9:34 PM, Monday February 6th 2023
Hi Ivangamngo, and congrats on completing your first lesson of the course! I will handle this critique, and I will give you my thoughts in the following sections corresponding to each exercise.
Superimposed lines
I have some difficulty identifying clearly the finer details of the image because of its blurriness, but from what I see your lines look for the most part smooth and confident (there seems to be visible wobbling in the set of horizontal lines at the top of the second page, but the others look fine). There's also fraying on one end only, which is good.
Ghosted lines
Here as well your line work stays smooth and confident. Your lines are also quite precise, with little deviation and overshooting. One thing to note is that in quite a few lines there seems to be a subtle arching, nothing too dramatic but it's there. It happens quite often to students in lesson one to have some degree of arching in their straight lines, usually due to a bit of stiffness in the joints due to not being used to draw from the shoulder. This is something that normally adjusts by itself through practice, but if you ever find yourself struggling when making straight lines try to subtly arch your line in the opposite direction to compensate, and over time you will find yourself naturally adjusting your precision without even thinking.
Ghosted planes
Most of what I said above applies here as well. Additionally, your tendency to subtly arch seems to have improved by itself. Also, good job not shying away from fitting as many planes as you could in the page, it gave you the occasion of getting the most out of this exercise.
Tables of ellipses
For the most part your ellipses look smooth and fairly symmetrical. The ellipses remain tight-packed and fit well between each other. You seem to have prioritized the fluidity of gesture over precision of the shape, and you were right to do so: if this course had a motto, it would likely be "confidence over accuracy". Since your ellipses look already quite fluid, you could probably start focusing more on keeping your repeated lines less loose and on trying to keep better your shapes between your established boundaries, in this case keeping them inside the panel (quite frequently your ellipses overshoot a bit). Another thing you may want to change is the amount of repeated lines you use. While the exercise allows for a maximum of three repeated lines, as you tend to do, it could be a good idea to try and progressively reduce the repeated lines to 2, as ellipses will play an important role starting from lesson 2, so working on making them less messy from now on could be useful for the future.
Ellipses in planes
Most of what said above applies here too. Some of your ellipses end up looking quite asymmetrical in trying to make them fit into the planes, usually the most distorted ones. One thing you could have done in those cases was to try and make ellipses with a higher degree of eccentricity (i.e. the amount of "thinness" of the curve) and aligning them to one of the diagonals instead of one of the two bisection lines (the lines that cut in half the sides of the plane).
Funnels
In this exercise you seem to struggle with keeping the minor axis of your ellipses aligned to the major symmetry axis of the funnel. As a result your ellipses are slanted, while they should follow the symmetry of the shape that contains them. You should think of these shapes as a sort of glass tubes around which some rings have been painted. The ellipses we draw are then nothing more than how we see the contour of these rings through the transparent glass. As a consequence, these ellipses should be aligned with the funnel and get broader in proportion the more we move away from the waist of the funnel. This thing is also lacking in your exercise, as the ellipses more or less get bigger while retaining essentially the same shape in your images.
Plotted perspective
As this is an introductory exercise to perspective and vanishing points, there is not much of note to say here. Your horizontals correctly converge towards the established VPs, and your verticals remain parallel according to the rules of 2 point perspective. The only thing I want to note here is that more care should be used in applying your hatching lines, since there's some very noticeable overshooting, especially in the center-right box in the second page.
Rough perspective
Your linework is very clean and precise, and you show a good understanding of convergence in 1 point perspective, as your line extensions show. However, it should be noted that you have made things perhaps a bit too easy for you by keeping your boxes mostly close to the VP and by making your boxes very long in depth, both things that, while resulting in technically correct boxes, represent a limited variety of possible cases. You could have probably benefited more from experimenting with a wider variety of box shapes and positions, even if the eyeballed convergence may be a little worse at first.
Rotated boxes
This exercise and the next are notoriously harder than the rest, and are worth revisiting later on in the course. Anyway, you did quite well here: the central "cross" of boxes is rotated quite well, and all of the boxes are kept closely packed. As a whole, your composition verges more on the stocky side rather than the desired "ball" shape, but this will undoubtedly improve when you will revisit this exercise during later lessons.
Organic perspective
Your curves flow nicely through the page and the boxes follow them closely, getting bigger and bigger the closer they come to the viewer. You also didn't shy away from having overlapping boxes. The only thing I want to criticize here is that there are a couple of instances of boxes with repeated lines that look quite messy. Remember that repeated lines are not a tool to correct an unsatisfactory mark, and more often than not in results in less solid shapes when used this way. Instead, repeated lines are a tool that we should use with care to reinforce the solidity of our shapes: as such, we use repeated line only to apply line weight, and we do this only on the silhouette of the box and with a single, confident overlapping mark traced with the ghosting method.
Conclusion
While I think you did an overall quite good job for your first lesson, before moving on the 250 box challenge there are a couple of things I'd like you to exercise a bit more. For this reason, I will assign you 1 additional page of funnels and 1 page of rough perspective. In your funnels page I'd like you to try and pay extra care in keeping all of your ellipses aligned. This is the thing I'd like you to pay attention to the most. As secondary aspects, try to pay also attention to keep your ellipses a bit better within the funnels and, if you feel confident enough, try to reduce your repeated lines from 2 to 3. Lastly, I'd like you to try and vary the degree of foreshortening (the rotundness of your ellipse) the further you go away from the waist of the funnel. For your rough perspective page, try to not to make all of your boxes extra long and close to the vp. Don't get discouraged if your precision will seem diminished a bit at first. Your page should look for reference a bit like the ones from the examples in the exercise description: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/roughperspective
Also, if possible, I'd ask if you can upload images with a better resolution in the future, as some pages were quite hard to distinguish. Take all the time you need and don't rush things. Good luck and good work!
Next Steps:
1 page of funnels
1 page of rough perspective