Welcome to drawabox, and congrats on completing lesson 1! Let’s look at it, one exercise at a time.

Starting off, your superimposed lines are looking solid. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. You’ve got a good deal of variety here, too. Your ghosted lines/planes look mostly good. They’re confident, though not necessarily all the way through, and properly lined up at the start. They seem to be missing their start/end points for their non-diagonal center lines, also. There’s some instances where you’ll stop short of, or overshoot your end point, but this is perfectly fine for now. Regarding the first issue, the specific problem seems to be that they’re a little wobbly, near the end. This is not exactly uncommon. In an attempt to not stop short of, or overshoot their end point, students have a habit of decreasing their speed, as they’re approaching it, but this is incorrect. In this exercise, our #1 priority is for our lines to be smooth, and straight – their accuracy is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. So, rather than being overly conscious of the end point, and slowing down as you’re approaching it, it becomes important to maintain a consistent speed throughout. Regarding the start/end points of the non-diagonal center lines; these are important! You may think that it’s fine to skip these, as the edges of the plane already tell you where a line needs to start/end, but this is incorrect. For starters, because they do much more than that: they also tell you the position (whether it goes through the center point of the plane) of your line, and its direction (whether it heads to the same vanishing point as its adjacent neighbors). More than that, however, they reflect our philosophy of thinking before you draw. Rather than trying to do all of these things at once, we split our work into manageable chunks, that we tackle one at a time. This is the sort of thing that’s important to do even if you feel confident in your ability to nail all of these things in one go.

Moving on to the ellipse section, your ellipses look nice. They’re smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. Their rotations may not match up quite as well as we might expect them to, but that’s the sort of thing that improves over time, so don’t stress. Also, they’re all of a consistent degree/angle in a frame, and you’ve been sure to try out a bunch of both. By the way, those tails on your ellipses happen when you flick your pen off the page at the end of your rotations. Try lifting it off, instead (maintaining the ghosting motion until it’s fully off the page). The ellipses in planes look good, also. They maintain their previous smoothness/roundness, despite having to fit into these more complicated frames. If you’ve noticed your rotations having a harder time ‘syncing up’, as compared to their counterparts in the previous exercise, don’t stress; it’s normal. As you draw more and more of these, upping your mileage, your actual skill will go up, also. Finally, the funnels look great. You’re still fully mindful of your priorities, and your ellipses do a good job of fitting into their respective frames, and being cut into two equal, symmetrical halves by their respective axes.

Finally, we arrive at the box section. The plotted perspective exercise looks clean. Your linework is solid, and the backlines have been placed correctly – nice job. I will mention, however, that your lineweight is a little too overt. Remember that lineweight is meant to suggest things to the viewer, not scream them. For this purpose, a single superimposed line is generally enough. You may find yourself wondering ‘shouldn’t I keep at it, if I miss the original line, and haven’t, technically, applied any lineweight to it?’ The answer is no. These exercises are, ultimately, just practice. Getting something wrong is not a concern, and, in the case of inaccurate lineweight, not something we point out, or even take note of. Too much of it, however, is a mistake, as it draws the viewer’s attention to itself, and away from your intended focal point.

