svendogee

2019-06-21 03:06

Hey there, I'm one of uncomfortable's TAs and I'll be going over your lesson 1 submission so let's get started.

Starting with your super imposed lines, you've put in a lot of work here. Your lines are confident and smooth which is good, the fraying is natural and will tighten up with time, but it's clear you are using confident strokes with the shoulder at this point. Your ghosted lines are also confident for the most part, there are some hiccups here and there and the occasional arcing, but overall you are off to a good start.

Moving on to your ellipses, there is still the smooth confidence, but not as much in terms of accuracy and control. This is understandable as drawing with the shoulder is a challenge in and of itself, and then trying to draw ellipses just adds another layer of complexity. You've done a good job drawing through and you have a fair number of strong showings in here. Just continue to practice these in your warm ups and they will improve. With your funnels exercise your ellipses are once again smooth and confident, but be mindful that the center line of the funnel is supposed to serve as the minor axis of the ellipses; yours are skewed a few degrees.

With your rough perspective boxes you have some things you've done really well, such as keeping your horizontal and vertical lines oriented correctly with respect to the horizon (parallel and perpendicular, respectively). I can see by your dots you are also planning ahead and ghosting each line which is what we like to see. To continue to tighten up your perspective just repeat the process of ghosting towards your vanishing point, and if you are worried you will overshoot your box, what I like to do is just lift the pen instead of trying to fight against the ghosting muscle memory to stop the motion.

Your rotated box is definitely rough, and while this exercise is more about exposing students to different types of spatial problems and solution strategies and not perfect execution, I would have liked to have seen a little more care taken. For instance, your hatching is very sloppy and haphazard and even though they are secondary lines to the boxes themselves, they should still be treated with care and ghosted accordingly. Additionally, remember to keep your boxes tightly packed so that you can use adjacent edges to help guide you along, as described here. I can see some attempts at rotating your boxes (left axis), but for the most part they are just shifted, as indicated by the converging lines of boxes being parallel as opposed to targeting different vanishing point locations. One last thing I'd like to mention is to draw larger. When we draw large we give our brain more room to think through these spatial puzzles, and will come in handy in future lessons and whenever you are drawing anything, really. Like I said in the beginning, this exercise isn't about perfect execution and more of an introduction to these problems, so don't take it to heart.

Finally let's look at your organic perspective exercise. You've done a good job conveying a sense of 3d space with your compositions, especially with these "super foreground" large boxes, they do a really good job of setting the scene. Your line work is pretty good throughout, but there is some overshooting which you didn't exhibit in the great showing of your ghosted lines exercise, so always remember to take that same care. Your perspective isn't terrible, you are definitely making an effort to have converging lines, but falling just a tad short still, but this will soon be remedied by 250 boxes! And with that, your lesson 1 is complete and you are free to move on to the 250 box exercise. Be sure to take advantage of all of the great resources uncomfortable has provided and to take your time. This can be a draining challenge, so make sure to take 50% of your time for fun drawing!

sluggydragon

2019-06-21 09:50

Hey there! I'm sluggy, one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be by later to give you a flair and check this critique. Let's get started!

Lines - These are more or less nice and neat, which is good, but I do see a little bit of a wobble in both these and your ghosted lines. This tells me that you are either going too slowly or drawing with your wrist. As you continue practicing, strive to find the speed at which you consistently put down a smooth, neat line. Don't be concerned about accuracy yet - even if you don't hit the end point if your line is consistently straight then you're going in the right direction. Once you achieve that you can focus on accuracy when you find the speed that's comfortable for you.

Ellipses - these are also fairly neat, but have the same issue with the wobble and they are a bit loose. Remember that you can ghost these as well. Remember to draw through them several times so you can eventually tighten them up through practice and repetition. As you're working on your control, you're looking to fit them snugly inside the bounding lines you've created (e.g. the funnels/planes/tables).

Boxes - With your rough perspective, you do a pretty decent job and it seems to me that you understand the intent of the exercise. You're consistently lining your horizontals up parallel to the horizon and likewise, your verticals are perpendicular. As for your extension lines - while they may not all extend back to the horizon perfectly, this will be something that comes with practice.

On your rotated boxes - Again, I definitely admire how neat you keep your work. This exercise is meant to be a definitive challenge and you tackled it admirably. The reason it squares out around the edges of the image is that you're no longer rotating the boxes. What you need to do to get that full 180 degree rotation is to shift your vanishing point along the horizon, so it rotates instead of moving back in space. Similarly, if you tackle this one again, remember to keep the gaps between your boxes consistent. This eliminates guesswork, so you know where to place your next box without needed to do as much measuring.

Your organic perspective is another challenge, but on this you did a really good job. While there are issues with convergences, it's clear you've got a solid understanding of this exercise and what it's meant to practice.

Overall, this is very strong work. Remember these tips during your warm-ups and you should iron that wobble out in no time. I'm happy to mark this complete and send you on to the 250 box challenge. Really nice work and good luck!

sluggydragon

2019-06-21 14:20

Hey there! I'm sluggy, one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be by later to check this critique and flair you up.

Lines - These are quite straight and neat - I'm not detecting much of a wobble, which tells me you've found a pretty comfortable speed that gives you consistent line work. Nice job there.

I notice that you don't have your ghosted lines exercise. Going by your planes, however, I will note that I think you are going too quickly - when you overshoot the end point, it has the effect of weakening the illusion of form. Since your lines are pretty clean, I suggest focusing on accuracy now, which will come in handy later.

Ellipses - These are bit untidy in comparison to your lines. Remember that it is possible to ghost these as well. Similarly, this will help you keep the ellipses within the bounding lines that you have set up. In future practice, try to draw through your ellipses a few more times, to smooth them out and get them consistent.

With your funnels, you do a fair job of keeping them aligned with the minor axis and you seem to understand that the degree of the ellipses should change towards the edges. Nice work there.

Boxes - Your rough perspective is looking pretty good. You do overshoot the end points again, but you manage to keep the horizontals parallel with the horizon and the verticals perpendicular.

Your rotated boxes are really great. This is meant to be a hefty challenge and you did a really swell job with it. Your gaps are consistent and you almost hit that 180 degree rotation. I can see that you took your time with everything but the hatching. I urge you to be thoughtful with every line you put down - while the image as a whole looks good, mistakes/untidy lines have the effect of drawing focus and subtracting from the good stuff. However, overall, nice work.

Similarly, your organic perspective is a fairly good show - your lines are neat, and you're playing with size to indicate distance. There's a lot of convergence errors here, but that's nothing the 250 box challenge won't help with.

Overall, really strong work. While I'd like you to submit the ghosted lines exercise, I'm happy to make this as complete and send you on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

Uncomfortable

2019-06-23 01:25

Your work here is really fantastic. I have just a couple points to raise, but by and large you're really doing a great job in following the instructions and completing the exercises exactly as they're written.

Starting with your lines section, you've very clearly approached them with full confidence and no hesitation. I don't see any sign that you're slowing down, or trying to steer your hand with your eyes - you commit to the direction of your stroke from the moment it takes off, and even if it strays from your intended path, you do your best to keep it smooth and straight. I do see a few slight corrections in your super imposed lines, but still there's nothing overt, and certainly no wobbling.

With your ghosted lines and planes, you reinforce that confidence with the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting technique and achieve a great deal of accuracy and precision. There's not a lot of overshooting or undershooting, and your lines remain straight, while hitting the points you've set out.

Moving onto the ellipses exercises, these follow the same principles - you're taking the care to plan and prepare beforehand in order to increase your overall accuracy, but you still execute them with a smooth, confident stroke, achieving a smooth, evenly shaped ellipses that is well rounded and free of deformation or distortion.

I did notice a little more stiffness or deformation in the ellipses in planes where you may have slowed down a little bit to fit them into the awkwardly shaped planes, which is pretty common. Of course this exercise focuses on being able to maintain the roundedness of your ellipses even while trying to touch all four edges of the planes - as you move forwards, make sure that the elliptical shape is your highest priority, even if that means missing one of the edges. This is a very minor complaint however, you're doing a very good job at this exercise as well.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, I can see that you're giving each and every stroke a good deal of attention - you're keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon line, and your vertical perpendicular to it. I'm also very pleased with how patient you are with extending each and every line - while it may seem like you're missing the vanishing point here and there, your accuracy is actually far higher than most people at this stage. You're falling within a fairly limited distance of the vanishing point, which is quite impressive.

One thing I did notice here however was that you have a slight habit of reinforcing your lines immediately after drawing them, so for many of these marks, we see doubles. I want you to fight against this bad habit - every single mark we put down must be the result of the ghosting method, meaning that we cannot allow ourselves to draw by reflex or instinct. Everything within these drawabox lessons must follow planning and preparation. Additionally, if you make a mistake with a line, you may feel the urge to correct it, but generally the best course of action is to leave it alone. Adding more ink to a problem area is only going to draw more attention to it.

You've done a great job of keeping the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent, so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork. Your rotations between the boxes are coming along well, although you could stand to push them a little further. Along the horizontal axis they're coming along reasonably well, although along the vertical axis, the rotations aren't pushed nearly as much. Remember that we're trying to cover a full 180 degree arc here, and try and exaggerate the rotations more in the future.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a great start. It's important to mention that this exercise is all about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered, and as such, it is more of an introduction rather than a test. I fully expect students to struggle with this, and despite that you've done a good job. There is still room for improvement, specifically in getting those sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but we will work on that more next.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-23 23:49

Nice work! Overall you're demonstrating a good grasp of the lesson material. To start with, your lines demonstrate a great deal of confidence, and throughout your super imposed lines you're focusing a great deal on achieving smooth, continuous strokes. I see no signs of hesitation, and your marks remain consistent in their trajectory from the point they take off, rather than showing signs of being steered by your eyes as you go.

Through the ghosting method, you reinforce these confident strokes with additional control and accuracy, improving the overall results without actually compromising their flow. Keep working on getting them to stop at their intended end points - this will improve with practice, though additionally getting used to lifting your pen off the page instead of slowing to a stop should help with this.

Your ellipses maintain the same principles of confidence and flow over accuracy, which certainly is key. For all intents and purposes however, your accuracy is still pretty good. There are definitely places where the ellipses overlap each other, or fall into their neighbouring sections rather than remaining snugly within the space they're allotted, or even float a little loosely inside of their own space, but you're definitely moving in the right direction on that front, and it is of course secondary to maintaining a consistent, elliptical shape. Keep at it. This will improve with practice, and with additional use of the ghosting method.

The accuracy takes the biggest hit in your ellipses in planes, but this is kind of to be expected. A lot of students will stiffen up and deform their ellipses to have them touch all four edges of their awkward containers - while you have plenty of room to improve, you did take the better route of focusing on keeping them evenly shaped as your first priority. Keep at it, and you'll be able to maintain that while also having them touch all four edges properly.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective, I am noticing signs that you may not be approaching the mark making process entirely correctly. That is, we're working one point perspective, where all the boxes run parallel to the ground plane. This means all your horizontal lines should run parallel to the horizon line, and your verticals should run perpendicular to it, as explained here. Taking the time to actually think about the intended behaviour of the line you're going to draw beforehand (during the preparation phase of the ghosting method) is critical to ensure that you achieve the stroke you want.

