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3:10 AM, Friday September 4th 2020

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission. Your superimposed lines exercise is off to a decent start. You are doing a good job keeping a clearly defined starting point on your line but I think you might be a little too concerned with accurately going over your line and it's causing a lot of wavering instead of striking a smooth line that tapers at the opposite end. This isn't hugely problematic for this exercise but it becomes a bigger problem I'll discuss once we get to your ellipses. Your ghosted lines and planes are looking pretty fine. You are doing a good job with the ghosting method and you are getting some confident linework with a nice deal of accuracy.

Now your table of ellipses and ellipses are both having some pretty severe problems with deformed ellipses. You did a great job drawing through all of your ellipses but in terms of achieving a smooth ellipse shape that's where you are really running into problems. Please check the lesson notes here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed It's very clear to me that you are heavily concerned with accuracy and in turn it's really destroying your line confidence and ellipse shape while drawing. The reason we are using the ghosting method is to build up the muscle memory of the drawing motion in our head so that when we go to put down our mark we do so without thinking. You are doing way too much thinking while making your mark it's destroying your shape. You really want to ghost these multiple times and then draw the ellipse from your shoulder with confidence and don't be so concerned with accuracy for now. That is something you build towards once you can get smooth confident ellipse shapes. Your ellipses in funnels are bit better in this regard but there's still plenty of work to be done here. I'm not going to have you redo any of these exercises but you really need to keep practicing your ellipses and working on them as they feel like the real weak point of this submission as they are for a lot of people. They're very hard to draw and it takes a long time to get good with them.

Plotted perspective looks fine nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective boxes turned out pretty good. You did a great job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that is something that will get better with practice. I am noticing some wobble returning to your lines here which is a pretty common thing I see a lot with this exercise. People tend to struggle with the spatial thinking here and thend to either skip steps in the ghosting method or revert to drawing from their wrist instead of using their shoulder. So just a reminder to always ghost your lines and draw from your shoulder. Even on short lines like these. Your wrist should be reserved for detail work only.

Your rotated box exercise turned out quite well. You did a great job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. You are running into some issues with not rotating your boxes in some cases which is a pretty common issue. Please check the lesson notes here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/notrotating Overall though this was a really good attempt. Finally your organic box exercise is looking pretty good. Your line quality is improved for the most part as you appear to be using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder. I'm seeing a bit of wobble on shorter lines still so be careful of that. Your box constructions are a bit wonky at times and that is something you will be getting a lot of practice with during the 250 box challenge.

This was a good submission overall although I would say your ellispes could still use some work so make sure you are practicing them during your warmups. Otherwise I think you are doing a really nice job understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:59 PM, Friday September 4th 2020

Hi Rob, thanks so much for the detailed feedback! This is really helpful. I did find the ellipses particularly challenging so I'll continue to practice those!

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No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.

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