(That’s just how imgur works, don’t worry – we can see the full thing!) OK, I shall be formal too! :P Hello and welcome to drawabox! I’m TA Benj, and I’ll be taking a look at your Lesson 1 submission today. Phew, that’s enough of that; back to casual now.

Your superimposed lines look good. They have a ways to go, certainly, but you’re on the right track. I’d say that the number 1 thing to focus on right now is their trajectory. Sometimes when you draw a line and see it run off course, you’ll course correct. Instead, we’d prefer it if you maintained the same course (even if it’s wrong!) Confidence is more important to us than accuracy, you see. The ghosted lines show a good improvement on that front, though their counterparts in the planes are a little lacking. This needn’t be the case! If you really think about it, what you’re doing here is very much the same thing. (You might recall the little blurb about ‘units of work’?) If you allow yourself to think that this exercise is somehow different, and that its unit of work is a plane, then you’ll cause problems for yourself. However, if you think here, as in every other exercise in this course, that the unit of work is a line, and just take things one line at a time, you’ll find that there’s no reason for them to be wobbly here, if they were different in the previous exercise. After all, aren’t you doing the exact same thing? Your planes look good aside from that, of course. You’re just a little too conscious of their end points right now, and thus slow down and try to get the line just right. But that’s irrelevant to us – all we want is for it to be smooth and straight.

The ellipses in the table of ellipses exercise show a good start. I do suspect they could be a little more confident, but they’re not bad even like this. I notice that their issue tends to be in their first rotation – they tend to stabilize after that – so I’ll recommend spending a little longer on the ghosting motion. If you’re more familiar with the motion, you’ll perhaps feel more confident when you commit, and get that first rotation right. If not, as before, remind yourself that we don’t really care how accurate you are; here, we’re only judging the smoothness/roundness of your ellipses. Quite simply, if they’re smooth/round they’re correct, no matter what. If they’re stiff, or wobbly, they’re incorrect. So!, make decisions with that in mind. There’s still the occasional issue, but the ellipses in planes show good improvements on that front – it seems you figured it out yourself, after all! The funnels, too, are well done. There’s the occasionally pointy ellipse, so I wonder if you’re not perhaps switching to a lesser pivot without realizing it? The shoulder is particularly bad at tight, small motions (like the curves at the top and bottom of an ellipse) – the wrist is quite good at them, on the other hand – so if you don’t keep on top of it, you’ll find yourself switching back and forth. The solution is as simple as keeping an eye on it. If you find yourself drawing from a pivot you shouldn’t be, simply switch back. Over time, you won’t have to do it quite so often.

The plotted perspective exercise starts the box section of well. If you’re wondering about those crooked back lines, they happen due to an accumulation of small errors elsewhere in the box – nothing to worry about for the moment. Your hatching here is a little insecure, so I’ll recommend treating it as you do any other ghosted line. You don’t need to plot points for each line, but do ghost them, nonetheless. The rough perspective exercise is missing its correction lines (where you go back after you’re done, and extend the lines to the horizon, as mentioned in the exercise page). From a glance, I can tell that you’ve done well here (with the convergences anyway, we’ll talk about linework…), but so that you can see what I mean, I’d like you to add those before I ‘officially’ say it. Good job with the rotated boxes exercise! It’s missing 4 boxes (the diagonals), but what’s here is good! Your boxes are snug, and though subtle, their rotation is there. You’ve done a good job of keeping track of and respecting the neighboring edges, both up front and in the back, so everything is how it should be. The organic perspective exercise is nicely done. I suppose I’ll talk about the issue here (and not in the rough perspective exercise), but please only ever draw each line once. Even if it comes out wrong, don’t go adding more ink to a line, but simply leave it be. We know that you know that it’s wrong, so there’s no need to tell us, nor to fix it. (And anyway, adding more ink to a mistake doesn’t ‘fix’ it, anyway – it just makes it stand out that much more.) Aside from that, your work here is good. Your boxes are well constructed, and their size and foreshortening are such that they flow quite well, too.