and try and attempt to have a linear reduction of size in each box next time you do this exercise.

These exercises along with their concepts are pretty hard to absorb all at once. You will get better at your perspective the longer you get further into Drawabox so keep on moving forward.

However, I'll take the time to explore your work as a learning opportunity to re-iterate a core concept of Drawabox:

This is a live example of the consistency over accuracy statement said before in this critique. You can observe how once you have the ruler, we can see that you have it all nailed down near flawlessly. When it comes to your freehand attempt, your consistency suffers and that in turn dramatically alters your accuracy. I hope this illustrates why it is super important to keep in mind of working on your lines to be as smooth and consistent as possible.

Keep up the good work.

• Some advice to make the most out of your 250 Boxes (from someone who's done this almost 3 times now).

1. Pace yourself and don't rush. You will gain so much from doing a page properly than doing 50 pages improperly.

2. Save your work after any work session digitally! (Partially the reason why I had to do this challenge far too many times than necessary)

3. Don't get rusty. Don't neglect your other ideas and concepts and practice them occasionally (Preferably lines and ellipses)

4. Keep yourself entertained. Make sure to keep the 50% at play. It is super important to keep yourself motivated in this challenge and not get burnt out.

5. Keep a quota of how many per-day/week. Try not and do 50 boxes all in one sitting.

Howdy!

Congrats on making it through lesson 1!

Your lines are going to need some work. The lines are wobbly and unconfident as though you haven’t fully wrestled control from your brain making micro adjustments. Your marks should be smooth and consistent. Accuracy comes later as your skills improve.

I would recommend going through the ghosted lines, then the ghosted planes exercises making sure to focus on making confident marks and making sure you are using your whole arm. Ghost draw the lines as much as you need, there is no rush.

You got this.