Hello, Joaz:

Welcome to Drawabox! Let's see what you can improve.

Lines

Your superimposed lines are great, lines start from the marked point and there is fraying on the other end but that's normal. We are not machines after all.

Now comes the important misconception: you are prioritizing accuracy over smoothness.

Before every mark, you are going to draw you should follow the 3 phase process. Plan, mark and execute. Each of the steps is focused on a field completely different from one another. Planning is related to how many things you know about what you are going to draw. Marking is related to how you organize that knowledge and communicate it to the viewer. Executing is related to how you join the marks you marked.

Each step is dependent on the previous one. If your planning is bad, you can't make good marks. If you fail while marking, your execution isn't going to communicate what you planned. But on the final step occurs something curious, if you don't match your marks exactly but you did a smooth execution it's going to be good (although you probably communicate another thing or use a style you didn't plan).

Your planning and marking are good (at least in the lines exercises). The problem is the execution. Now that we know which phase you are struggling with we should know what problems you have.

• Your lines are wobbly. So you are trying to correct the line as you draw it but there isn't that much hatching so I think you are trying to apply the process but you didn't understand it well enough.

• Your lines arc outwards sometimes. So you are drawing from the elbow instead of drawing from the shoulder.

We have 2 problems and luckily we have solutions for both:

• To achieve better smoothness in your lines you need to make the line as if you weren't looking. Everyone can make a smooth line randomly, so you are perfectly capable of it. The thing is you want some accuracy, that's when ghosting comes in. Ghosting is a process that affects your muscle memory, but the long-term memory is not going to make you an artist just by ghosting 8 times a stroke. You have to exploit short-term muscle memory, which happens just after you did the first stroke. It should feel like the superimposed line exercise but with the pen lifted all the time. You start to iterate joining your marks as explained in the ghosting method section and when you feel that you are reaching good enough accuracy, you put randomly (it's important to do it randomly, to trick your brain) your pen down. There should be no pause between ghosting and doing the final execution. It should be as if someone presses your hand down while ghosting. The less your brain can modify the smoother the line would be. Every motion tends to be smooth if it's not altered midway. You can check a more visual explanation in this comic. You have to avoid course corrections at all costs. Remember, smooth over accuracy.

• To avoid arching you have to draw from the shoulder. This is exaggerated in the lesson but you have to do it as much as you can. If you are drawing on a table in A4 format you are going to draw with your elbow by instinct because you don't need that much reach. The thing is you will. To avoid that situation when you need it (and that's where the arc forms) we use our shoulder as the pivot point of each stroke. That's a problem because we are not using that muscle rarely on a day-to-day basis. The drawabox course is intended to be drawn that way so you can train that muscle. The problems (myself included) a lot of us have is that we don't even know how that muscle feels so it's hard to use it when you don't know how to use it. I recommend you an exercise that worked for me. Stand up and go next to a wall. Extend your arm fully extended and place your hand almost touching the wall. Now ghost some imaginary lines on the wall. Play around a bit. Try to draw some lines, ellipses, plains, and boxes. Take note in your mind how the shoulder muscle feels, and how the elbow is almost not used. But as you will see you need some elbow intervention to draw. The important thing to know is that we need both motions, the shoulder, and the elbow but we can establish the pivot point on each of those. If you use the elbow as the pivot, you will not be able to use your shoulder motions (that's a third of your arm potential set of motions). Sit facing the table again, lift your elbow a bit in the air, and try to not rest too much of your arm's weight on your hand, play around drawing freely some forms on the paper. Try to balance which muscles you rely most of your efforts on.

If you achieve these 2 improvements you probably will make two of the most important steps this course is designed to teach.

Planes

Good planning and marking. Nothing much to say. Your lines here suffer from the problems mentioned above.

Ellipses

You have a similar problem with smoothness with your ellipses but even if it's similar I would treat it as different. Organic lines are harder than straight ones because there are more complex motions involved. You did well drawing over your ellipses 2 times, keep doing that in future lessons, you will need that extra practice.

