Hello, Yellowgirlmc:

Before i begin with your critique, let me add some feedback about your submission. Try to upload the album in order so it is easier to critique. Also upload all the required exercises in the correct amount, i can't evaluate your progress properly if you submit a half completed lesson. I am missing 1 page of superimposed lines.

This critique is going to be a hard pill to shallow so be prepared.

Critique:

Lines

You are capable of make straight confident lines as showed by your results in the ghosted lines exercises. In your superimposed lines you have fraying in your lines which normally is not that big of a deal but in your case this fraying starts too early. I think the reason is that you tried to rush through the lesson 1 and this is just another symptom of doing that. I will refer to this more in each section to make clear that rushing is enough by itself to ruin any kind of attempt of draw properly.

All the content learnt in drawabox is supposed to be additive. This means that if it teaches you how to draw a line, and then teaches you how to make a square with lines, you are supposed to apply the content of lines into squares. The lines on your ghosted exercise are excellent, but comparing it with the rest of the lines in your submission show that you didn't ghost as much as you did with the ghosted exercise in the others. This is a bad thing because i am not 100% sure if you can learn the last part of the lesson without having the most important concept of the first lesson learnt.

To condense in a simple phrase. Confident lines are always the most important thing in a drawing. If you make confident lines but mess up the rest, the draw will look like another thing but at least seems like a drawing. Wobbly lines are so missleading to the viewer that the brain can't do anything to see a drawing in there. Confident lines should be your first priority always. If you apply this you will improve by an unmeasurable amount your current skill. For doing that you just have to apply the process teached in the lesson for every stroke you do. Plan and mark, ghost and then draw.

If you are having trouble with the transition between ghosting and drawing, see it like this:

The final stroke is right after ghosting without any pause between both steps. It should feel like you are ghosting and someone else come behind you without you noticing it and pushes your pen down while you start one of your ghosting motions.

Don't worry about spending too much time doing the entire process. You will get better with practice and depend less on this as time goes on. You will always have to do the entire process but as you practice it more, you will optimize this process. You will have plenty of time to practice this as you go through the 250 box challenge. But only if you take the process seriously and ghost enough each stroke. Don't skip it because you will have to use that skill in following lessons and each time you rush over a skill practice you will have to slow down later on.

Your planes suffer the same problem of rushing over them and skip the ghosting phase or doing it wrong. You tried to adjust the trajectory of your lines at the end of the stroke. This is a bad habit. Don't try to adjust in the last moment. You have 3 phases for each stroke and each one of them has one single purpose. The marks and plan phase is supposed to be only about thinking where do you want your line to be; the ghost phase is about practicing the stroke so it can be confident and match your plan made in the previous phase; and the final stroke is about don't let your brain time to adjust the trajectory of your stroke. So depending how you fail, you can practice more that phase in the next attempt. In your case, your marks seems to be always where they should, but the lines don't match that marks so it can be because of your ghosting or your final stroke phase. But we can see that your lines are not straight and confident, and that's responsability of the final stroke so you have to correct it by drawing faster the final stroke, closing your eyes while drawing the final or stroke or any strategy that works for you. The most difficult phase to correct and improve is the planning phase so i'm sure you can solve this problem.

Ellipses

You have more confidence doing ellipses that lines which is surprising because it usually is the opposite. You did too much repetition in each ellipse, the perfect amount is between 2/3 but you are currently aiming to 3/4. It's not needed, you can use that extra time to ghost a bit more.

You did too little ellipses in one of your funnels. Try to always avoid drawing too little in your exercises, that kind of drawing are usually done with the wrist and it's too difficult to do them from the shoulder when you are starting this journey.

You rotate each ellipse you draw and that's why your ellipses don't match the line in the funnels exercise and responsible of the empty spaces in the table of ellipses too. You have a problem here but you shouldn't be solving it before working on the confidence of your ellipses a bit more. After working on it you can retake this problem and try to adjust the degree and orientation of each ellipse. I recommend you to have this problem on pause until lesson 2 where you will have plenty of time to work on it because you have a lot to focus on first.

Boxes

I would like to give useful feedback here but you rushed so much on this part so i will have to guess your problems because they are hidden behind unconfident wobbly lines. Don't worry too much about it, i will try to guide you a little more at the end of the critique so you can fix the majority your problems.

In the plotted perspective you rushed too besides having the ruler helping you. Seriously we need to work on your patience. With the help of a ruler almost every line should be completely straight but some of your lines have similar problems as your handmade ones. If you did some of the lines on this exercise hand made, please be sure to read slowly your exercises next time they are carefully designed and they should be carefully read.

