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Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

1:51 PM, Monday May 12th 2025

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Hi, I just finished the first lesson. Hope the link works well.

Thanks for your time and feedback.

6:39 AM, Wednesday May 14th 2025

Welcome and congratulations on finishing the first lesson of Drawabox! I'm Mada and I'll be taking a look at your submission.

Overall you did a great job here, but I do have a bit to mention so let's break them down one by one. I'll write the most important things in bold.

Lines

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking good. Ghosted lines look correctly ghosted and confident too, and there are barely any arching. You've also demonstrated the same confidence in your ghosted planes with a great accuracy. Nothing much to say except keep up the good work!

Ellipses

Now with the tables of ellipses, you've demonstrated a great understanding of the concept in executing confident ellipses. The ellipses in planes are nice, you drew it confidently and snugly in their respective planes.

The funnels are also looking great; you've aligned them correctly to the minor axis, but do try to fit them in more snugly by making them touch against each other like you would in the Tables of Ellipses exercise. Otherwise, I have no complaints here as your ellipses will tighten as you get more practice. Also this is optional, but you can attempt the optional step of varying the ellipse's degrees as you move outwards in your warm ups, as mentioned here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3

Boxes

You've shown a good understanding of how to make 2 point perspective in the plotted perspective. I did see some skewed back vertical lines here and there, which is usually caused by an accumulation of human error as you plot more and more lines. I assume that's the case and you understand that every vertical line is straight in 2 point perspective. Even if the points are not aligned correctly, try to find a middle ground and draw it as vertical as you can.

You've applied the ghosting method and lines extension correctly for the rough perspective. I've noticed that some of the back faces of your boxes are not rectangular. By rectangular, we mean that they should be composed of horizontals that are parallel to the horizon line, and verticals that are perpendicular to it. While this could also be caused by the sometimes inaccurate lines, it's worth mentioning that there should not be any arbitrary guesswork or random angles. Don't forget that these rectangular front/back faces are the unique characteristics of 1 point perspective.

As the notoriously most difficult exercise in this lesson, you've done a great job at doing the rotated boxes. You've rotated them pretty well (while making sure to move the converging lines) and used neighboring elements to deduce the next orientation of boxes, which is the whole purpose of this exercise.

Finally, organic perspective looks great as well. They look like they belong in the same page and the lines converge as they move farther away from the viewer. There are a few hiccups here and there where there are divergences that results in skewed boxes, but overall they're minor and they look pretty solid.

This will get more relevant as you get to the box challenge, but any hatching from this point on should also be done with the ghosting method and not done haphazardly like you did here. It will make your stuff cleaner and more practice is always good! Try to cover the whole area of the box with consistent spacing.

One last thing I want to mention is do not correct your lines by going over it with more lines. This will make your mistake stands out even more with how bold it is, and generally is against the concept of executing planned confident lines throughout this course. Unless it's waaaaay off the trajectory, accept the mistake and trust your muscle memory that it will get better with time and practice.

Anyway, I think you've grasped the concepts of the whole lesson and ready to put them into practice in warmups. Remember to keep working on your lines & ellipses confidence. Again, congratulations and keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

Move onto the 250 box challenge.

Do the lesson 1 exercises as your regular warmup and don't forget your 50% rule art.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:44 PM, Wednesday May 14th 2025

Thank you for your comments. I'll keep all your advice in mind to continue improving my exercises.

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