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6:38 AM, Monday January 18th 2021

Hey hey; welcome to drawabox! I’ll be looking through your submission today. If it’s available to you, I’d suggest using imgur to upload your images next time. Now, let’s see.

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking good, particularly in page 2. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. One thing I notice is a fair bit of insecurity at the starting point. Try not to spend so long lining up your pen that your confidence suffers; after a bit, you can even rely on the built-up muscle memory from the previous strokes. The ghosted lines/planes look… okay. I feel like you might be drawing these a little too fast, so I’d spend some time experimenting with a bunch of different speeds. You’ll want to go for the one that gives you the most accurate, though still confident, lines. Skipping ahead to your organic perspective, I see that you’ve addressed the overshooting issue, also, though it has come at the price of your linework’s confidence. Ideally, you wouldn’t have to compromise. If you do, confidence is always the priority.

The table of ellipses exercise looks decent. The first thing I notice is that you’ve drawn through your ellipses a little much. 2-3 times is the recommendation; ideally, you’d stick to 2. Also, they have a tendence of stating off a little stiff, then stabilizing in a future rotation. Ideally, they’d be confident from the start. If you see this continue, you’re likely not ghosting enough. Remember to do so until comfortable. Finally, be a little more mindful of your pivot, too. Looking at how pointy some of these are, I get the impression that you’re subconsciously reverting to a lesser pivot (elbow/wrist), for the extra control it’ll grant you on those sharp turns. Always check back to make sure that each mark is originating from the shoulder. The ellipses in planes exercise has a huge issue: your ellipses haven’t been drawn through. It’s a little unfair to judge them like this, so I’ll reserve opinion until the revisions, but for now I’ll mention that you might want to spend a little longer ghosting these, too. A more complicated frame means more time spent making sure the ellipse properly fits into it. Though we’re not thinking of perspective right now, we still want the ellipse to fit within its bounds. The funnels exercise looks decent, if a little rushed. The entire point of this exercise is aligning your ellipses to the minor axis, and a lot of these aren’t. Here, too, spend a little more time in the ghosting stage.

The plotted perspective exercise looks nice, though its lineweight is a little too overt. Be subtle.

The rough perspective exercise looks a little better in its second page (the one in which you’ve actually plotted some start/end points for your lines, as per the instructions), but it has a lot of issues there, too. First off, even that, you don’t do always. Try to be consistent about it. All lines need start/end points, because all lines are drawn using the ghosting method. Second, your linework here is wobbly. Remember that there’s no difference between what you’re doing right now, and what you were doing in the lines section. Finally, remember that there’s no obligation to stick to your original guesses. Once you’ve placed a point down, check it again (by ghosting it to the horizon), and alter it if needed. Don’t commit to one until you’re 100% sure that it’s correct.

The rotated boxes exercise looks good, if a little small. Looking at your squares, it seems like you weren’t planning on this being any bigger from the start. Then again, seeing how they’re not actually overlapping the box, I’d bet these were drawn at the very end. If so, that is incorrect. These are among the first things you draw, as per the instructions. Leaving aside the linework, which I’ve address in a previous section, let’s talk about your boxes. Though they don’t, strictly speaking, rotate, and they aren’t always as snug as we’d like them to be, you’ve properly drawn through all of them. You’ve had some trouble identifying where the back corner falls in most of them, but this is normal, and something you’re not expected to get an intuition for until well into the box challenge. Also, though it’s good that you’ve gone through the trouble of adding lineweight/hatching, please be a little more consistent, and subtle, in regards to the lineweight, and use the proper pivot for the hatching.

The organic perspective exercise is mostly good. I’m wondering if you used the ghosting method for these lines, however. I don’t see many points on the page, and I also notice some automatic reinforcing (in this context, you extending a line that stops short), here and there, so I’m wondering if you just extended these arbitrarily. If you did, you shouldn’t. Outside of that, however, your boxes look good. They’re of a consistent, shallow foreshortening, and properly increasing in size as they follow the flow line. This pushes the illusion nicely.

Next Steps:

Before I have you move on to the box challenge, I’d like to see a few things.

1 page of ghosted planes, where your linework is confident, and, ideally, your lines don’t overshoot,

1 page of ellipses in planes; your ellipses being drawn through twice,

1 page of rough perspective, where it’s clear that some proper planning has gone into each point.

Good luck!

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:58 PM, Friday January 22nd 2021
5:58 AM, Saturday January 23rd 2021

Great improvement!, though there’s still a few things to look out for. In regards to your ellipses, be careful not to stiffen up. The purpose of ghosting is to familiarize your muscles with the motion you’ll be asking them to perform, so as to be comfortable. If you’re not, then don’t commit to it just yet. Should you, it’ll reflect itself in your linework. Ghost until comfortable, however long it takes, then commit. As for the rough perspective exercise, spend a little longer considering each line, if you can. One trick is to look at the shapes of your planes. Because of the rules of 1-point perspective, your near/far planes should be of the exact same shape, though not size (the far one is, of course, smaller.) If your points suggest otherwise, then there’s been a mistake somewhere, so consider re-working them. That said, having shown improvement in the areas I requested, I will move you onto the next step- the 250 box challenge. Continue practicing these concepts in your own time, and you’re bound to improve even further. Good luck!

Next Steps:

250 box challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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