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5:11 AM, Sunday February 16th 2020

Hey there, TA Meta here to look over your work so let's get started. I'll address what you've said in your post down in my crit for your organic perspective, but note that us TAs and Uncomfortable don't expect perfection from anyone, only your best effort at this point in time.

Beginning with your superimposed lines, these look confident for the most part, however I do see signs that you're more preoccupied with accuracy than confidence here, with quite a bit of wobbling evident on your curved lines as well as your brain bringing your arm back into line whenever its strayed off the mark. The biggest part of drawing confidently is not allowing your brain to micromanage your movements and accepting the outcome of the line once you start. Your ghosted lines and planes are definitely an improvement in terms of confidence, which is good to see. There's a little bit of arcing to them, but this can be counteracted by consciously trying to arc slightly in the opposite direction to what your arm naturally does.

Next to your tables of ellipses and these are looking great, you've executed your ellipses with a good amount of confidence and with the exception of a couple of the smaller ones, they're a really nice round shape. Next to your ellipses in planes and it's fantastic to see nice confident ellipses here. Oftentimes we see students lose confidence in their ellipses in order to try and hit all four points, but you haven't done that here, these are really great. Naturally, further accuracy will come with time but you're well on track.

Finally, your funnels are probably the weakest out of this set of exercises and it feels like you got a little overwhelmed with all the different asks here, at the cost of those lovely confident ellipses. In terms of alignment, you seem to have done a pretty good job in the middle part of the one on the right, but slowly the ellipses have slanted off from the minor axis, this is something that you can work on in your warm-ups as being able to align an ellipse to a minor axis becomes really important in constructing organic forms and cylinders in later lessons.

Onto your rough perspective now and these are looking pretty good. You've done a good job keeping your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line. Your line confidence here isn't great, so just remember that each box is made up of 12 lines and for each of those lines, we put the same amount of planning and confident execution into them as we would any of our ghosted lines.

Next onto your rotated boxes and you've done a good job here keeping the gaps between the boxes consistent and managed a pretty good amount of rotation out of your boxes. Your linework got a bit rough here and you were definitely a bit heavyhanded with the pen as well. I also suspect you might've drawn it quite small, so make sure that you draw your exercises as large as possible, because this gives our brains plenty of room to work through the problem.

Finally, your organic perspective is off to a good start, you've got a good amount of variation in the size of your boxes, which is conveying a nice sense of scale in the scenes. You do need to work on your line confidence and trying not to automatically correct your lines when they're incorrect. We discourage this because we should be planning each and every line we put down, and kneejerk correcting our work can result in undermining what we've already drawn and breaking the illusion of form. It's better to work with the mistake.

The last thing I want to address is that these last two exercises are fully designed and intended that you take one try at them and then submit for critique as they're supposed to be really difficult. You're not meant to nail them down the first time, or even the 10th time, these exercises are there to introduce you to a new concept you may not have otherwise considered, and prime you to take on the 250 box challenge. By stopping to grind on a particular exercise, you deny yourself the opportunity to receive useful critique to improve, and in the process of trying to perfect things, end up stuck while others move on and pick it up later. All this is outlined in this page, which you might not have seen when you started as it was part of the 1 February update.

Next Steps:

Don't grind. Take your time to plan out your lines and feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge. Good luck.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:51 AM, Sunday February 16th 2020
edited at 10:52 AM, Feb 16th 2020

Hey Meta, Thank you.

I really appreciate your words and I didn't notice the new page about grinding.

I will do more funnels / superimposed line in warmup and will not try to correct myself and be more confident.

Let's the quest begin. 250 boxes ahead of me!

edited at 10:52 AM, Feb 16th 2020
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