Your rotated boxes are quite well done. You've kept the gaps between your boxes narrow and consistent (aside from right underneath the horizontal axis), and covered the full 180 degree arc of rotation, especially on the horizontal axis. Your vertical axis is a little less so, but is definitely getting close. Just be sure to push the outermost boxes' rotations further, and tuck in their furthest edge in order to give the impression that the exposed face is turning away from the viewer.

Lastly, you've got a great start on your organic perspective boxes. There's definitely room for improvement, specifically with getting your sets of parallel lines to converge towards their shared vanishing points, but this is entirely normal and expected. This exercise is all about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered. It's an introduction to the concept, rather than a test, and we will continue to work on this.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-24 00:50

Your lines are looking good! You're doing a great job of focusing on achieving smooth, confident strokes without any hesitation or uncertainty. You commit to a trajectory the moment your pen touches the page, and don't fall into the trap of attempting to steer it with your eyes as it is drawn, and instead hold to the same course. This eliminates any wobbling. You then go on to apply the ghosting method quite effectively to reinforce those marks with further control and improve your overall accuracy.

Keep working on limiting those overshoots, but all in all you're doing a great job.

Now, I do have to mention that you've actually submitted too early. All three sections of the lesson must be completed (lines, ellipses and boxes) before submitting for critique, as explained in the homework section and in the requirements below the patreon-only thread link from the lesson.

So go ahead and finish up the other two sections, then resubmit the whole set.

svendogee

2019-06-24 14:49

Hello there, I'm one of uncomfortable's TAs and I'll be going over your work today.

As you progress through your super imposed lines they become more confident and smoother, indicating a growing understanding of the mechanics of drawing with the shoulder. This is good and as you continue to practice it will only improve more. Your curvy lines show a little more variance which is understandable as drawing curved lines with the shoulder takes even more practice, so once again just keep practicing these in warm ups for even better draftsmanship. Your ghosted lines are somewhat more wobbly and always stopping at the end point, indicating to me that you are more focused on hitting the end mark than producing a confident line. For now just trust the process of ghosting and using your shoulder and producing a clean smooth stroke and the accuracy will come in time. You are exhibiting this confidence more in your planes as you have lines that clearly miss the mark some but are straight and confident. Of course accuracy is important, but these are all things that must be held in balance and trained up, and as a new student we strive for flow and confidence first, then we go for accuracy. So just keep these things in mind and you will continue to improve in both confidence and accuracy.

On the flip side, your ellipses are looking pretty confident, and I would be inclined to say you might even want to try to slow down just a tad to get things tighter as you are drawing through your ellipses. Your funnels exercise is a little more off the mark, most likely because there are several constraints you are trying to balance with the bounds of the funnel as well as alignment of the minor axes. My suggestion is to draw larger so you have more room to practice and, frankly, drawing ellipses a little bigger is easier, in my opinion.

Your rough perspective is off to a good start. Your perspective is zoned in pretty well and I like to see you are planning your lines (indicated by the dots) instead of just going for each line. Make sure you are still using the ghosting method and your shoulder though as your lines start to wobble and/or arc here. You do a good job keeping your vertical lines vertical relative to the horizon and your horizontals parallel to the horizon and with more ghosting and shoulder action they will get even straighter and more exact.

You did a pretty good job on the rotated box. You are successfully rotating your boxes, except the bottom vertical axis could benefit from more rotation as the converging lines are pretty parallel in that region. Your lines are alright, it's understandable that it can be overwhelming to ghost and prep every line when the page becomes so cluttered, but it is paramount that we work that habit into our subconscious. You drew this large, which is what we like to see, but you could have afforded to pack your boxes closer together to leverage adjacent edges being nearly parallel and this helps make our lives easier in terms of perspective. Uncomfortable talks more on the matter here so go back and read that again now that you've completed the exercise and it should click a little better now.

Finally let's look at your organic perspective. While your perspective is skewed in most of the boxes, they all appear to exist cohesively in the same space which helps the viewer overlook these errors (as long as they are small like most of yours). Usually students have perspective errors in terms of large divergences - with far planes larger than near planes, but you do a good job keeping your lines parallel - too parallel in fact! To jog your memory I'm going to link this section to show you how lines will always converge to some vanishing point. In this scene the points are far away, but still existent, so lines will still converge, just very slowly. All in all though this is a good exercise. I like your compositions and you weren't afraid to overlap your boxes. There are a few places where you did a re-do line, but make sure to kick that habit early! We plan our marks and prepare carefully then live with the results.

With that, you are complete with lesson 1, good job! Now your next step is to move on to the 250 box challenge. There are a lot of great resources so make sure to take your time to ingest them all and to take breaks to draw for fun so you don't burn out. Keep up the good work and we will see you when you finish them.

sluggydragon

2019-06-24 16:56

Hey there! Sluggy here, one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be by later to give you the appropriate flair and check this critique, so let's get into it.

Lines - Your superimposed lines are looking pretty good - not very much wobble, which tells me you're going fast enough to let your muscle memory take over. However, with your ghosted lines, I believe you're going too fast. These don't have as much control as your super-imposed lines and often either don't reach or overshoot the end points. Since your lines are consistently pretty smooth, I think it's time to focus on accuracy, finding a speed where you can maintain quality, but also hit your end points consistently.

Ellipses - These are looking good as well. They're smooth and pretty tight. Remember that you can ghost these as well, so you can make sure your ellipses are snugly sitting in the bounding lines you've created for them. With your funnels, you did a pretty solid job of making sure the ellipses stayed aligned with their minor axes, as well. Nice work there.

Rough Perspective - It seems you understand the purpose of the exercise and you do a fairly solid job of keeping your horizontals parallel with the horizon and your verticals perpendicular. What I need to tag you on is your line work. I understand it's a bit of a balancing act to manage both ghosting and perspective and your lines here show that you were either going too quickly or too slowly. With the lines being a bit untidy, this has the unfortunate effect of weakening the illusion of 3D form. However, this will come with practice. Practicing the act of planning and preparing before putting each mark down will be invaluable for later assignments, so I suggest continuing to practice your accuracy with ghosting in future practice sessions.

Rough Perspective - Like with the rough perspective, I can see that you had some understanding of where to go with this, but hasty line work weakened the image as a whole. Overall, this assignment is meant to be a challenge, so in the future, if you attempt this again, here are a few things to keep in mind: remember to keep your gaps consistent to eliminate guesswork on where to place the next box. This, combined with rotating the boxes too much, may be why your attempt is a bit oblong. Similarly, you left out the hatching. While this seems minor, I want to urge you to follow the directions in the homework as closely as possible as this will help with your learning the material.

Organic Perspective - This is also meant to be a challenged, but your attempt here is fairly good. While there are a few errors with convergences - as you probably already knew from your check lines - overall, this is pretty strong work. Again, your line work is a little weak, but that's nothing the 250 box challenge can't help with.

As a whole, nice work and I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete. You're free to go on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

Uncomfortable

2019-06-25 02:11

It looks like you only linked to one page of your homework! Make sure that you're linking to the full imgur album instead, it usually has a url that looks like imgur.com/a/ABCDEFG

spelling_expirt

2019-06-25 15:38

Hello, I one of Uncomfortables TAs. After I review your work, he will give you your updated flair. Lets dive in.

Your lines section is well executed There is a little wobble or straying, but mostly the lines are confident. The ghosted section does not have a lot of fraying, and the ghosted lines are strong and clean. I do see a slight curl at the end of some of your strokes, and an arc on larger ones, so try to be mindful of that in the future. However, by the end of the planes exercise, I do see improvement on both of these fronts. So keep up the good work.

There is definitely evidence of struggle in the ellipses section. You did well with drawing through the ellipses, and you were also really trying to make the ellipses touch their neighboring edges. However, a lot of ellipses are warped, wobbly, or asymmetric. Remember, like the lines section, the highest priority is confidence first, accuracy second. I also wanted to note that a lot of your ellipses are, mostly, the same degree. That is, there are not really narrow ellipses or nearly circular ones. Ellipses are tricky, but can be tackled if you plan and ghost more before letting your pen hit the page. Then, let your muscles do the work.

In the boxes section, your start by correctly framing your plotted and rough perspective exercises. You additionally properly extended your check lines. However, it seems like your line work is a little less confident, I can see more straying marks. Furthermore, often your verticals are not perpendicular to the horizon. However, by the end of the rough and organic perspective exercises, you seemed to become more comfortable with using the skills from previous sections to approach each box line by line. By the end, the boxes are drawn more confidently with cleaner stronger lines. Your rotated box exercise is well ordered, and you used line weight and hatching well to delineate each box. You did a decent job rotating the boxes as well, although it looks like maybe you rotated the boxes directly adjacent to the center box a bit too much. Lastly, your organic perspective exercise shows that you understand how to make use of smaller boxes to give a sense of space to the page. In a couple spots, I can see that you went over your previous lines. Just be aware that doing so can attract the viewers attention, so it is best to leave your lines as your first made them, and to use additional line weight more strategically (more on this in the 250 box challenge).

There is a lot of growth throughout this submission as you come to terms with the principles of planning, preparing, and execution. The benefits you are getting from doing the exercises definitely shows; your hard work is paying off. You are ready for the 250 box challenge. Be sure to continue to do lesson 1 as warm up. Pay special attention to the ellipses exercise in the future. Try to make your ellipses as confident as your lines are. At first, you may need to ghost for a very long time to get your muscles ready, and that is normal.

spelling_expirt

2019-06-25 14:30

Hello, I one of Uncomfortables TAs; he will give you your flair after I finish my critique. Lets dive in.

Your lines are off to a great start, where each line made is crisp and straight. Your super imposed lines are not significantly frayed, and even your longer lines only show slight wobble. Likewise, your ghosted lines are nice and clean. There is even a little bit of variance in line weight; your ability to control this will benefit you in subsequent lessons. The confident, planned linework extends to the planes section. There are some slight accuracy issues, as you tend to overshoot just a little, but this will improve with time.

Your ellipses are equally confident. They are all drawn through and show very little warping or wobbling, implying that you ghosted the motion before making your mark. You really took care to try to make each ellipse right size for its containing shape, whether it be planes, tables, or funnels. As in the lines section, the accuracy of these ellipses will increase with time. I do see just a little drift in your minor axis in the funnel exercise, so keep an eye on that as well.

In the boxes segment, everything is properly plotted and framed. Check lines are correctly used. In the rough perspective exercise, the horizontals and verticals are parallel and perpendicular to the horizon, respectively, and the lines are perhaps a little less confident then the lines section, but still overall show evidence of planning. It does look like you had a tendency to draw over lines you felt were not good enough; you will definitely want to avoid this trend in the future. Drawing over your lines attracts the viewers eye to it, producing the opposite of the intended effect. Your rotating box exercise is, aside from drawing over your lines a little too much, fantastic. The spacing between boxes is even, you drew through them, and you made good use of line weight and hatching for clarity. You really rotated the boxes to a significant degree; often boxes are under-rotated. In the organic perspective section, it seems like you stopped drawing over lines (for the most part). You used size well to convey the recession of the boxes into the background; it might be worthwhile to experiment with occlusion more when you use this exercise as warmup.

