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11:04 AM, Tuesday April 21st 2020

Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking fairly confident. There are a few occasions where you're course correcting a little bit back to your original guideline - this exercise is about confidently drawing lines and accepting their trajectories no matter how inaccurate. You did a good job, however, lining your pen up with the starting point which has limited fraying to one end of the line.

Next your ghosted lines and planes are looking straight and confident. It would have been good to have seen a bit more variation in the lengths of your ghosted lines, as you seem to have drawn roughly the same length each time.

You've done a good job cramming lots of ellipses of all different shapes and sizes into your tables of ellipses, which is good to see. They're all drawn through twice with a good amount of confidence as well. There are a few instances where your ellipses pop out of the bounds of the table - accuracy will come with time and practice, however it is something to be aware of.

Next, your ellipses in planes are looking confident and hitting the four sides of the plane the majority of the time, which is good to see. Similarly to the previous exercise, you do have a few popping out of their bounds and the same as what I said above also applies.

Finally, your funnels are off to a good start, your ellipses here a nice and confident. The funnel in the centre of the page is really nicely done however you do have a tendency to slightly tilt your ellipses off the minor axis. This may mean you need to rotate your page to find a more comfortable angle of attack.

Next you've done a good job keeping your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line in your rough perspective, particularly on the first page. The second page got a little more tilted off from where they should have been, particularly on the rear planes and as such, is not as accurate with the convergences as the first. It's good to see your line confidence did not take much of a hit here, as students usually get a little overwhelmed with this exercise.

You've done a good job keeping the gaps between your boxes consistent on your rotated boxes. This gives you context clues about how to place the next box and as a result your boxes do look cohesive even if they don't rotate as much as they should. The last two exercises in lesson 1 are designed to introduce students to a new kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered and we don't expect any level of mastery.

Finally, your organic perspective is off to a good start, with the variation in the size of your boxes as well as overlapping providing a nice sense of depth to each of the scenes. You could have pushed the size variation even further to convey an even greater sense of depth however the exercise is overall well executed. Your boxes are actually quite nice, though there are some of the more subtle issues that tend to only present themselves once you draw through your boxes and extend the lines, as you will do in the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:12 AM, Sunday May 3rd 2020

Thank you very much for the detailed critique. I very much appreciate the detailed comments and will keep them in mind for future exercises.

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Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens

Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens

Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.

Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.

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