Hello, and welcome to drawabox. I’ll be taking a look at your Lesson 1 submission today.

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking great. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. One thing you may consider doing, next time, is drawing your arcing lines a little bigger. I know that that’s how they are in the example homework (and it’s generally a great idea to mimic the composition of said homework), but for these, in particular, drawing a little bigger is better, as it’s, at least at this beginning level, easier to engage the shoulder during large motions as those they’d require. The ghosted lines/planes look fairly confident, if a little hesitant near the end. See if you can be a little less conscious of the end point, next time. What’s likely happening now, is that you’re slowing down as you approach it, in an effort to not overshoot. Instead, your focus should be in the smoothness and straightness of your line – nothing else.

Moving on to the ellipse section, the table of ellipses exercise looks fairly good. Your ellipses are quite confident, though I do suspect that you’re drawing these a little more quickly than you need to. What I mean by this is that I expect you’d be able to achieve a higher degree of accuracy, without necessarily sacrificing any confidence in the process, if you were to draw a tiny bit slower. More than drawing slower, however, this is a recommendation to spend some time to discover what your ideal speed is, by drawing ellipses at various ones. Anyway, the ones here are smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through, if not particularly varied with regards to their degrees/angles. Another thing: it seems like you’re flicking your pen off the page at the end of them; see if you can lift it, instead, to get rid of those tails at the end. The ellipses in planes do a good job of maintaining this same level of confidence. Their rotations don’t match up quite as well, but this is perfectly normal, for this exercise. What you’ll want to worry about is the number of rotations – be sure that it’s a minimum of 2, and no more than 3, as per the instructions. Finally, the funnels exercise looks good. Your ellipses here are snug, and properly cut in half by their axes; most of them anyway. One thing I’ll recommend is to not add another ellipse at the edge, if there’s not a minor axis to align it to. For the purposes of this exercise, an ellipse aligned to nothing is not of much use to us.

The plotted perspective exercise looks clean – nicely done.

The rough perspective exercise shows some solid improvements throughout the set, and though it’s in a good place by the end, I’ll still talk about some of the problems encountered throughout, just to be safe. The first is regarding line confidence. It’s easy to forget, because the big picture is often overwhelming, but there’s actually no difference between these lines, and the ones in the earlier exercises – at least as far as the process of drawing a line is concerned. Another minor thing regarding linework: each line is drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. The second issue is to do with the convergences themselves. I’ll quicky remind you that you’re not, in fact, obligated to stick to your original guesses. Actually, once you’ve got a point plotted, you’re encouraged to check it (by ghosting it to the horizon), and alter it, as needed. Don’t commit to a point unless you feel that it’s the correct one.

The rotated boxes exercise looks great. It’s big (huge positive!), its boxes are snug, and properly rotating. Them being snug is also the case round the back, though they struggle to rotate there, unfortunately – in other words, the far planes of your boxes are a little flat. This is perfectly expected, however, and something that we’ll address in the box challenge, so don’t stress. What matters is that you’ve taken your time, here, even adding some hatching to really clean things up at the end – nicely done.

Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks fantastic. Your compositions are quite interesting, but it’s the increase in size, and consistent, shallow foreshortening of your boxes that are really effective in communicating the illusion we’re after. The boxes themselves look quite good, too, and you’ll find that the amount you’ve drawn (it’s a lot!) will serve you well as preparation for the box challenge. The only issue is the occasional automatic reinforcing (which I brought up in the rough perspective exercise), which sometimes contradicts what the size of your box is saying, as a line that’s thicker has a habit of popping to the front, though this is not always what we want it to do.