The attention to detail, planning, and confident execution is extremely evident throughout this submission. Great work! Feel free to move on the 250 box challenge. Dont forget to use this lesson as warmup.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-25 20:21

Overall you're doing a pretty good job! There are a few things I noticed, as well as some marked improvement that I could see over the set.

What jumped out at me in your super imposed lines and your ghosted lines exercises was that there was a little bit of hesitation behind your lines, that caused them to stiffen up every so slightly. It's not the sort of thing that is particularly easy to pick up, but the little signs are there that you're a little unsure of yourself as you make those marks, and that you're second-guessing your muscle memory as you execute them.

As you get into the ghosted planes however, I believe you get a little more comfortable with the technique, and do a much better job of separating the planning, preparation and execution phases of the ghosting method. The lines appear smoother and more confident here, which tells me that you're shutting off your brain when you move to make the marks themselves, and allowing your arm to do what it does best without interference. This is definitely a big step in the right direction. Even though the issue was fairly minor, that last little bit of stiffness can be difficult to conquer.

For the most part, your ellipses are coming along well. You're visibly working on pushing forward with confidence, and while there's a touch of stiffness here and there, I believe you're doing a good job of capturing smooth, even shapes for each ellipse and avoiding much distortion. I noticed that in a few of these you definitely went a little overboard in drawing through your ellipses - try and limit it to two or three rounds before lifting your pen, with two being ideal.

For your funnels, remember that the core of this exercise is built around the idea of aligning your ellipses to the central minor axis line. I'm noticing a tendency in yours to slant a little, so keep working on that.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, you're doing a good job of keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon line and your verticals perpendicular to it, which shows me that you're thinking about the fact that this is a one point perspective situation which dictates a limited set of possible behaviours for each line. The fact that there is no slanting in these lines suggests that you are taking a moment before each line to properly consider which behaviour that stroke should follow, before jumping into it. I'm also pleased to see that you're applying the line extension method to check how your estimation of perspective might drift. Overall that drifting is fairly limited, and you're doing a pretty good job of aiming those alignments correctly.

Moving onto your rotated boxes, you did a good job of keeping your gaps narrow and consistent so as to avoid any unnecessary guesswork. You did however fall into the trap of having your boxes run roughly parallel to each other (aside from the central box). Keep an eye on those relative rotations between the boxes so you can better cover the full 180 degree arc on each major axis.

Lastly, you've got a good start on your organic perspective boxes. I'm actually VERY pleased to see that you decided to draw through all your boxes here - even when students have encountered that technique from having moved ahead previously, they don't all realize that this is a technique that can be used wherever you feel it may help you to better grasp how the forms sit in space.

Now, there certainly is room for improvement, specifically in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but that is entirely expected. This exercise is all about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered, and serves as an introduction rather than a test. We'll also continue to work on this.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-26 19:23

Both your lines and ellipses sections are very well done. You're demonstrating confident linework, without any hesitation or attempts to steer the pen with your eyes as you draw. You're showing that you trust in your muscle memory, and are allowing your arm to do what it does best. You then reinforce that by applying the ghosting method, adding the planning and preparation phases to your mark making process without changing the execution phase. You imbue your strokes with a greater tendency towards accuracy and precision without impeding the confidence and flow of the strokes.

This helps you to achieve smooth lines that go where they need to. You've got a little bit of arcing to some of your longer lines, which you can read about here, but by and large this is going well. Additionally, this combination of preplanning and confidence does a great job of keeping your ellipses evenly shaped and free of stiffness, even when dealing with the tricky situation of having them fit inside of awkwardly shaped planes.

Now, when you hit the boxes section, you do encounter some difficulties.

First off, I'm not seeing the rough perspective boxes represented here - it looks like you may have forgotten to include it, so I'll have to ask you to submit that as well before I mark this lesson as complete.

That said, in both your rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes, there is a visible change in how you go about drawing your lines. These marks don't appear to be using the ghosting method, with your investment of time shifting all towards the execution of your marks, drawing more slowly rather than planning and preparing beforehand.

This results in lines that are a great deal stiffer, and much less smooth than you demonstrated earlier. Every single mark demands and requires just as much time as it needs to be drawn to the best of your ability, whether it is on its own, or if it exists as part of a larger, more complex form or object.

Now, these last two exercises are absolutely meant to be quite challenging, and so it's common for students to get a little overwhelmed, and in reaction to that, dump what they've learned and fall back to older habits. Whenever you feel a little in over your head, don't push forwards - take a step back and take stock of the situation. You may find that you don't know where your lines should necessarily go, but a line is still a line regardless of where it is drawn, and you know how to draw lines. So step through the process, determine which line you want to draw, and then execute it with confidence. Even if the line is oriented incorrectly, it will still be smooth and confident - and that's at least a win on one front.

Looking at the rotated boxes exercise, there are two main things I look for:

• Whether the student kept the gaps between the boxes narrow and consistent, so as to avoid any unnecessary guesswork, as explained here. Your gaps were definitely close, but still had a tendency to be rather inconsistent. There wasn't really any attempt to keep the lines that were close together running roughly parallel to one another.

• Whether the student is covering the full 180 degree arc of rotation on both major axes. You're achieving this in your second attempt, though your corners (which are incomplete) seem to be flaring out farther, rather than sticking to their neighbours. Maintaining the consistent gaps would have helped with that, at least somewhat.

On that point, no matter how badly an exercise is going, see it through and bring it to completion. Don't leave exercises half finished, as you have done here with the missing boxes in both attempts.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a good start, though there is plenty of room for improvement, specifically in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points. This exercise is all about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem they may not have otherwise considered, and so it is more of an introduction rather than a test, and I fully expect students to have difficulty with this. We will continue to work on this, of course.

Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to submit your two pages of rough perspective boxes. Once I do mark it as complete, I'll want you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-26 19:50

Your work here is really fantastic. I have just a couple minor things to point out, but by and large you've done a phenomenal job.

To start with, your lines are exceptionally well executed. You're clearly focusing on executing your marks with confidence, not allowing your brain to steer the stroke, but instead trusting in your muscle memory, and for your arms to do what they do best. You maintain a consistent trajectory throughout the stroke, and don't waver or hesitate in order to get back on your intended track.

Once introduced to the ghosting method, you add the first two phases of mark making - planning and preparation - to precede your execution, and do so without changing how you actually put the marks down. You're still confident and consistent, but now your strokes are reinforced with proper planning to achieve greater accuracy and precision without stiffening up.

This confidence and willingness to apply the ghosting method with this degree of deliberateness carries over into your ellipses, and helps you to achieve smooth, evenly shaped ellipses that generally do a wonderful job of fitting snugly within their intended containers. I noticed in your ellipses in planes that you had a slight tendency to deform them in order to touch all four edges - this is something you should avoid, in favour of maintaining the elliptical shape above all else (and then gradually finding how to place and orient the ellipses to still achieve contact with all four edges), though the degree to which yours were distorted was minimal compared to most other students with this issue.

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, for the most part I can see you taking a great deal of care in maintaining horizontals that run parallel to the horizon line, and verticals that run perpendicular to it. This shows me that you're willing to take that moment before each mark to really think about exactly what behaviour that stroke should follow, and what your intent is with it. Being that this is one point perspective, we really only have the three possible kinds of lines, and so we need to know specifically which category our stroke falls into before moving forward with it.

Now, I am noticing that your linework here is perhaps just a little bit more hesitant than your previous stuff - it's almost unnoticeable, but I can see signs that you may not be approaching each stroke with quite as much preparation. Always remember that each and every stroke we put down deserves and requires as much time as you need to execute it to the best of your ability, whether it is floating on its own, or part of a larger form or more complex object. Whether it's an individual or part of a collection, a line is always just a line.

You really nailed the rotated boxes. You maintained narrow, consistent gaps so as to avoid any unnecessary guesswork, and you covered the full range of rotation on both major axes without any 'flairing' of the corners. One minor point - your boxes ended up being quite long (depth-wise). While it's not stated that these should be perfect cubes (because there's no need of that), aiming more equilateral is definitely better for this exercise.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are coming along very well. You're already demonstrating a strong grasp of 3D space, and how these forms sit within it. Your convergences are coming along well, and maintain a consistent trajectory towards the shared vanishing points. You're even drawing through most of your boxes, which is great to see (although in the future, don't make those lines fainter - draw them with the normal confidence you'd draw anything else). And, perhaps unimportantly, your compositions are quite pleasing and well balanced.

I am noticing a few places where you're perhaps correcting mistakes, once the line has been committed. In the future, try and avoid that sort of thing. Once a mark is down, it's usually best to leave it be rather than to draw attention to it or get in the habit of having to adjust and tweak everything.

Now, the quality of your organic perspective boxes puts me in an awkward spot. At this point I will of course be marking this lesson as complete. I generally assign the 250 box challenge next, as this last exercise is intended to be an introduction, an opportunity to expose students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered. You are however already demonstrating considerable comfort with this sort of thing. At the same time, I don't want to accidentally leave you without some of the particularly valuable aspects of the challenge either.

So, I'm going to ask you to complete at least 50 boxes from the 250 box challenge (with all the line extensions drawn upon the completion of each page). When you submit your work, be sure to include a reminder that I only assigned 50 instead of the whole enchilada.

svendogee

2019-06-26 03:09

Hey there, I'm one of uncomfortable's TAs and I'll be going over your lesson today.

I am glad that you pushed through and did it even when you didn't feel like it. It's this resilience and willingness to toss aside feelings that leads to growth.

Your lines are stronger than you give yourself credit for. Your super imposed lines are tight and mostly confident, as are your ghosted lines. In both I see wobbles near the end points which means you need to ghost more and trust that muscle memory. Flow/smoothness > accuracy at this stage in your development. What I like to do is instead of stopping the motion of the line, I just lift my pen off so I don't have to fight the inertia and muscle memory I built up with ghosting.

Ellipses are hard. I think everyone can agree on this. Yes, you struggled, but you persevered and tried to follow the directions, which is what we look for in lesson 1. At this point just continue to practice the ghosting method and using your shoulders for all marks, including ellipses. I recommend trying to go a little faster to eliminate the wobbles and yield a smoother more confident ellipse. I can already see the progress with your funnels exercises and you do a good job keeping the minor axes aligned to the central axis of the funnel.

With your rough perspective I see you tensed up a lot. Remember to ghost and plan every line and if some miss the mark, it's just more room for improvement and practice. You do a good job orienting your horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and your verticals perpendicular. While your converging lines miss the VP a lot that is normal and with more practice in drawing towards a desired point your accuracy will improve.

Good job on completing the rotated box exercise! First and foremost our goal for students is to complete this exercise and be exposed to new types of spatial problems and ways to solve them. A nice drawing is a far and away secondary concern. While you definitely try to rotate your boxes, you more just translated them over and shrank them, as indicated by the converging lines all being mostly parallel. Remember, to rotate a box the vanishing points translate along the horizon as seen here. Additionally, you could have afforded to keep your boxes closer together to utilize adjacent lines in guiding your perspective, explained here.

Finally let's take a look at your organic perspective. You are showing starting signs of perspective with attempts to get your lines to converge, and while there are some divergences and perspective errors, that is nothing the 250 box challenge won't clear up. You also do a good job conveying the illusion of depth on your page by scaling your boxes, and to sell the illusion even more in the future you can play with more overlapping boxes and very large boxes in the immediate foreground.

