Hi, and welcome to drawabox. I’m TA Benj, and I’ll be taking a look at your Lesson 1 submission today.

Starting off, your superimposed lines look good; they’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. The ghosted lines look fairly confident, too. The same can be said for the ghosted planes, but I do wonder if your pages in the imgur album are in order. If they are, that would mean that you started off drawing start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of your planes (correct), and then decided to stop for whatever reason (incorrect). So, perhaps, they’re out of order. If not, however, know that you should be plotting those. Notice how when you don’t, your lines tend to change their trajectory, or become wobbly, near their ends? It’s because your brain has more to think about than just drawing a line from point A to point B; it also needs to think about where they’re going.

Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise is well done (save for that one instance where your ellipses float inside of their frame, instead of touching all sides of it (page 1, row 5, column 2)). Beyond that, however, your ellipses have a goal, and they’re smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. P.S. it’s good to think of this ‘goal’ as the start/end points in the lines exercise – it’s there so you don’t have to think of too many different things when you execute your mark. The ellipses in planes are mostly well done. There’s a few instances where they deform a little, in an effort to fill as much of the frame as possible, but given how big your frames here are, I don’t consider it an error. (Similar to how some of the smaller ellipses in the table of ellipses exercise are a little wobbly, but I don’t mention it as a mistake, since small marks are notoriously hard to drawn from the shoulder.) Finally, the funnels are well done. Do remember, however, that the degrees of your ellipses here are meant to increase as they move away from the major axis, not the other way around. If you’re not confident in being able to do that, then at least try to keep them consistent.

The plotted perspective exercise looks clean.

The rough perspective exercise is mostly well done. The linework (line quality, that is – more on this in a second) looks solid, and the convergences start off strong, and show some nice improvement throughout the set. The issue comes from the automatic reinforcing habit. I’ll remind you that each line is to be drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. Try not to get into the habit of redrawing a line that you consider to have come out ‘wrong’ – even something as simple as extending a line that stops short, is not something we encourage.

Solid attempt at the rotated boxes exercise. Its rotation is a little slight, but you’ve kept your boxes nice and snug. This is less the case in the back (both the rotation, and the snug-ness (is that a word?)), but this is to be expected, so no need to stress about it – we’ll address this in a second, in the box challenge.

Save for the automatic reinforcing habit, which we’ve discussed, the organic perspective exercise is well done. It’s boxes are a little same-y, and their foreshortening a little too shallow, but they’re well constructed, and flow decently enough, so solid work.