To achieve smoothness with ellipses you have to discover your sweet spot for the ghosting of organic lines. I can't discover that spot for you, but I can tell you what you want to be looking for. That sweet spot is a balance between speed and control. You need enough speed to avoid course correction and enough control to rely on the muscle memory built on the ghosting phase. Also try both orientations: clockwise and counter-clockwise. I had to speed up my ghosting and execution a bit to teach my muscles how ellipses are and then I slowed down a bit to gain some control. I'm still struggling with ellipses but at least now it's more uncommon to find potatoes in my drawings (ellipses with random bumps).

Boxes

This is the point where your line fundamentals could not support enough stress and fell off. Don't worry we can play around with it but sadly some of your errors were not only execution-related but also planning and marking. These are easier to assess because marking the corners of a box is easier than drawing it.

I think you marked well for your current level and you will get there with time but currently, you made some mistakes that could be easily fixed with more planning. Look at your bottom attempt in rough perspective. There are a lot of lines that are not parallel to the horizon and that's an impossible situation without rotating or deforming the box. That's why those boxes feel distorted because they are. That could be fixed by changing the marks. And here comes the correction: Don't be afraid of putting another mark on the paper if your marks were a bit off. There is a statement of "don't attempt a line twice" in drawabox, but that only applies to lines, as they are execution phase. You can attempt a couple of times more while marking, especially if you are drawing something that you are not familiar with.

Rotated boxes have near no rotation. The size of the boxes was really good! This exercise is easier if you make them big. There are gaps between the boxes too big to let you rotate them as the exercise told you to. Some lines don't match each corresponding neighbor reference and here is where all your problems aggregate one on top of each other and explode. BUT this is the exercise intention. It's a reflection of what you know about lesson 1. The more you grasp the better this exercise becomes. It's a quality gate that isn't expected to be a perfect boxy sphere. In your case, it is a grid of boxes that don't curve along any axis. The goal of this exercise is to rotate the boxes but have the pivot point where both axis cross. You rotated some boxes but had the pivot point inside of them. That's where you have to improve.

Organic perspectives suffer from the same problems as the rest of your boxes. The lack of the backlines just exacerbates them all. Also have in mind that when Uncomfortable says that something is optional, he means that you should improve a lot more by doing it but you won't need that improvement at that moment... but you will eventually. So I recommend that every time you show some sort of statement like that, follow it as an order, it will multiply your results. As a reviewer, I saw that the students that get the better improvements are the ones that follow all the recommendations even the optional ones. But that's your decision after all.

Verdict

I will ask you for a revision. You need to improve that line confidence with the tips I gave you. Re-read the lesson, play around a bit until you grasp or figure out some of the problems I mentioned earlier and try to overcome them in the following exercises (in the mentioned order if possible):

• 1 page of ghosted planes. Focus on smoothness on every exercise not only on this one.

• 1 page of the table of ellipses. Try to find that sweet spot and don't stress too much if you get out of the limits. If you make a smooth ellipse but you miss the target will be good for me.

• 1 page of rough perspective. Try to spend more time when planning. Image how your lines will extend while you place the marks and try to correct them if you detect something off.

• 1 page of rotated boxes. I'm sorry to have you attempt this again as it is a bit grindy. But this is the only exercise that lets you grasp a good concept about rotation and I think you can learn a lot after fixing all the previous problems. You need to show you here all your progress so I recommend you to start one corner at a time, so if you mess up one corner you can learn from it for the next one. I just want to see a good enough result, nothing has to be perfect, focus on rotating the boxes compared to the central box.

I hope it helps. Keep working on it! Fundamentals are one of the most important parts of drawabox to the point that Lessons 1, 2, and 3 have 80% of the knowledge (according to the Pareto principle). From that onwards is just delivered practice.