And with that you are finished with lesson 1. Moving forward I want to urge you not to be so self critical. Usually when students are hyper critical of themselves it's under the guise of being "realistic" and "self-motivating" but in reality students are just that, students. They don't know what they should be looking for at each stage of their development and it's why it's so important to have outside evaluations. Self evaluation is great, but don't plan your own funeral from it :P

You are now free to start the 250 box challenge. Please make use of the very helpful resources provided by uncomfortable and remember to take breaks to draw for fun to avoid burning out. Keep up the good work and we will see you on the other side of 250.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-27 16:24

Unfortunately your last submission was on June 24th. Students must wait two full weeks (14 days) in between submissions, so you'll have to hold onto that until July 8th and resubmit then. This is both to ensure that students do not flood us with submissions, and that they are given enough time to work through a given lesson or challenge without rushing.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-28 22:54

Starting with your lines section, you're demonstrating a great deal of confidence behind each stroke, without much in the way of hesitation, or attempts to steer your pen with your eyes as you draw. You're trusting in your muscle memory and letting your arm do what it does best without interference.

Now, your use of the ghosting method does need some work however. Generally speaking, the way things work is we have you first get used to drawing with confidence (which you're doing quite well), and then reinforce that execution with two preceding phases - planning and preparation. I'm noticing a slight waver in your ghosted lines that suggests your preparation phase, where you ghost through the motion, may need work, and that you may have been drawing more from the elbow than the shoulder. This does however improve when you get into the planes exercise, although you do need to keep reducing your tendency to overshoot as you go. One thing that may help here is to get used to lifting your pen when it hits the intended end point, rather than trying to slow to a stop.

Your ellipses generally demonstrate that same confidence you started out with, which is great to see. It helps you to achieve smooth, evenly shaped ellipses without any distortion or deformation. Through the ellipses in tables exercise, you're generally doing a good job of keeping them snug within their intended spaces, though keep working on gradually tightening them up (without losing the confidence of the stroke). This will come with practice.

One thing I'd like to point out in regards to your funnels exercise is that there are many cases here where you're not quite aligning correctly to that central minor axis line. Remember that the core of this exercise is to push students to ensure that each ellipse is cut into two equal, symmetrical halves down their narrowest dimension. Yours have a tendency to slant a little.

Jumping ahead to the rough perspective boxes, there are signs here that you need to stop and think a little more before moving to draw each mark. With this exercise being a one point perspective problem where all boxes are parallel to the ground plane, each line can only really follow one of three possible behaviours:

• The horizontal lines will run parallel to the horizon line

• The vertical lines will run perpendicular to the horizon line

• The lines that go off into the distance will converge towards the vanishing point

The third is obvious, as it's perceived as the main focus of this exercise, but the first two can often be overlooked, as you have done here in many cases. You've got a lot of lines that slant a little more arbitrarily, so when you set out to draw a line, you need to take the time to consider just exactly what that line is meant to accomplish, and how it needs to be drawn in order to best accomplish that task. Taking a moment to think about how that line needs to be have is critical, so try not to jump into drawing your strokes before you know what exactly you mean to put down.

Though it's definitely a bit rough (and admittedly the hatching is a little sloppy), you have nailed the two main things I look for in the rotated boxes. Firstly, you've kept the gaps between your boxes fairly narrow and consistent, so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, and you certainly have covered the full 180 degree arc of rotation for both major axes.

I'm sure future attempts will come out much better, but you did nail down the most important points with this one, so good job. Maybe in the future, you'll want to draw these forms to be a little larger, to give yourself more room to think through how they're laid out in 3D space.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a good start. There's definitely room for improvement, specifically in getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but this is completely normal. This exercise is all about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered. In that sense, it is an introduction, rather than a test of skill. We'll continue to work on this in the future.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-29 22:51

Though you're running into one major pitfall that impacts a great deal of your work, you're actually still doing a good job overall.

The major issue starts with your super imposed lines, where I can see that you're definitely focusing a great deal on achieving accurate strokes, rather than focusing all of your efforts on maintaining smooth, confident ones that maintain a consistent trajectory from the moment it touches the page and commits to a direction. Ultimately that's what this exercise is about - learning to set aside the need for everything to be perfectly accurate, and instead trusting in your muscle memory. If we get into the habit of allowing our eyes to steer our pen as we draw, we will always end up with a wobblier, stiffer stroke.

Once you hit the ghosted lines and planes exercises, you do yield a great deal of that need to control your lines, and give way to more confident, smoother strokes. There is a touch of very slight stiffness that I can still see in some cases, but by and large these are moving in the right direction, and don't show any notable wobbling.

Your ellipses on the other hand, do. Here you're choking up and allowing yourself to draw with a much more rigid hand, putting your mark down more slowly. The ghosting method applies here just as it does to straight lines - identify the mark you want to make, prepare by ghosting through the motion as needed, and then finally execute the mark by trusting in your muscle memory and drawing with confidence. The flow and evenness of the shape is a far higher priority than your accuracy, as we want to make sure that your ellipses are, above all else, evenly shaped (and therefore properly elliptical, rather than deformed to fit their containers).

Jumping ahead to your rough perspective boxes, these are generally well done, though I'm catching a few horizontals and verticals that are sitting at a slant. Remember that since this exercise is in one point perspective with all the boxes running parallel to the ground plane, this means each line can follow one of only three possible behaviours:

• Horizontals run parallel to the horizon line

• Verticals run perpendicular to the horizon line

• Lines going off into the distance converge towards the vanishing point

The third is the obvious focus of this exercise, but it's easy to forget about the first two, and to jump into drawing those lines without properly considering what we're aiming to accomplish with those strokes. Be sure to use the planning phase of the ghosting method to think about exactly how a the line you're drawing needs to behave in order to accomplish its particular goal.

In your rotated boxes, you've done a great job of keeping your gaps narrow and consistent, so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork. You are still definitely struggling with rotating the boxes relative to their neighbours however, as explained in these notes.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are coming along well. There certainly is room for improvement - specifically with getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points - but this is totally normal and expected. This exercise is all about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered, so it's more of an introduction than a test of your current skill. We will certainly continue working on this.

Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I want you to do one more page of the tables of ellipses exercise, pushing to draw your ellipses more confidently, applying the ghosting method and keeping them more evenly shaped and eliminating that stiffness and wobbling. Once you submit the extra page, I'll mark it as complete and send you onto the 250 box challenge next.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-01 17:15

Very nice work! Through your lines section, you start out focusing on the confident execution of your marks, achieving smooth, consistent trajectories without hesitation or uncertainty. You then go on to reinforce that with the ghosting method, adding accuracy and control to your linework without undermining the confidence of those strokes. You're doing a great job of balancing the investment of your time towards the planning and preparation phases, and pushing through the execution with full commitment to the practiced stroke.

This carries over nicely into your ellipses, where the same principles apply to achieve even, well rounded shapes without visible deformation or distortion. You're also doing a great job of keeping them snug within the space they've been allotted, avoiding any overlapping/overshooting or ellipses that float a little more loosely in their containers. You're holding true to this in the ellipses in planes as well, where a lot of students struggle to avoid pushing and pulling their ellipses to touch all four edges. You're keeping them elliptical (for the most part - the big ones on the top and bottom of this page are the only ones to get a little out of shape), and also fitting them properly within their containers at the same time.

You're generally doing an okay job of keeping your funnels' ellipses aligned correctly, though I do think there's a slight tendency to tilt just a little bit. They're all following this same discrepancy however, so I think you just need to adjust your sense of alignment. It doesn't appear to be an unawareness of the particular goal - you know what you're aiming for, you just need to tweak it a little bit.

For the most part, you're keeping your rough perspectives' horizontals parallel to the horizon line, and your verticals perpendicular to it, which tells me that you're aware of the intended behaviour of each individual stroke before putting it down. You're applying proper planning and consideration beforehand, and I'm also pleased to see the checking after the fact for your lines as they converge towards the VP.

Now your rotated boxes are coming along okay. Filling the gaps in with black was probably not the best idea - I assume there was some little mistake or issue that you wanted to clean up, but I'm not going to ding you on poor presentation choices. Overall you're keeping those gaps narrow and consistent, so as to eliminate any unnecessary guesswork, and you're doing a decent job of rotating the boxes relative to one another. I do think this last point could use some improvement, exaggerating the different orientations of neighbouring boxes and avoiding a tendency to have their lines converge towards similarly positioned vanishing points.

Lastly, your organic perspective boxes are a good start. There is room for improvement, specifically with getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, but this is completely normal. This exercise is all about exposing students to a different kind of spatial problem that they may not have otherwise considered, so it serves as an introduction to this kind of a challenge, rather than a test of skill. We will continue to work on this next.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to move onto the 250 box challenge next.

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-03 09:10

Hey there, I'm one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be along later to give you a flair.

First up, your superimposed lines are looking pretty good. There's a few stray lines here and there but overall you've done a good job of keeping them straight and confident. Onto your ghosted lines and planes and these are also very good - straight and confident with the exception of a few wobbles here and there.

Onto your ellipses and I can see you definitely struggled a little here, with lots of lumpy ellipses and some gaps here and there. Try to keep a confident pace and ghost as many times as you need to. There's definitely places where you nailed the flow so this is likely just something you need to practice more. That said, the shape of your ellipses in planes and in the funnels has definitely improved. On the funnels, you haven't correctly aligned your ellipses to the minor axis.. This concept becomes even more important in later lessons, so it's important that you nail it down.

Finally, onto your boxes. The rough perspective definitely shows promise but it seems like you let uncertainty get the better of you here because your lines are distinctly wobblier here. In terms of your boxes, you've made a solid attempt at keeping the lines of the front faces perpendicular and your estimation of perspective is not too far off the mark for the most part. I did notice you applied line weight here, though I feel that maybe you went about it too slowly, which made the result look a lot wobblier. Much like the superimposed lines lesson, we want to aim for confidence when we apply line weight.

You've taken a really solid crack at the rotated boxes and even managed to get quite a bit of rotation, though the outer boxes could be rotated further. On some of the outer diagonal boxes, you seem to have lost the nice consistent spacing you maintained on the other boxes. We keep these gaps consistent to give little cues about where the next box should be placed and even how far to rotate it.

Finally, your organic perspective boxes. Towards the end, it seemed like you were slowly getting the hang of what the box should look like. I definitely think you could have fit far more boxes in these compositions - don't be afraid to overlap things. It's good to see experiments with scale and rotation here as well and ultimately, the purpose of this and the previous exercise are to introduce you to spacial concepts that you may not have considered before.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete and ask you to move onto the 250 box challenge. Here are some points for you to keep in mind as you progress:

• Practice your ellipses and particularly their alignment to the minor axis.

• Plan, ghost, and execute every mark that you put down with confidence (including line weight). This is the best way to get the most out of the 250 box challenge and these lessons in general.

sluggydragon

2019-07-04 15:07

No problem! I agree that you show improvement between these two pages but I'll hold off on full feedback until you have the entire assignment. Reply to this thread when you've submitted we know when you do. Thanks and good luck!

sluggydragon

2019-07-04 15:35

Hello there! I'm Sluggy, one of the TAs. Uncomfortable will be by later to check this critique and give you the appropriate flair. :)

Lines - These are very neat and it's clear to me that you took your time with this exercise. One thing I do notice is that you have a slight wobble in your ghosted lines. This is telling me that while you are consistently hitting that end point, you may be going too slowly or drawing with your wrist. When doing this exercise in the future, plan and prepare with your ghosting and then take the plunge and put the mark down, focusing on making a smooth line, consistently. When you find the speed you're comfortable with, you can then focus on accuracy.

