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5:17 PM, Tuesday August 4th 2020

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. I'll be taking a look at your submission today. Your superimposed lines are coming along well. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point on these and also keeping all of your tapering to the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes are coming along nicely as well. You are doing a good job using the ghosting method to achieve smooth linework and while your accuracy is still a bit lacking that will improve with practice.

Your table of ellipses are looking pretty good. I am noticing a tendency for you to not always draw through your ellispes. A lot of times you appear to be only drawing them like one and a half times. Even if you feel like you got the initial ellipse right you still want to be drawing through 2 - 3 times. You are achieving some smooth ellipse shapes though so that is great. Your ellipses in planes are a bit of a mixed bag. In some cases your are ignoring accuracy and forcing yourself to draw a smooth ellipse but other times you are still thinking a little too much about accuracy and it's destroying your ellipse integrity a bit. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/12/deformed The biggest issue with these is that you aren't drawing through any of your ellipses. You need to be drawing through EVERY single ellipse you draw while doing these lessons. There are no exceptions and it doesn't matter if you feel like you nailed the ellipse in one stroke. I'm seeing a lot of similar problems with your ellipses in funnels in terms of not consistently drawing through your ellipses. You are also running into some issues with your ellipses tilting off the minor axis that you need to be aware of. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/13/notaligned

Your plotted perspective looks okay although I think you could have taken a bit more care in keeping all of your verticals aligned straight up and down. I'm seeing a lot of slanting happening and that really shouldn't be happening especially if you are using a ruler for everything. Your rough perspective boxes could definitely use a lot work. Your line quality has taken a pretty big dive here and it could be because you aren't ghosting as much or because you have reverted to drawing from your wrist because the lines are shorter. You should always be ghosting every line you make and then drawing from the shoulder with confidence. Even on short lines. Your wrist should be reserved for detail work only. You are also very inconsistently extending the lines back on your boxes. Sometimes you appear to be following the convergence on your box lines and other times you just seemed to pick a random angle to extend and I'm not even sure you understand where the vanishing point is on a lot of these exercises. I would definitely recommend you rewatch the video and reread all of the lesson materials for this section.

Your rotated box exercise was a good attempt. You did a great job drawing through your boxes although your line quality is having a lot of the same wobble that I was noticing in your rough perspective boxes. One thing that might have helped you think through the spatial problems you were facing here a bit easier would have been to keep your gaps between your boxes more narrow and consistent. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/16/guessing Finally, your organic box exercise sees a big improvement in terms of your line quality. I feel like you have returned to properly using the ghosting method and drawing from the shoulder with these. That said you box construction are having LOTS of issues but you are going to be getting a lot of practice with that during the 250 box challenge.

Before that though I think you need to redo some of these pages mainly so you get a little better at following directions and I think you need to need get a firmer grasp on constructing boxes in one point perspective before moving on.

Next Steps:

One more page Ellipses in Planes - MAKE SURE YOU DRAW THROUGH YOUR ELLIPSES

One more page Rough Perspective Boxes - Reread lesson material and rewatch video. Focus on better line quality and extending the lines back on your boxes correctly

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
7:08 PM, Friday August 7th 2020
9:29 PM, Friday August 7th 2020

The ellipses are much improved. Even though I still think they are a bit sloppy overall you did a good job drawing through your ellipses and really focusing on trying to get a smooth ellipse shape. Still a lot of room for improvement here. The rough perspective boxes are a bit better but this exercise still seems to be a bit of a struggle for you. Luckily your next task is the 250 box challenge so maybe working through that will really help with your box constructions. I'm going to mark this as complete good luck with the box challenge.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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Printer Paper

Printer Paper

Where the rest of my recommendations tend to be for specific products, this one is a little more general. It's about printer paper.

As discussed in Lesson 0, printer paper (A4 or 8.5"x11") is what we recommend. It's well suited to the kind of tools we're using, and the nature of the work we're doing (in terms of size). But a lot of students still feel driven to sketchbooks, either by a desire to feel more like an artist, or to be able to compile their work as they go through the course.

Neither is a good enough reason to use something that is going to more expensive, more complex in terms of finding the right kind for the tools we're using, more stress-inducing (in terms of not wanting to "ruin" a sketchbook - we make a lot of mistakes throughout the work in this course), and more likely to keep you from developing the habits we try to instill in our students (like rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach).

Whether you grab the ream of printer paper linked here, a different brand, or pick one up from a store near you - do yourself a favour and don't make things even more difficult for you. And if you want to compile your work, you can always keep it in a folder, and even have it bound into a book when you're done.

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