The rough perspective exercise has a number of (admittedly small) issues. Let’s address them one at a time. For starters, your line quality is a little lacking, here. There’s no reason for this. As explained in this section, what you’re doing here is no different from what you were doing in the ghosted lines exercise: drawing a line, from point A to point B, over and over. Certainly, your lines are coming together to form something else – possibly much more overwhelming – but this bears no relevance to the task at hand: the process of drawing a line hasn’t changed. Meaning, if they could be confident there, they can be confident here, too. Try not to get too caught up in the big picture, if you can. Related to this, there’s a little bit of automatic reinforcing, too. Remember that each line is to be drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. This is useful for a number of reasons. First, since one chance is all you get, you’re encouraged to put your all into it, as opposed to the more ‘fine art’ approach of sketching roughly, hoping that the correct line is somewhere in there. In other words, it encourages you to think before you draw. Second, it makes it easier, for both you, and me, to see where your mistakes lie, and pick out a next step for you. Ultimately, this is something you’re going to need to deal with, for it to get better, so sweeping it under the rug does you no favors. Finally, it gives the mark an opportunity to ‘blend in.’ As mentioned earlier, one of the most common misconceptions that students have is that adding more ink to a mistake fixes it. Quite the contrary: where normally it wouldn’t been lost in a sea of other marks, that make up your drawing, now it screams its presence to the viewer, not only drawing their attention to your blunders, but drawing it away from your intended focal point. Long story short: don’t correct an incorrect line (with anything but a differently colored pen!) Now, this might be as a result of you drawing too small. In general, we encourage our students to draw big. Bigger movements are, for one, easier on the shoulder (you might’ve come across this question, in the FAQ, that asks whether it’s okay to draw small lines from the elbow/wrist, as they’re more comfortable from that pivot), but, more than that, they allow us the space needed for our brains to work through the various spatial problems these exercises throw at us. Next, there’s the convergences. One issue that I notice, which could be as a result of the thickness of your pen, is that there’s not too many points on the page. What I mean by this, is that you’ve, it seems to me, not spent too long considering the direction each line should head in. This is not uncommon: students sometimes assume that they need to stick to their original guesses, but this is not necessary. In fact, you’re heavily encouraged to plot a point, check it (by ghosting it to the horizon), and alter it, if needed. That’s, ultimately, the reason we commit our planning stage to points: they’re easy to ignore, in the context of the drawing as a whole, so having a couple of extra ones if of no concern to us. Second, much related to this, the convergences are a little lacking. I see this a lot. Getting a little overwhelmed, students default to their prior knowledge of what a box should look like: they guess; and of course, what comes to mind is a cube. But what we’re drawing here is not a box with 3 sets of 4 parallel lines, but rather one that has 2 sets of parallel lines, and 1 set of lines that converge towards a single point (hence: 1-point perspective). As a result of this, our boxes come out looking a little strange, but it’s how they’re supposed to look. Trust your points! So that there’s no confusion, let me give you a quick step by step, of what I recommend you do in this exercise. Assuming you’ve got your frame, horizon line, vanishing point, and near plane (the initial square/rectangle that you draw), your first step is to pick one of its points, and ghost a line from it to the vanishing point. This is one of your depth lines. Place a point in the path of this line, closer to the plane, than the VP. This next part is important: check whether this point is correct, by ghosting it all the way to the horizon. If it intersects it at the VP, it is. Otherwise, it is not, so adjust it. Repeat this process until satisfied. Next, pick another point (ideally, one of the 2 adjacent ones, rather than the one opposite it), and do the same. Be careful!: this time, you’re not only placing a point in the path of the line, but also making sure that said point forms a line that’s either parallel or perpendicular to the horizon, when connected to the first point. Check this point, too (both aspects of it). Repeat this for the 3rd, and 4th points (for the 4th one, there’s no need to ghost; provided the other 3 are correct, you simply complete the square/rectangle). Again, here, you check your points. Do they seem right? Is the overall shape similar to that of the near plane? If everything is good, and there’s no need for further adjustments, now you commit. After you’ve got a full page, extend the correction lines, and study them. Look at your most common errors, and try to come up with ideas regarding how to fix them. They don’t need to be correct – I’m here to guide you, if needed – they just need to show an attempt. One interesting way to check whether your box is correct, before you’ve committed to it, is to look at the shapes of its planes – specifically, the near plane, and the far plane opposite it. Because we’re working in 1-point perspective, these planes need to be identical in shape, but not size (the far one, of course, is smaller). If you notice that this is not the case (say, if the front plane is a square, and the back plane a rectangle), then you know that there’s been a mistake somewhere, so reconsider your points. If you find yourself needing some further help, consider checking this video, by our very own ScyllaStew. You don’t need to watch it in its entirety, but observe her planning, and perhaps draw alongside her for a bit, to get a proper understanding of what’s expected of you for this exercise.

Moving on to the rotated boxes exercise, this is fairly well done, though not without its issues. For one, it seems like you’ve not drawn through all of your boxes. In fact, the only ones you have seem to be the ones along the vertical/horizontal axes. The lack of guidelines has caused you some trouble, when it comes to constructing their far planes, in particular. That said, what’s here looks good, and, ultimately, all we ask is that the exercise has been completed to the best of the student’s ability, which this one seems to have been.

The organic perspective exercise, too, looks good on the surface, though has some errors we need to address. Mainly, its lack of planning. It seems like, instead of plotting start/end points, ghosting between them, and then committing to the line, you’ve simply extended your lines arbitrarily. This is incorrect. You’ll remember from the ghosted lines section that the ghosting method is to be used on every single mark that you make for this course, and hopefully beyond. Save for that, however, things look good. Your boxes show a clear increase in size, and maintain a consistent, shallow foreshortening throughout.