You didn't extent the lines to the vanishing point. This is the whole point of the exercise, to teach you how far you are from plan correctly your lines. I will repeat myself, skipping parts of the process will slow down in the future. Try to stick with the method of drawabox.

In the organic perspective you did a speedrun. No marks, no ghosting and you even draw multiple lines with a single stroke. This is the problem of not taking the previous parts in mind for this exercise.

In the rotated boxes you accumulate all the mistakes i have previously mentioned. I could identify some perspective mistakes, your horizontal lines didn't rotate. The central box face is a square and the faces on the left and right (let's call them central column boxes) are properly rotated and they are not a square anymore. But the faces of the boxes in the borderline next to the central column boxes, have the same rotation on the horizontal lines than the central columns boxes. They shouldn't. When you rotate a box, one of the vanishing points should be moving near the box and the other should be moving away. In this case, both vanishing points stay in the same place after the rotation.

Fixing your problems

First of all, congratulations for reading this far. If you don't want to punch me in the face after pointing out so many of your mistakes you have a frozen heart. Let me apologize if you feel bad about anything i wrote but believe me that i wouldn't write one thousand words if it's not for helping you.

I will go first with the problems i think you have to solve before continuing with more drawabox content:

Patience

I think your problem currently is far from grinding. You have to learn that the process of drawing something is long and takes time even for professionals. It's completely normal to take a long time to draw something and you should be preparing for this at the start of the journey or you will burn out too quickly. Also the most of the learning process happens while you are sleeping after a day of practice, so you will learn more about lesson 1 if you complete it in 7 days than if you rush over it in one go. You have to let the knowledge to slowly sink in. There is no exception for this rule. If you want to learn something it will take time.

I'm going to ask you more than what i usually ask as revision to work on this. I don't want to see so many signs of rushing as i have seen this time.

As an aditional note, rushing is useless if you want to receive feedback or improve in general. You will have to wait anyways to receive a critique, and the worse that critique is presented the more time will consume to a person to critique because he will have to spend some of the time you didn't while reading, and rewrite the things you read but didn't apply in order to rush over the content.

If you want to continue drawing, at least apply the 50% rule and draw for fun. But don't expect to take this course in a single month. I have been doing daily practices from 3 months ago and i'm only at the end of lesson 2. This is a longer path that you can't even imagine. The amount of people that give up without reaching lesson 3 is terrifying. You will need resilence and patience. Rushing will burn you out, because it's impossible to complete drawabox in one go, even in multiple sessions... I aim to a lesson/challenge per month and still feel like i could be rushing too much...

Confident lines

Confident lines are not something you can achieve one time and then have in your pocket forever. They take some effort to make. This effort has to be made every single time, you can't avoid it. You should work on every line as if it was the most important line in what are you drawing. I know you are not going to reach that perfection every single time, but you have to try. If you do a line and fail, analyse yourself where did you make the mistake, in which phase, how can you work around it. If you can't find the answer by yourself, ask for feedback on discord and apply that new knowledge for the following lines.

Reading

I know it's hard to have in mind all the content that is displayed in an exercise. But at least, try to avoid the mistakes that are already displayed there and do a quick peek at the final result is displayed at the end of each section so you can detect when you are skipping content.

The people that will do the critiques for you is people that have completed at least that lesson so trying to rush over it without the community noticing it is almost impossible. If someone is harder to fool than a teacher, is other students that also thought about fooling while doing that lesson.

Revision

I want you to complete some aditional exercises with some goals in mind. All this exercises should be completed in order and they shouldn't be done in one go. Avoid this advice at your own risk.

1. I want one aditional page of ghosted lines. Focus on confident lines. You already got this exercise in your first attempt but as you didn't apply it later on i think you need to retake it.

2. I want one aditional page of ghosting planes. Focus on confident lines. If you plan a square, you do confident lines and you end up with a triangle, it will be okey. Avoid adjusting your lines, the moment you commit to draw you can't change the motion.

3. You can choose here. One page of organic perspective drawing through the boxes or two pages of organic perspective but without having to draw through them. Focus on confident lines. Do marks for each line and be sure to apply the entire plan-ghost-draw method.

4. I want one aditional page of rotated boxes. Focus on apply all the knowledge you got from the critique and the extra practice and apply it here. If you can also solve the perspective problem i talk about in the critique, you will gain extra points!

If you have any doubt or question doing this revision, you can ping me or send me a DM in discord. I have written 2 thousand words and spend 2 hours with this critique so i want to be sure you learn for my own sanity hehe.