Ellipses - These are also quite neat and you improve over the course of the exercise, but I still see signs of a wobble. Remember that ellipses can be ghosted as well and the same concept with your lines applies here: Aim for smooth consistent curves and then work to tighten the ellipses up by drawing through them. That said, you do a good job keeping them within the bounds of the boxes, planes, and funnels you're drawing them in. With your funnels, keep an eye on that minor axis and make sure your ellipses remain aligned with it.

Rough Perspective - With this exercise, one thing to keep in mind is to make sure that your horizontals are parallel with the horizon and that your verticals are perpendicular. This is an easy way to make sure you're keeping things in perspective with the horizon. However, it seems you're starting to understand the purpose of the exercise as you go through the homework and your convergences towards the VP improve, so good job there! One thing I want to point out is your hatch marks on the very first segment of the exercise - try to put as much care into these as you do every other part of the drawing. Though there will be exceptions in other work, in this curriculum, the combination of dark pen marks and the focus on construction means that if you leave part of a drawing untidy, it tends to draw the eye. Being careful with each mark is a good habit to instill for later exercises.

Rotated Boxes - This is a very difficult challenge in the homework set but this is very strong work. Your lines are clean, your hatch marks are neat, and the gaps between your boxes are consistently sized. Also, it's well proportioned. Nice job! As for the reason the image itself is a bit squared out around the edges, that's because the boxes aren't rotating enough. To avoid this, you'll want to shift the VP along the horizon line enough that the box rotates instead of moving back in space. However, this is very good work.

Organic Perspective - This is also meant to be a challenge, and you tackled it fairly well - I notice you playing with the sizes of the boxes to indicate distance. There are a few errors with convergences, but that's nothing the 250 box challenge won't help with.

Overall, this is good work and it's clear you're learning a lot from these exercises. From looking at your pages, one thing I want to emphasize is to avoid focusing on making your homework too neat-looking. Sometimes you need to get a little messy to get rid of that wobble or get your ellipses nice and tight and that's okay. After that, neatness will come with time, patience, and practice. That said, I'm happy to mark this complete and send you on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

sluggydragon

2019-07-05 18:22

Hey there, welcome to Draw-A-Box! I'm Sluggy, one of the TAs - Uncomfortable will be by later to check this critique and give you the right flair.

Overall, I will say that for just starting out, this is fairly strong work and I hope you stick with this! Let's get into the finer points now.

Lines

Your superimposed lines show a good amount of thought, in that you consistently avoid fraying at the starting point. However, I do have some notes on this: though I notice that you are missing the ghosting exercises, I can tell that between your superimposed lines and your planes, you haven't quite found a speed at which you're comfortable and consistent. On your superimposed lines, you may be going a touch too quickly and on your planes, your lines are wobbly, showing that you're going slowly. Keep in mind that with every single line you draw, you want to try and ghost it ahead of time.

Planning and preparing ahead of time and consistent practice will constantly narrow the gap between what you mean to accomplish and what you put down on the page. Part of Draw-A-Box is instilling good habits and ghosting is one of them. With this, you're trying to find the speed at which you can make a smooth line. After you achieve that, you can focus on accuracy and hitting the end point.

I do notice, however, that your line work improves over your set of planes, so you are certainly moving in the right direction.

Ellipses

You note that you're not quite confident with these, but they're looking pretty solid as well. The curves are pretty smooth and I'm not seeing much of a wobble. What you'll want to focus on now is drawing through the ellipses so you can get them tighter. Other than that, you're demonstrating enough control to keep them within the boxes, planes, and funnel arcs you've put down.

With your funnels, you'll want to keep an eye on that minor axis - make sure that your ellipses are properly bisected by that line. You can achieve this by ghosting your ellipses as well, to get an accurate mark.

Rough Perspective

These aren't bad at all and I hardly think you got worse, as you say. In terms of the exercise, it seems you understand the purpose of it. You keep your horizontals parallel to the horizon and your verticals perpendicular and that keeps the boxes in proper perspective. Your lines continue to improve though I still see that wobble, but we already went over how to improve on that. Balancing ghosting and perspective is a bit of a tough act, but consistent practice will only help. Overall, nice work on this part.

Rotated Boxes

Like with the rest of your work, this appears neat and well-thought-out. This is meant to be a challenge for beginners and you tackled it quite well in that your gaps are fairly consistent and the boxes are kept together. The reason that the image is squared out around the edges, is because the boxes aren't rotating enough. I also notice that you struggled with drawing through the outside boxes - this is a matter of coming to understand the boxes as 3D forms on a 2D plane and it will happen with patience and practice.

Finally, the lack of hatching between the boxes - I'm tagging you on that because I urge you to follow the directions as written as closely as possible. This will allow you to draw as much as possible from the curriculum. However, beyond that, you did well

Organic Perspective

These look quite good, actually! You're playing with the size of the boxes to indicate distance and your mark-making is already improved. While there are convergence errors, that is to be expected and nothing the 250 box challenge can't help with.

Like I said at the beginning, this is strong work and I hope you continue! I'm happy to mark this as complete, but please submit the ghosted lines exercise in this thread. Also, continue to include ghosting both your lines and ellipses in your future practice sessions. I'm sending you on to the 250 Box Challenge. Good luck!

sluggydragon

2019-07-05 19:03

Hey there! I'm Sluggy, one of the TAs - Uncomfortable will be by later to check this critique and give you the right flair.

Lines

This is very solid work! I can see you've found a comfortable speed that consistently gives you a smooth line. With your curved superimposed lines, I do detect a little bit of a wobble - I would venture to guess that at some point in the curve, you're either slowing down too much or using your wrist. Continue to practice using your shoulder with these and that wobble should smooth out with practice and persistence.

With your ghosted lines - again, these are consistently smooth, nice work - try to focus on accuracy and hitting the end point consistently now. I notice you're often overshooting that end point, and when you're constructing forms, this may have the effect of weakening the illusion of 3D form. Still, good work here.

Ellipses

Similar to your lines, your ellipses are consistently smooth and pretty well controlled in that you're keeping them snugly in their tables, funnels, or planes. However, I recommend that you draw through them a bit more, to tighten them up with each pass. At the moment, they are a bit loose. Similarly, with your funnels, keep an eye on that minor axis and make sure it passes through the middle of each ellipses. You can accomplish better accuracy by ghosting each ellipse before putting your first mark down.

Rough Perspective

While your boxes are technically neatly constructed and put together, they are not quite in perspective. This is because the horizontals are not parallel with the horizon and the verticals are not perpendicular. Ensuring this is a good way to keep your boxes in line with the horizon line you've put down. Similarly, if you make a mistake, fight the need to draw back over it. One bad line won't look too incorrect, unless it's wildly off the mark, but if you draw over it in an attempt to fix it, you're darkening the line and that can draw the eye.

Still, despite the way these boxes are tilted relative to the horizon line, it's clear you understand the purpose of the exercise. I would just keep an eye on the horizontals and verticals and make sure you've got them properly aligned.

Rotated Boxes

This portion of the homework is meant to be a bit of a challenge and you tackled it quite well. You kept your boxes together and the gaps between them are consistently spaced. Nice work there! One of the main reasons that the box isn't as round as the example image is because the ones are the edges are not rotating enough. To achieve this affect, make sure that the VP for each box is shifted along the axes enough that the box is rotating instead of just moving back into space.

Similarly, I do need to tag you on hatching the back face instead of between the boxes, mainly because it's important for you to follow the directions as closely as possible for the maximum amount of learning this course can provide.

Organic Perspective

It seems like this portion of the exercise gave you a bit of guff - balancing perspective and line work can be a tough task, but keep in mind that ghosting applies here as well. Similarly, there are a few errors in your convergences, but this is nothing the 250 box challenge can't help with.

--

In conclusion, this is very strong work! Continue to work on your ghosting in future practice - as I said, try to strive for accuracy now that you're confidently putting down smooth marks. I'm happy to mark this as complete and send you on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

sluggydragon

2019-07-05 19:26

Hey there! I'm Sluggy, one of the TAs - Uncomfortable will be by later to check this critique and give you the right flair.

Lines

Your lines are looking quite good - between the superimposed lines and your ghosted lines, it's clear to me that you've found a comfortable speed that's producing consistent clean lines. The next step from here will be focusing on accuracy - in future practice sessions, when ghosting or doing superimposed lines, do what you can to hit the end point. Currently, you're either overshooting, or not quite reaching your end points, so practicing this at the speed you've achieved will be good for future exercises.

Ellipses

These are looking very clean, so really nice work here. Like with your lines, since you've found a speed where you're consistently producing clean lines, it's time to focus on tightening your ellipses up. You're aiming for a pretty uniform circle, so continuing to draw through will help you get it closer and closer to that ideal.

You also demonstrate a good degree of control, keeping your ellipses snugly in their tables, planes, and funnels. Nice work there! With your funnels, keep an eye on that minor axis. It should run right through the middle of your ellipses and in a few of those, they are shifting or tilting off of the axis.

Rough Perspective

Strong work here. Your verticals are perpendicular to the horizon and your horizontals are parallel. Similarly, your line work is neat and confident. It's clear you understand the purpose of this exercise. I would urge you to fight the urge to correct mistakes with more marks. This has the effect of drawing the eye to these mistakes rather than correcting them. Similarly, this is part of where accuracy will help you - overshooting the end-marks may have the effect of weakening the illusion of 3D form. Overall, however, nice work.

Rotated Boxes

I will admit, this is a bit small to make out too much, but from what I can tell, you tackled this portion of the homework fairly decently. Your gaps are consistent, you keep the boxes together, and you very nearly achieve a full 180 degree rotation. Really strong work there. What I will tag you on, however, is the lack of hatching between the boxes - I point this out only because it's important to follow the directions closely, so you can learn as much as possible from this curriculum, especially in later lessons.

Organic Perspective

Honestly, really good work here. While I do see a few convergence errors, your boxes are well constructed and your line work is neat and well-thought-out. Once more, I do see you overshooting your end points, creating little tails at your box corners, but this and the convergence errors are nothing the challenge can't help.

--

Really strong work here! Your linework is good and it seems like you understand the 3D form pretty well already. Continue to practice ghosting so you can improve that accuracy. I'm marking this complete and sending you on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

Uncomfortable

2019-07-06 01:03

Just a quick bit of housekeeping - I noticed that your flairs aren't showing up on your username, so you likely have "Show my flair on this subreddit" unchecked (it's usually on the sidebar). Make sure it's checked, as we use your flairs to track whether or not you're eligible for private critiques, and which lessons you've completed.

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-05 23:55

Hi there, I'm one of the TAs. Uncomfortable will be along later to check on this and give you your flair.

Let's get started. Firstly, your superimposed lines are fantastic. They are confident with minimal fraying, even though they're so long. It's a clear indication you're engaging your shoulder and a great start to this section. The same confidence is demonstrated in your ghosted lines and planes however on some of the lines, I can see a little bit of uncertainty kicking in towards the end of the lines you draw but it does improve over the course of your work.

