Hi Alexxty, my name is youenoh and I will be critiquing your Lesson 1 assignment.

If this is your first time here, welcome aboard! I am fairly new as well so I am excited to contribute. Let's get started:

Superimposed Lines

Excellent use of your page, plenty of practice here, and overall great accuracy on your marks. Great confidence and fluidity as well. As you mentioned, the longer lines are a little less accurate, but that's to be expected. I'm seeing a bit of arcing on the longer lines, make sure to try to reverse that arc slightly as you move your arm and those lines will straighten out over time. It looks like you've got your shoulder drawing down but IF you're still using elbow, this could cause an arc effect, so keep an eye out for that if you believe that could be the issue.

Also, just a minor note, I'm seeing some variation/fraying in your starting points. Make sure not to neglect any portion of your set-up and be methodical when it comes to where you start and where you end your lines.

Ghosted Lines

These look awesome, not much room for improvement but I would have probably filled the page more, just due to this being such an important exercise (although you get plenty more practice as you progress).

I'm seeing just the tiniest bit of inaccuracy at the end points (nothing to be concerned about at all), but one thing that helped me eventually nail these was to focus on the end point before making the stroke, rather than following the pen as I draw. This only worked for shorter lines, and might not help you the same way it did for me, but it's something to try if you feel so inclined.

Ghosted Planes

These look amazing and you clearly took your time on every line. If I were teaching a class I would use this as an example of how to do this exercise right.

If I had to say something constructive, I would maybe add some variety or some more extreme angles just to push your comfort zone, but really there's very, very little room for improvement here.

Tables of Ellipses

Perfect follow-through on all of these, 2-3 rotations, just as recommended. Lines are smooth and confident. There are a few floating edges here and there but for the most part these minor mistakes were corrected within the same bounds (which tells me you're thinking about each ellipse before drawing them, nice work!)

Again, you could maybe use just a bit more variety. I'd love to see some very shallow ellipses (as they are fairly common in nature) and maybe a little more lean/angle in some of these tables. I saw one DaB student turn their ellipses completely horizontal which is maybe a bit much, but you can always get creative with the shape and size of the tables to get a wide spectrum of ellipses and really get that muscle memory locked in with a huge array of possibilities.

Ellipses in Planes

Pretty much the same comments as the previous two exercises. Your ellipses are smooth and confident, perfect follow-through. A few floating edges but nothing that will create issues in more complicated drawings. Your cylinders should be a breeze!

Funnels

I didn't see any major issues with this, despite your comment. The arcs of the funnels even look really clean!

That being said, I would say this is your weakest link so far. Your ellipses seem a little less confident this time around, and the majority of them are either off-center from the major axis of the funnel (minor axes of the ellipses), or they are not fully perpendicular to this line. Make sure you're aligning them so they are cut in half right down the middle, rotate your page as needed, and take a moment after every ellipse to make sure you've got them straight. I see you're flattening the ellipses as they reach the center (which is great practice), and getting the alignment right with the major axis of the funnel will really help this perspective click.

Also, I'm not sure why, but the end ellipses on this exercise never quite reach the widest points of the funnels. This might be more of an issue with the construction of the exercise itself than it is with the students, but if you do funnels for warm-ups, it might be fun to try and really push the size variance on these ellipses and try to snug them up at the far ends.

Other than the minor points above, this really was a superb entry, and it can be a tricky exercise.

Plotted Perspective

No comments since we were provided tools here. Extremely clean compared to the other submissions I've seen though, what's your secret?

Rough Perspective

Another very clean submittal for this exercise. A couple notes:

1. These are easily the least confident lines I've seen in your submittal, which I find is common with this exercise. At this point in the lesson I like to remind folks to treat every ghosted line as a connection of two dots. Keep the whole box in mind while establishing the dots, then clear your thoughts for the ghost and especially for the final mark. Rinse and repeat. Very good lines still, don't get me wrong, it's just easy to get wrapped up in the bigger picture when working on more advanced exercises.

2. The furthest boxes tend to have perspective lines that fall short of the vanishing point (also common with this exercise). My solution was to give the furthest boxes more extreme angles, or a more "wide-angle" perspective. CAREFUL with that trick though, as the furthest boxes are not necessarily in the "safe zone" and could become heavily distorted, especially in one-point perspective, which is uncommon for a composition like this. You may have noticed this yourself, I just feel it's useful to keep in mind for any future perspective applications.

Rotated Boxes

This is very, very good. Not many students pull this off even half as well as you did. I'm especially impressed with the rotation and depth of the furthest boxes.

I know it would be almost useless to try to sneak them in at the angles you've established, but technically there should be one more box at each of the "corners" of the nightmare ball. You should just re-do the whole thing. (kidding!)

In all seriousness though, the only issues I see are some elongation and distortion errors on the interior faces of some of the furthest boxes (see the bottom-left and top-left areas, specifically).

This was VERY well done though and I only noticed mistakes because I had to look really hard. Excellent work!

Organic Perspective

Again, your depth, rotation, variation, confidence, cleanliness are all great. There are some perspective oddities, like distortion and twisting of the centermost cubes on page 1, frame 2 (which I honestly kinda like, it gives a nice dynamic feel). There are also some vanishing point convergence issues overall, but for freehand this is pretty spectacular.

- RECAP -

Normally I would mention working points here, but there's really not a lot you need to improve upon that won't already be addressed in future exercises. If I had to recommend any one exercise for warm-ups, I would do some more funnel ellipses. I would also love to see you put a spin on some of these exercises to throw into your DaB sketchbook (i.e. draw some floating houses similar to the organic perspective exercise). Your execution is fantastic, but the guidelines can be pretty strict and I want to see you push yourself creatively with some additional variety. Also, of course, don't forget the 50% rule.

You're definitely ready for the 250 box challenge (if you go that route), and I'm positive you'll see massive improvement. Your prerequisite understanding of 3-D space is clearly locked in, and what few perspective issues I saw were very minor, so this exercise would be perfect to get you really comfortable with these shapes. I hope you're excited as I am to see your progress!

Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions regarding the review above, additional advice/tips, or heck, just to chat.

Cheers :)

• youenoh