3:07 AM, Sunday April 24th 2022
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 deforming some of your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/deformed This is likely happening because you are too worried about accuracy and are probably slowing down your stroke to compensate. 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 having the same issues although the shape did seem to improve as you worked through the exercise. 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/1/14/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and accuracy so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.
The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty good. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/9/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. I am noticing that you are redrawing lines on occasion and this is a habit you should try and get out of. Try and stick with the initial line you put down even if it's a bit off. Adding more lines just makes things messier and harder to read. 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 turned out decently. I like that you drew this nice and big as that 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. Obviously the rotations here could be better which is perfectly fine given the difficulty but this was a good effort overall. 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 and there is a lot less line wobble in this exercise compared to your rough perspective boxes. However, the redrawn lines here are definitely an issue. Your box constructions are decent for the most part but there are some wonky ones here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you. Before moving on though I'd like you to do one more page of this exercise as a revision. I want you to be focus more on confident linework. No redrawing lines this time. Just put down a confident line and stick with it.
Overall this was a solid submission that showed a nice deal of growth. Your line confidence and ellipses are both coming along nicely. The redrawing lines became a bit of an issue in the last few exercises and I'd like to resolve before you move on to the 250 box challenge. Otherwise, I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. Once you get that revision submitted and I take a look you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.
Next Steps:
One page of the organic perspective exercise - Focus on confident linework. No redrawing lines.