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12:57 AM, Thursday March 12th 2020

Hey there Nyarle, I'll be going over your work today so let's get to it!

So starting with your super imposed lines, you've got quite a bit of fraying. While your lines are pretty confident, at this point it's time to start finding a good pace to tighten up those groupings. Also be careful with using your elbow vs your shoulder as I see some arcing in some of your lines. Your ghosted lines are on the right track, and while there is some wobbling, for the most part your lines are looking confident and executed from the shoulder. On the other hand, some of your lines get very consciously steered instead of trusting the muscle memory built up during ghosting. Just keep practicing, as this is only your introduction to these exercises and methods and you are intended to keep practicing these in your warmups daily.

Moving on to your ellipses, while you are struggling some with keeping the groupings tight you do improve quite a bit throughout your exercises. Your ellipses in planes, while rough, show an understanding of where the ellipses should be making contact to ensure they are fitting snugly within the bounds of the planes. The ellipses in your tables are looking good, shaped nicely, and packed cleanly. Finally, on your funnels exercise you are doing a pretty good job keeping your minor axes aligned to the funnel axes, and while not perfect, it is pretty close especially with your large ellipses at the ends.

With your rough perspective boxes your lines are very nice here, especially in the second page! There are some instances where you redraw your lines, so I want to discourage that before it sets into a habit. The act of redrawing a bad line only serves to bring more attention to your mistake where the viewer would most likely miss it otherwise. Your horizontal lines are parallel to the horizon and verticals perpendicular so good job there keeping your boxes oriented correctly. Your converging lines are also on the right track and your accuracy to far-off points will only get better with time.

Moving on to your rotated boxes, this is honestly a very nice attempt. You've hit all the major points: boxes are rotated and packed neatly. Your lines are a little shaky and lacking in confidence, and you could have drawn larger to give your brain more room to reason through this exercise, but overall it's solid. This exercise is meant to serve as an introduction to new types of spatial problems and solution methods and a "good" result is not required or even expected, but you've done a good job here.

Finally, let's look at your organic perspective. Here your lines are getting very haphazard. As students approach the finishing line of lesson 1 it's common to start rushing, but you have to win that mental battle in drawing time and time again; rushing will never help. Always ghost, always take your time, never rush. Your box perspective is off to a good start: you're mindful of line convergence and you don't have much divergence going on where your near planes are smaller than your far planes so good job there. In terms of composition and the illusion of 3d space on the page, you do a good job with your scaling and overlapping forms to sell depth on the page, but it's all overshadowed by the sloppy line work and really breaks the illusion before it can take hold.

Next Steps:

And thus, your lesson 1 is complete and will be marked as such. Your next stop is the 250 box challenge. Be sure to take your time with every line and take heed of the 50/50 rule introduced in lesson 0. This will not only help you avoid burn out but also help you to avoid rushing. Keep up the good work and see you next time.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:45 AM, Thursday March 12th 2020

Thank you! I'm confident I tackled my issues with the box challenge, now I'll just have to wait a while. Keep up the good work :)

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Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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