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11:15 PM, Wednesday April 24th 2024

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along well. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on a consistent smooth ellipse shape. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes although you are deforming some of your ellipses at times. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/17/deformed You are compromising your overall ellipse shape by adjusting for accuracy midstroke. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory of the motion you build up while ghosting and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come through mileage and consistent practice more than anything. Your ellipses in funnels are having the same issues with deformed ellipse shapes but are otherwise looking fine. Your ellipses are off to a good start but there is room for improvement when it comes to your ellipses both in terms of overall consistency of shape and smoothness so make sure you keep practicing these in your warmups as they can take a while to get used to.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/wobblinglines This is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced. You are doing a good 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 will become more intuitive with practice. One thing that can help you a bit when doing a one point perspective exercise like this is to realize that all of your horizontal lines should be parallel to the horizon line and all of your verticals should be perpendicular(straight up and down in this case) to the horizon line. This will help you avoid some of the slanting lines you have in your constructions.

Your rotated box exercise is a decent start but unfinished. You did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent for the ones that you drew. The problem is that you gave up about halfway through on this exercise. A big part of learning how to draw is getting comfortable working outside of your comfort zone and getting more used to failing and learning from your mistakes. Unfortunately in cases like this we can't analyze your mistakes because you didn't finish the exercise. So as a revision I'd like you to either finish this exercise to the best of your ability or try another and make sure to draw it nice and big. The size of the one you drew this time was fine but drawing big makes it easier to think through the more difficult rotations at the corners and outer rows. I'm not expecting it to be done well or even correctly but the attempt must be made in order to learn. Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting more comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework for the most part. I'm still seeing a tad bit of wobble which tells me you are still slowing down your stroke for accuracy. Remember to fully commit to your marks and it's okay if your line is slightly off as our current priority is a confident smooth line. The other possibility is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist for some of these lines. Just something to keep an eye on. You should be drawing from your shoulder for basically every line you draw, even shorter ones. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only. Your box constructions arerelying somewhat heavily on parallel lines for your box constructions. The 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you in order to develop a better understanding of how box lines need to converge to vp's.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. Your line confidence improved as you worked through these exercises but I was still seeing a tad bit of wobble on the final exercises so keep in mind the advice I gave earlier. Make sure to keep practicing those ellipses during your warmups as well. Otherwise I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. Once you get that revision submitted and I take a look you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

Finish the outer rows and corners of your rotated box exercise or give this another shot and do the entire exercise

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
12:38 AM, Thursday April 25th 2024

Hello Rob. Thank you for the critique! I have a question about the rotated boxes. The one I submitted was my second attempt at that exercise. I watched the instruction videos quite a few times, but the instructions for the corner boxes continue to elude me. I literally tried my best with this one. I don't know how to draw the corner boxes. At a certain point Uncomfortable's instructions not to grind and accept where I am at this point in time came to the forefront. Do you have any suggestions on how I can complete those?

Also, I have been drawing with my shoulder. It is actually in quite a bit of pain today due to that. I have had to ice it throughout my work day. Any advice on how to avoid hurting my drawing arm would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

9:46 PM, Thursday April 25th 2024

Don't worry about it. Being able to draw boxes from different angles and rotations will become a lot easier the deeper you get into these lessons and the rotated box exercise is sort of meant to be beyond most beginners abilities to get them to try something they aren't comfortable with.

For your shoulder a little soreness was happening for me at first as well but not that bad. I would definitely practice for less amount of time than you were previously doing until your muscles get used to being used more.

3:15 AM, Friday April 26th 2024
edited at 3:16 AM, Apr 26th 2024

Thank you for the advice for my shoulder! I will work to break up my drawing sessions into shorter periods.

Here is my second attempt at the rotated boxes.

https://imgur.com/a/IBQTbkA

edited at 3:16 AM, Apr 26th 2024
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