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3:21 PM, Sunday November 5th 2023

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along well. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on a consistent smooth ellipse shape. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes although you are slightly deforming some of your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/deformed You are compromising your overall ellipse shape by adjusting for accuracy midstroke. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. Your ellipses in funnels are looking smoother overall. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a good start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting mostly confident linework here along with some slight wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/wobbling This is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced. You are doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise was obviously a bit of a struggle. Although you drew this at a decent size one thing that would have helped you here would have been to just draw this a bit bigger overall. Drawing bigger really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. You did a good job drawing through your boxes but one of the reasons this exercise started to fall apart on you is because you didn't keep the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/21/guessing Keeping the gaps narrow and consistent really helps with inferring information about neighboring boxes rotation and proportion. You are struggling with the rotations on the outer row which is perfectly fine given the difficulty of this exercise. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. This is a great exercise to come back to after a few lessons to see how much your spatial thinking ability has improved. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework which is great. Your box constructions are fairly wonky throughout this exercise and you need to develop a better sense for how box lines converge to vps so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a really solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge. Keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:11 PM, Monday November 6th 2023

Thank you!

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