Your ellipses are looking quite good throughout, smooth and confident. I would suggest that you draw through them one more time than you have, as this will tidy up those straggling lines that hang out the ends. You've done a good job of confining your ellipses to the planes, without losing confidence - this is exactly what we like to see. The funnels are also really solid, with only a few misalignments of the ellipses here and there and it does seem that you understood the purpose of this exercise.

Onwards to the boxes and here we see the first signs of uncertainty in your work in the rough perspective boxes. Where all the other lines you've drawn in this lesson are confident, these ones are wobbly, unsure, and have been reinforced multiple times. Line weight is a tool that should be used subtly and we should aim never to reinforce a line that doesn't serve a purpose in organising the hierarchy of our drawing. Other than the line confidence, you work here is actually pretty solid too, with the convergences of your boxes, even the ones far away from the vanishing point, are actually pretty accurate.

Interestingly, your line confidence improved on the rotated boxes, which is arguably a far more difficult exercise. You've actually done a really solid job of rotating the boxes, although the layer furthest from the centre could probably have stood to be rotated further. Your gaps are consistent and here at least, your line weight makes more sense.

Finally, your organic perspective boxes. These are really good too! Your line confidence came back and it's clear you have a fair grasp on perspective already and I'm excited to see what you can do after the box challenge. Again though, you have reinforced every line of the box here.

Overall, you've done some really solid work here, with your confidence only wavering as you got into drawing the boxes. Moving on, try not to let that overwhelm you and spend the time planning each line of your box as this will pay off in the long term.

I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete and ask you to move onto the 250 box challenge.

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-05 23:58

Hi there, it seems your link is missing the majority of the lesson, could you please edit your post with a link to the full album and reply to this comment when you've done this. :)

spelling_expirt

2019-07-08 01:30

Hello, I am one of Uncomfortables TAs. There are no worries on the patreon front, so you don't need to worry about that. I will critique your work and then he will assign your flair. So lets take a look!

The lines section is overall pretty good! You have a bit of fraying in your super imposed line exercise, but for the most part the lines are pretty confident. There is a consistent small arc towards the middle of these lines thats worth addressing. In both the ghosting and planes exercises, I do see a small amount of wobble. Remember, the point of these exercises is confidence first, accuracy second. Your lines might be all over the place at first, but if they are crisp and clean, then mission accomplished. This might be remedied by moving a little quicker on the page, or ghosting a planning a bit more. Just remember, once your pen has hit the page, the time for hesitation is over.

The next section is the ellipses section. Your ellipses are pretty confident. While they may be (expectedly) a little off, I dont see wavering on the page. Most of your ellipses contact their surrounding edges. In the planes section, there is a bit of warping as you try to make your ellipse accurate, so remember to prioritize symmetry and confidence before trying to make it fit perfectly in the plane. In the funnels section, I do see the ellipse lose alignment to the minor axis. Keep an eye on these things; I would also suggest you try to vary the ellipse degree more dramatically get more out of the exercise.

In the boxes section, nothing is amiss with your plotted perspective boxes. The boxes are framed, recede to the correct vanishing point, and the verticals and horizontals are oriented correctly with respect to the horizon line. In the rough perspective, you were mindful of how your verticals were perpendicular and you horizontals were parallel to the horizon. There are places with things get a little off but the effort is clear. It does seem like the line quality is pretty hesitant in this section. As you strived to make your boxes align to the vanishing points, your brain was taking over and making your drawing hand unsteady. The same ideas from the previous two sections apply here: plan, prepare, and execute. By the time your pen strikes paper, try to have every confidence that your muscles know what to do. In the rotated box exercise, your line quality is much better. Your spacing is a little uneven, but you used the neighboring, previous lines to guide each subsequent one. Furthermore you drew through your boxes and hatched them to clarify the drawing. It does look like you succeeded in getting the boxes to turn more on the vertical and horizontal axes then in the 4 corner quadrants. As the boxes turn away from the viewer, the angles get more and more severe.

By the organic perspective exercise, I can tell that you are starting to incorporate the prepare-and-execute mentality of this lesson. Considerably more lines are straight and confident. Additionally, your boxes are well plotted and framed, and you made good use of size to convey space on the page.

You definitely understood the goals of this lesson, and I really think that the 250 box challenge is going to effectively hone your new skills. Keep up the good work!

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-09 08:30

Hi there, I'm one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be along later to update your flair so let's get started.

First up is your lines section and this is pretty solid across the board. Your superimposed lines are nice and confident with minimal wavering and nicely grouped together. This confidence flows through to your ghosted lines though I do see a few little wavers as you approach the end of your line, which is occasionally present in the ghosted planes as well. This is suggestive of a focus on accuracy which tends to make your brain take over at the last minute.

Onto your ellipses and these start off a little more shaky and unsure than the lines however by the last page of tables and the ellipses in planes, you've tightened this up and they're very nicely shaped. I'm glad to see you've drawn around every ellipse at least twice as well. Your funnels actually do a pretty good job of following the minor axis line, with only a few ellipses straying from it though here again, your ellipses wavered a little, particularly with the smaller degrees. It's possible you are reverting to using your wrist when you're doing the tight ellipses, which is something you want to avoid.

Your rough perspective is looking pretty good, though your confidence wavered again here. You've managed to get them very much perpendicular and your estimation of perspective is not too bad at this stage. Onto your rotated boxes and you've made a pretty solid attempt at this and your line confidence actually improves a little here. You've managed to keep the gaps between your boxes nice and consistent and whilst you haven't managed the full rotation, you aren't expected to nail this or the following exercise at this stage. Finally, your organic perspective boxes are looking really good. Your compositions are solid and there's some good experimentation with scale. The boxes themselves are a good start though there's definitely room for improvement with your estimation of perspective.

Overall, I'm really happy with your work. You've clearly read and understood the instructions and what's being asked of you and made your best attempt. Make sure you maintain your confidence no matter what line you need to draw. I'll mark this lesson as complete and ask you to move onto the 250 box challenge.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-09 21:51

Very nice work overall, with just a few little things to point out. To start with, it's clear that you really enjoyed drawing the arrows, considering all the extra pages you did. They flowed quite nicely, with just one hitch. I noticed that with the few that zigzagged enough for me to see it, you had a tendency to leave the spacing between those zigzagging lengths of ribbon fairly consistent. As shown here, perspective is going to compress that spacing as it moves farther away from us. Doing so will help convey the idea that the arrow is moving back in space.

Next for your organic forms with contour lines, you're doing a great job of keeping your ellipses confident and evenly shaped, and keeping your contour lines pinched between the edges of the sausage form. You're also keeping your sausages simple and matching the whole two-spheres-connected-by-a-tube-of-consistent-width nicely. There's just one thing missing - the degree of your ellipses and curves doesn't seem to shift at all. As explained here, the degree of those cross-sectional cuts should shift, widening/narrowing as it moves through the length of the form to correspond with the changing of that cross-sectional slice's orientation relative to the viewer.

Moving onto the texture, you've definetely put a great deal of work into this, and to be completely honest, I feel the analyses/studies on the left side of the exercise did the best job of showing the qualities I wanted to see on the right. Remember that the density gradient on the right there is meant to transition from solid black (hence the bar of solid black we put in) to blank. You did the blank side pretty well, but as there's a very clear jump from solid black to what you'd drawn for your texture, that wasn't handled properly.

The key here is to focus on your cast shadows, and you definitely do grasp this to a degree. The fact that cast shadows are flexible and subject to how we choose to play with the lighting applied to the object. We can plunge an object into darkness, causing the shadows to deepen and engulf more of the object, merging into a single continuous shadow shape - and we can also shoot direct light at the object, blasting those shadows away and leaving only those in the deepest cracks where no light can penetrate. This second part, you managed well - but you seemed to be afraid to push your shadows past a certain point, so you weren't able to blend correctly with the solid black bar on the left.

I do also feel that your observation was demonstrated far more strongly in the texture analysis exercise than the dissections. In the dissections you seemed to rely more on drawing from memory, resulting in some of these getting a little overly simplified. Don't forget that our memories are not reliable, and that we must look back at our reference almost constantly, identifying only one or two marks to transfer to our drawing at a time. While doing that, we need to think about which little textural forms exist on the surface of our object that actually result in the casting of those marks (which are, of course, shadows). Being aware of what causes the mark is critical to drawing it in a manner that conveys that textural form's presence without having to outline it directly.

Moving on, your form intersections were very well done. You're demonstrating a very strong grasp of 3D space here, and were able to capture the forms in a manner that makes them feel consistent and cohesive within the same scene. You also handled their intersections fairly well, though you'll continue to improve on that front with further practice. As far as the intersections go, I really only wanted students to try them out here - it is, similarly to the rotated boxes and organic perspective boxes, an introduction to a difficult concept rather than a test.

Lastly, your organic intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how these sausage forms interact with one another, how they sag and slump together as they find a state of equilibrium. You've strongly conveyed the illusion that they exist in three dimensions, and that they are more than just flat shapes pasted on top of one another.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're doing well, though you have a couple things to keep an eye on. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-10 13:26

As I was adding your submission to our backlog spreadsheet, I clicked on your link to make sure it was a complete submission - but it looks like the link leads to a 404 error. Could you double check it and fix it if necessary?

sluggydragon

2019-07-11 17:37

Hi there! I'm Sluggy one of the TAs. Uncomfortable will be by later to check this critique and give you the right flair.

Lines

This is fairly strong work from the start! I do detect a bit of a wobble in your curved super-imposed lines, but I see you were able to straighten them out a bit after you went through the ghosting portion of the homework. At this point, you'll want to focus on your line's accuracy, so you can more consistently hit the end point of your lines.

Ellipses

These are looking pretty good, but I am seeing a little hint of a wobble. You do improve over the course of the set, but remember that you can ghost ellipses as well. That said, you keep pretty solid control over each one. As you continue practicing these, try to draw through them more so you can start tightening them up.

With your funnels, be extra careful that you keep the ellipses aligned with the minor axis you've drawn out. You do a pretty good job over all, but there are a few that are falling off.

Rough Perspective

Nice work here. It's clear you understand the purpose of this exercise and you've executed it neatly and quite well. I am going to nitpick a little bit though, to point something out: This is where accurately hitting the end point with your ghosted lines is particularly important. On a few of these boxes, your lines overshoot the corners: this has the effect of weakening the illusion of 3D form on the 2D plan. Similarly, try to fight the urge to draw over mistakes, as this will draw the eye to the mistake - which is darkened as if there is added line weight - rather than the drawing as a whole. While I don't consider this an error on this exercise, it's part of the reason that ghosting is important and good to keep in mind for future practice and lessons.

Rotated Boxes

Very strong work here. This is meant to be a challenge and you tackled it very well. Your gaps are consistent and your hatchmarks are neat. Your rotation in the core of the drawing is pretty good, but you actually stopped rotating the boxes around the edges, which is why it doesn't have a fully round appearance. You'll want to make sure you're shifting the VP along its respective axis enough that the box rotates rather than moving back into space. Still, really good work on this.

Organic Perspective

The convergences here are actually pretty decent and consistent. That's really great! However, you do continue to overshoot with those ghosted lines and I'm seeing a little bit of that line wobble coming back on the smaller boxes, meaning working on your ghosting and accuracy is all the more important.

