Hello! Today I will review your submission. Before starting, I will address your previous comment. It was recommended that after completing lesson 1, and the submission is reviewed and marked as complete, that the student tackles the 250-box challenge. Please wait for others to review your work before moving on, as you could miss valuable advice that could make a significant difference in future lessons. I will also judge your work and skill as it is shown here, and try my best to identify problems and provide advice on how to avoid them in the future. I do not know if you have improved while doing the 250-box challenge, so keep that in mind. But enough of that, I will do my best to help.

The most common problem I can identify is your lack of confidence in your line making and stressing accuracy above anything else. It is quite noticeable in the superimposed lines exercise; your lines lack smoothness due to your conscious brain intervening to correct its course. Understand that a confident and continuous line can be worked upon even if it misses its intended path. Accuracy is something one can train over time, while continuity can be achieved early on. Your lines in the ghosted lines are a major improvement to the previous ones, most of them are smooth and drawn with confidence, and you are putting the ghosting method to good use. The biggest issue I can identify, however, is the arcing which is caused by either not drawing from your shoulder, or it is a natural tendency. The latter can be fixed by consciously arcing your line in the opposite direction to “cancel it out.” Moving on to the ghosted planes exercise, on the first page the wobbling returns, a bit more subtle than in the superimposed lines but still noticeable. I suspect you are hesitating here. Your second page is much better with the wobbling being less apparent but still visible. Notice how your less accurate lines maintain a consistent trajectory. This is what we want to see.

Your insistence on accuracy transfers over to your ellipses. In the table of ellipses you were more concerned with keeping your ellipses snugly against each other and within the bounds of each box, resulting in a wobbly mark that is also not elliptical and lacks symmetry between the two halves from the minor axis (notice how many of your ellipses seemed to “squish” one another). This issue is also present in your ellipses in planes and in the funnels exercises. With your funnels, you could have started with a narrow ellipse in the center and gradually increase the degree as you moved away from it. Remember, we want our ellipses to be smooth and confident, just like with your lines. Here is what you could do to help you improve: apply the ghosting method as many times as you feel comfortable with before making your ellipse. You should also try to draw them faster, this will force you to give up a bit of accuracy. It is also worth doing warm-ups with the ellipses exercises for a couple of minutes to improve them.

Your plotted perspective is done well, not much to say about it. Your rough perspective is also done well, your accuracy is off as you can tell with the extended lines, but this is expected early on; with practice it will improve. It is also good that you did not correct your mistake when your line missed its intended path. Many students try to hide their mistakes, but you left it as it is. This is the correct approach. Your rotated boxes is done well. Your biggest issue is drawing through your boxes; the vanishing point of the inner lines are not converging towards the same vanishing point. Finally, the organic perspective exercise. Well done, there is depth in the scene and your box construction is, for the most part, decent. One thing you should remember is that the initial Y angles must be greater than 90 degrees. There one issue, however. You were supposed to make two pages of rough perspective with 3 sections for each, but you only made two pages with only one for each. Please make your work like the example homework next time. Your line work is still suffering from hesitation here.

I can tell you put a lot of effort into your work and followed the instructions for each exercise, except for the boxes exercise, although you did understand the core concepts there and did a good job overall. Your line making, however, needs to improve. So, I will ask for revision and task you with redoing only one page of the ellipses in planes exercise. Now, you stated that you completed the 250-box challenge, so I assume your line making has improved a lot over the course. But I am concerned with your ellipses. Remember, after you are done with the planes, do the ellipses and apply the ghosting method as many times as needed. Once you feel that it is appropriate to execute the mark, begin drawing your ellipse and do not hesitate! Let your muscle memory handle the rest. Do strive to keep the ellipse tangent to the planes edges, but do not worry if it does not come out perfect. Above all else, keep it smooth.