Welcome (back!) to drawabox, and congrats on completing Lesson 1. Let’s take a look at it, shall we? Before we do so, however, I’ll let you know that we don’t insist that our students go through the box challenge a second time. That said, if you choose to submit your old one, please draw an additional 50 boxes (that more accurately reflect your current skill), and submit them with it. Now then, onto the submission!

Your superimposed lines are strong. They’re smooth, properly lined up at the start, and of a consistent trajectory. Your ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, also – I’m pleased to see how boldly you’re missing a lot of your end points. That said, you’ll not always plot them. The first step of the ghosting method is ‘plot start/end points’, so you’re expected to, always (I’m looking at the non-diagonal center lines of the planes, specifically).

The table of ellipses exercise looks alright. My main issue with it is that your ellipses have been drawn through a little much, and this seems to have, in part, been done to hide some of the confidence issues therein. For now, I’ll remind you that more so than accuracy, it’s confidence that we’re most concerned with here (in other words, an ellipse that is smooth, and rounded, but overshoots (or stop short of!) its frame, is correct; the opposite is not), and request that you draw through your ellipses exactly 2 times, from now on. The ellipse in planes/funnels are quite similar to these, unfortunately, but on the bright side, save for that issue, all other aspects of them are looking solid.

The plotted perspective exercise looks good, though it seems like you missed the instruction to split your page into framed compositions. As a result, you’ve only got 4 boxes here; one of which doesn’t have a back line.

The rough perspective exercise is a little mixed. The convergences improve nicely – though they still have a ways to go – but a lot of this improvement seems to come as a result of you more consistently ignoring the instruction that the lines of the far planes are parallel/perpendicular to the horizon. Don’t just check that the line heads in the correct direction; also check that its relationships with its neighbors are what they should be. As a little tip, the far plane of the box should be identical in shape to its near plane. So if the latter is a rectangle, the former can’t be a square, and vice versa. As for the linework, the problems are two-fold. First off, the lines themselves are occasionally wobbly, but there’s no reason for them to be. There’s no difference between these lines, and the ones in the ghosted lines exercise; thus, if they could be confident there, they can be confident here, too. Secondly, there’s quite a bit of automatic reinforcing present. Remember that each line is drawn once, and only once, regardless of how it turns out. Resist the urge to ‘correct’ and incorrect line by drawing it again.

The rotated boxes exercise looks good. It’s a little small (drawing big is something we recommend, as it gives your brain some much-needed room to think), but the boxes are snug, and rotate quite comfortably. They’re, in the back, occasionally a little flat, but that’s perfectly expected, and something that we’ll address in more detail in the box challenge, so no stress – it’ll come back to you.

Save for the aforementioned automatic reinforcing issue, the organic perspective exercise looks good. The boxes are, at times, bordering on dramatic, but their increase in size does a solid job of aiding their flow, nonetheless. Here, too, however, it seems like you’re not using start/end points, if the overshooting is any indication. Please do.