--

In conclusion, this is very strong work! Your line work is pretty clean and it's clear you took your time with the exercises. The main issue I see is you overshooting your end points and the wobble in your ellipses. Continue to practice these exercises in future warm-ups. I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete and send you on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

spelling_expirt

2019-07-11 18:39

Hello! I am one of Uncomfortables TAs. I will critique your work and then he will assign your flair. So lets take a look!

Starting with your lines section, there is a lot of good work here. Your super imposed lines start in a tight point, which shows me that you were concentrating on where the pen hits the page, and for the most part the lines are clean and straight. These features persist into your ghosted lines and planes, where your lines show little wobble. You are preparing and committing to your marks, which is the exact intent of the lessons.

Moving on to the ellipses section, there is likewise a lot of confidence in these ellipses. There is little wavering present. However, you could improve getting your ellipses to touch their neighboring edges, particularly in the ellipse table. In the able section, you did draw through many of your ellipses, but some you did not. What is great in your ellipses in planes exercise is that often people sacrifice the smoothness and symmetry of their ellipses in trying to get them to touch the four edges of their bounding plane, but your ellipses are still pretty strong in this section. Some ellipses are bowed a little i.e. a little flat on one side. Nonetheless, the priority here is confidence first, accuracy second, and you have achieved that. Accuracy will come with practice. Perhaps the biggest thing to note is that the funnel exercise is missing. Please provide the missing page of funnels, and keep in mind some of the things noted here.

Your plotted perspective exercise is framed, although usually people draw all four borders of the frame rather then using the page end. I think it is important to fully frame the horizon line. In your rough perspective, your verticals are roughly perpendicular to the horizon, and your horizontals are roughly parallel to it. There are a couple instances where this is not true, but this will be a matter of practice. Your lines have a little more wobble then what is evidenced in the Lines section of the homework. It is common for line quality to dip a little as the exercise becomes more complicated, but by the end of the boxes section, your marks start to regain their earlier confidence. You did neglect one important element, where you did not extend your converging lines to the horizon to see how close your estimation was. This is a critical component of the rough perspective exercise since its actionable, tangible feed back to your work. Keep in mind that the extension lines are also to be used in the 250 box challenge.

The rotated box exercise is pretty solid. The spacing between each box is tight, and you used adjacent lines to assist you in plotting. All the boxes are drawn through, and you did a fantastic job turning each box away from the viewer. If I could nitpick, the symmetry of the boxes could be improved. In other words, the sphere is wider then it is tall, but you definitely got the intent of this exercise. The organic perspective exercise shows me a good grasp of three dimensions. You succeeded in turning the boxes in several different ways, used size to convey space, and also used a bit of occlusion. Like the rough perspective exercise, there are some lines here that have a bit of an arc as you rise to the more difficult challenge of making a box, but I hope to see this ironed out in the 250 box challenge.

All in all, I can see the ghosting and execution mindset starting to click with you. Before I send you off to the 250 box challenge, I would like to see the on page of missing funnel exercises. In the future, try to read the instructions closely so you don't miss important parts of the exercise or required parts of the submission.

spelling_expirt

2019-07-11 19:17

Hello, I one of Uncomfortables TAs. After I review your work, he will give you your updated flair. Lets dive in.

Your lines section, as a whole, is fantastic. Your superimposed lines are great, with bold, confident mark making resulting in clean, crisp lines. The ghosted lines and planes are similar. I do see an occasional wobble as you try to correct and inaccurate mark mid-stroke, but most of your lines are do not waver or show hesitation.

There is a good foundation in your ellipse section. You drew through all of your ellipses. However, I do see a bit of warping and hesitation here. I want to point out how your second drawn through line is pretty tight to the first, and you paid careful attention to getting the ellipses tightly packed into their allocated space. This indicates to me that you are really trying to focus on accuracy. Instead, try to focus first on confidence, as in your lines section. Try to ghost the ellipse enough that you are confident in your muscles before marking the page. If it helps, It will likely take more ghosting for your ellipses then compared to your lines.

Moving on to the boxes section, your plotted perspective exercise did correctly use a horizon line and two vanishing points, but I do think it would be beneficial to fully draw the frame of each image, rather then using the page edges for the left and right side. Your rough perspective exercise has good alignment, where you tried to keep your verticals and horizontals perpendicular and parallel to the horizon, respectively. You also plotted your convergence lines to the horizon, which is a great way to check your work. Your line quality suffered a little here compared to, say, the planes section. This is a normal consequence of stepping up the challenge of the exercise, but just try to remember to apply the skills you are learning in the superimposed and ghosted line exercises to your boxes.

The rotated box exercise is well structured. Your boxes are drawn through, your spacing is nice and tight, and you made good use of line weight to clarify the drawing. If you compare the converging angle of the outermost boxes on the horizontal axis to boxes neighboring them on the same axis, you can see that the degree of convergence between the two is nearly the same. Your brain is going to resist you turning the boxes. I am not sure if you did the boxes on the vertical axis before or after the horizontal, but the illusion of turning is more effective on this axis.

The organic perspective exercise has some crisp and clean linework. However it does look like maybe you drew over some of your lines. If this was an intentional application of line weight, that is OK, but if it was to hide a perceived mistake, I would encourage you to leave this habit behind. Trying to cover up a mistake with more or heavier lines just brings more attention to it. For this exercise, you could experiment a little more with size to make the image feel deeper.

You have absolutely got the intent of this lesson. I can see the preparation and planning that took place before you made each mark on the page. Now that you have the basic idea, the next step is more practice, which the 250 box challenge is great for! As you move on to this challenge, keep practicing the exercises you learned in lesson 1 as warmup. While the box challenge doesnt use ellipses, keep working on these as well, keeping in mind what was discussed above. Nice work!

Uncomfortable

2019-07-11 21:06

I've gone ahead and added your submission to the backlog - but I did want to say that I'm surprised you had trouble finding the link. There's no button as shown here at the bottom of the table of contents? Or if you're on mobile, here?

svendogee

2019-07-12 04:00

TA Sven here to do your critique today, so let's get started.

Your super imposed lines start off pretty wild, but you start to reign them in on the second page. Understandably, your curved lines are a little more erratic, but that's just the nature of learning to draw with our shoulder and will improve in time. Overall I think you could start experimenting with different speeds to try and find a sweet spot to really tighten up these super imposed lines as it is an exercise in line weight, and when applying line weight to a drawing we don't want wild double and triple lines.

In your ghosted lines I'm glad to see you challenging yourself with longer lines as these are really the test to see if we are applying the ghosting methods and using our shoulder. Conversely to your super imposed lines where I think you could afford to slow down a touch, I feel like in these ghosted lines you could afford to speed up a little as your are showing quite a bit of wobble and concern with hitting the end point rather than focusing on creating muscle memory with ghosting and executing a smooth, confident line. Keep practicing these methods and trust that accuracy will improve with time. In your planes, your line quality took a dramatic uptick, as they are smooth and confident for the most part and when you miss the mark you aren't showing any conscious concern with correcting it.

Moving on to your ellipses, you are doing well reinforcing them as instructed. Continue to practice ghosting these with your shoulder as they are showing a heavy degree of wobble and variance, but that is to be expected and nothing to fret over. Also be sure to be mindful that an ellipse will have neither a pointy end nor a blunt end, so when we are drawing these shapes it sometimes takes a conscious effort to try and keep a continuous smoothness to them as we go around. There are a lot of mechanics in the arm at play here so just keep practicing. Your funnels are going well in the right direction as you are keeping your minor axes aligned to the central axis of the funnel. They are still pretty spread in the reinforcement but that will improve with more ghosting and confident execution (and of course, practice!).

You have done a lot of work on these rough perspective boxes, which makes me happy! It's clear you are not rushing through these exercises and giving them each the focus and time they deserve. You've done well applying the instructions of extending your lines to check convergence, as well as keeping your boxes fairly well oriented, with the horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and the verticals perpendicular. I do see a breakdown of line confidence here, as is common as these boxes are the first "real thing" we draw in lesson 1 so there are bound to be some nerves from time to time. Just remember to keep applying the ghosting method with the shoulder.

Your rotated box is quite nice. The boxes living on the 2 axes are rotated well and not skewed, and your lines are more confident here. The diagonal boxes start to have some perspective errors and some of that could have been mitigated by keeping your boxes packed tighter together to utilize adjacent edges as explained here. You did a good job pushing through that, and as that is our first priority for students on this lesson, you have completed the main objective. That is, to be introduced to new types of spatial problems and different strategies to solve these problems.

Finally let's look at your organic boxes. You really have continued doing great with just absolutely packing your pages with practice, and giving each line the care it deserves. Your compositions are engaging (if not a little similar throughout), and you do an excellent job of conveying depth through scaling and overlapping. You have quite a bit of diverging perspective (near plane smaller than far plane), but that will get fixed right up in the 250 box challenge.

Overall you've done a great job putting in the work and following the directions in this lesson. I am happy to mark it complete and send you off to the 250 boxes. Make sure to take advantage of all of the great resources uncomfortable has made for the challenge, and remember to adhere to the 50% draw for fun rule to avoid burn out and so you don't mindlessly go through the motions of the boxes. Good job and we will see you next time.

spelling_expirt

2019-07-12 16:44

Hello, I am one of uncomfortabless TAs. I will review your work and then he will assign your flair.

First off, you are correct in that you are missing some pages: 1 page of ghosted lines, 1 page of ellipses in tables, 1 page of ghosted planes, 1 page of ellipses in planes, and 1 page of superimposed lines. That said, your work is sufficient to judge how you have incorporated the mindset required for these lessons.

Starting with the super imposed line exercise, things are looking decently precise and clean. There is little fraying at the beginning of the mark, but a little wobble present. This wobble persists into the ghosted lines and planes exercises. There are little curves and arc present, which shows me that as you are drawing the line, you are noticing that the line is not accurate and trying to adjust for this mid stroke. Remember, the whole point here is to ghost and prepare enough that, once our pen contacts the page, your muscle memory is entirely responsible for the mark. However, you do start to get the hang of this by the organic perspective exercise.

Your ellipses are fairly fluid and symmetrical, drawn through, and many of them contact the ellipses or lines next to them. Similar to the line section, that the lines waver a little bit as you worked to keep the ellipses accurate. My advice here is the same: once ink is flowing from your pen to your page, the time for hesitation, second thoughts, or changing your mind, is over. Make your mark and be done with it. The priority is confidence; accuracy will come with time. For many of the ellipses in your funnel exercise, they contact the funnel exterior and their neighboring ellipses well, but there is some occasional drift in the minor axis that is worth keeping an eye on. Lastly, as you continue to do this exercise in the future, try to vary the ellipse degree more.

Moving to the boxes section, your plotted perspective exercise is correctly framed. I cant tell if some of your verticals look a little askew because the page is curved or warped, but most of them are perpendicular to the horizon. Likewise, your rough perspective exercise is framed, and its verticals and horizontals are perpendicular and parallel to the horizon, respectively. They are also plotted back to check against the true vanishing point. There is hesitation in these lines as well. When you start off, you may need to ghost many times before you feel like you have a crisp, clean, straight mark. You can also vary the speed of your mark, maybe drawing a little faster would help.

The rotated box exercise was well executed. The boxes are structured, spaced evenly, drawn through, and hatched appropriately to simplify the drawing. You did a decent job turning the boxes. It looks like the first boxes adjacent to the center, on the axes, had a pretty aggressive turn, which made it hard to turn outer boxes further. This exercise and the organic perspective exercise has some of the best line work throughout the set. However, try to resist the tendency to go over a line a second time to fix it. The heavier line weight brings the viewers eye to these lines, producing the opposite effect to what you want. You spaced and shrunk each box well to give a sense of dimensionality to the page, and you kept an even degree of foreshortening throughout the page.

All in all, I think you are starting to get the point of these exercises, which is to ghost and prepare enough that a confident line can be placed on the page. You can move onto the 250 box challenge. Be sure to keep using the lesson 1 drills as warmup. While ghosting, really focus on what type of mark your ghosted motion will make on the page, paying attention to little tremors and adjustments in your muscles. Get those smoothed out, then blast your confident line onto the page. Also, make sure to include the complete homework in your next submission.

svendogee

2019-07-13 14:18

Hi there, I'm one of the TAs and I'll be going over your work today.

Your line work exercises start off strong. I would have liked to see a few more lines crammed onto the pages for a little more mileage, but that's alright since you'll be doing these in warmups for basically the rest of your drawing tenure. Your ghosted lines are smooth, but showing some wobble and course corrections, which indicates to me you are using your shoulder but should try and speed up a little and trust your ghosting to produce a confident line. If you miss the mark that's ok, with practice accuracy improves.

You did a ton of ellipses which is great since these are way harder than lines and we could all use more ellipse practice. You are doing a good job of reinforcing them an appropriate amount without getting too heavy, but there are still a lot of places with flat spots or wobbles. To remedy this, try to draw faster and (as always) remember to use the ghosting method with your shoulder to produce confident, smooth marks. On the funnel exercise you get a little heavy with the drawing through, but you keep your minor axes all aligned with the funnel central ellipse, so just keep on practicing your ghosting and shoulder drawing.

By the time you get to the rough perspective exercise your lines are improving quite a bit. I see you are starting to experiment with line weight which is good, but remember the heaviest lines are saved for the perimeter of the box and internal lines should be lighter (which is explained in the 250 box challenge here.) Your perspective is developing, and you do a good job orienting the boxes correctly relative to the horizon, so not much else to say here on this exercise except to ding you on the lines that are wobbly, which will improve with time and practice.

Your rotated box is quite a strong submission. Your lines are confident, your boxes are rotated, and most of the perspective is correct. The far corner boxes are the only ones that jump out to me that they aren't rotated. You can tell because the outer lines corresponding to the top back edges are parallel to their neighboring boxes equivalent lines. This is the trickiest spot to rotate a box since there are no apparent patterns for the vanishing points to move, but with time it will become a lot more clear. This exercise is first and foremost about exposing students to new spatial problems and solutions, and that has been accomplished here in addition to your submission. The only other thing I am noticing is that in a few places you are drawing what appear to be a re-do line after the first attempt doesn't go as planned. We need to just ghost and trust the process and live with the results because drawing more lines just brings more attention to any mistakes.

Finally let's look at your organic perspective exercise. Frankly, I am very pleased with these. These are some really nice and compelling compositions and you are doing a great job of selling depth with both scaling your boxes as well as overlapping them. You still have a few places where you are drawing those re-do lines but overall your lines here are strong as well. Your perspective is definitely on the right track and there are some really nice boxes in here, but still some that are skewed or diverging. Overall you have done a great job on this lesson and I will be marking it as complete. Your next stop will be the 250 box challenge. Make sure to read and watch all the resources so you can get the most out of the challenge and take your time. Additionally, make sure you draw for fun to avoid burnout. Once again, great job and we will see you after your 250 boxes.

spelling_expirt

2019-07-13 22:23

Hello, I one of Uncomfortables TAs; he will give you your flair after I finish my critique. Lets dive in.

This is some pretty strong work here! I havent seen your initial passes at the superimposed and ghosted lines, but this newer pass shows how you have really started to commit to your line work. While the lines are, sometimes, on the lighter side, there are still pretty confident and clearly ghosted. While there may be ever so slight arcs, there are little signs of hesitation. I do see the persistence of the habit to draw over lines you feel are incorrect (in the ghosted lines, rough perspective, and organic perspective sections). Your ghosted lines and especially your second page of planes are quite crisp. You see to have a light touch on the page, which can really assist you in future lessons. Just make sure you are making a bold, strong mark when that is the best mark in that situation. Dont make light marks out of hesitance.

Your ellipses are pretty confident and smooth. They have decent symmetry and are nestled against one another quite nicely. There is no sign of wobble. One major observation I can make is that sometimes it seems like you are drawing through your ellipse more then 3 times. Try to minimize the draw through to 2-3 times. When you go over from this number, the ellipse goes from looking strong to looking scratchy. In the funnels exercise, you did a good job adhering to your minor axis. You also really started to experiment with ellipse degree; keep pushing that as you do these exercises as warmup.

Your plotted perspective exercise checks all the boxes: It is framed, contains two vanishing points, and the verticals are consistent. In your rough perspective exercise, you did an excellent job keeping the verticals and horizonals perpendicular and parallel to the horizon, respectively. You also used your extension lines correctly. The line work is a little more hesitant here, in that I see you going over some of your lines repeatedly. It may seem nitpicky, but I like to address this habit as soon as possible so it does not carry over to future lessons. Every time you try to fix a line, the thing you are truly accomplishing is drawing the viewers eye towards the mistake, rather than away from it. Once your line is down on the page, there is no fixing it; you can adapt to it with your future lines, but try to just accept it for what it is: line in a series of exercises designed to develop strong linework and 3d thinking. It doesnt need to be perfect. Your rotated box exercise has really tight spacing--in fact the spacing is so tight that in the corners it is hard to see. You clearly used neighboring lines to plot out your subsequent ones as well. You could have perhaps rotated the boxes a little further, but this was also well executed. In your organic perspective, you used size and occlusion well to give a sense of space ot the page. On top of that, you chose a lot of different angles and positions for the boxes, which is great. The line quality drops a little here but, I think with mileage this will dissipate.

Great work! As you move to the 250 box challenge, keep in mind what was mentioned about going over your lines. Really try to eradicate that habit. I think the milage gained from the challenge will be really good for you. Dont forget to do these exercises as warmup!

sluggydragon

2019-07-15 12:16

Hi there, welcome to Draw-A-Box! I'm Sluggy, one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be by later to check this critique and give you the appropriate flair.

Lines

This is a strong start! While I see some wobble in your superimposed lines, it looks as though the ghosting technique helped you iron that out for later exercises. You do a pretty solid job hitting consistently hitting/stopping at the end point as well, that's good to see. Of course, I will recommend you continue to practice with these exercises during your warm-ups, to continue strengthening this skill set. Now that you've found a speed where you're able to consistently make smooth lines, you can go on by focusing on accuracy and really nailing that end point.

Ellipses

These are pretty solid as well. The curves are smooth and the ellipses themselves are pretty tight. It's clear you've also got a good amount of control, keeping them all snugly within the table and planes. However, I do see a bit of a wobble later on, during the funnels exercise. That exercise is a bit more of a balancing act than the previous assignments, so it's understandable. Just remember that you're able to ghost ellipses the same way you can ghost lines, making sure you're planning and preparing before putting down your first mark.

And though there is a wobble, you do a pretty good job of keeping your ellipses aligned with the minor axis, which is great to see. Nice job!

Rough Perspective

Nice work on this, it's clear you understand the intent of the exercise and you do well, keeping the horizontals parallel with the horizon and the verticals perpendicular. I am going to nitpick, though, so you're getting the maximum amount of feedback.

On a few of your boxes, I notice you tried to re-draw a line that missed its mark. Try to resist the urge to correct mistakes, either by redrawing or drawing over. Because of line weight, it actually tends to draw the eye, rather than cover up the mistake, and unless a line is outrageously off the mark, most mistakes will go unnoticed. This also helps promote thoughtful mark-making, which will be very useful later on in the curriculum.

Rotated Boxes

This is a really strong show. It's meant to be a challenge and you've tackled it quite well. The gaps between your boxes are consistent, you keep them close together, and you get pretty close to a full 180 degree rotation. The reason it squares out around the edges, rather than looking like the example image is because the boxes are not actually rotating. You want to make sure you shift the VP along the horizon enough that the box actually rotates, rather than moving back into space. However, over all, this is very good work.

Organic Perspective

Nice work on these! Again, this is meant to be another challenge, and while there are a few convergence errors, overall, you did a good job with this. Your line work is particularly thoughtful here as well, making it neat and pretty readable, even when the boxes are all stacked up on top of one another. Keep it up!

---

Nice work overall! It shows that you are quite mindful when it comes to your lines and its pretty clear you have an understanding of 3D boxes on a 2D plane. Keep up with the ghosted lines and ellipses during warm-ups, to really iron out that wobble. I'm happy to mark this as complete and send you on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

Uncomfortable

2019-07-16 15:26

Hey! Looks like I don't currently have you down as being eligible for private critiques. If you are a supporter of Drawabox on patreon, be sure to check your patreon inbox as I'll have sent out a message to grab your reddit username and do some other basic housekeeping.

If not, you're welcome to submit your work directly to the subreddit to be reviewed by the community or to the discord server.

sluggydragon

2019-07-16 20:12

Hi there! Welcome to Draw A Box! I'm Sluggy one of the TAs. Uncomfortable will be by later to check this critique and give you the right flair.

Lines

These are looking nice and smooth from the start. Little to no wobble even in the curved lines. Nice work! Your ghosted lines also look pretty good. What you want to go ahead and focus on now is fine-tuning the accuracy of your lines, making sure you're consistently hitting that end point now that you've found a speed you're comfortable at.

Ellipses

Your ellipses are similar to your lines. Consistent and little-to-no wobble. However, they are still pretty loose, so continuing to draw through your ellipses will help you tighten them up while keeping them as smooth as they are now. You do a pretty solid job keeping them within their planes, tables, and funnels, so I can see you have a good level of control. Just watch out for that minor axis in your funnels. You want to make sure it goes through the center of the entire set of ellipses - at the moment, several funnels are entirely offset. Other than that, this is strong work, so continue to work on tightening your ellipses up.

Rough Perspective

It's clear you understand the purpose of this exercise - your boxes are neat, with the horizontals parallel to the horizon and the verticals perpendicular. Your hatching is very neat and thoughtful. I will nitpick a little here and note that you want to fight the instinct to draw over mistakes. While your line-weight is pretty well placed, the places where it's been done to cover up mistakes are pretty clear because the line weight here is even heavier. If a line isn't egregiously off the mark, just leaving it is less noticeable than drawing over it. Overall, however, strong work.

Rotated Boxes

Really good job here - this is meant to be a challenge and you handled it quite well. Your gaps are neat and consistent, as is your hatching, your boxes are close together, and you very nearly hit that 180 degree rotation. The reason it squares out on that one side is because you're not rotating the box enough. You want to make sure you're shifting the VP along the horizon enough that the box rotates rather than moves back into space. Otherwise, good work here.

Organic Perspective

This is also meant to be a challenge and you did pretty well with it. You did a pretty good job placing down lineweight and I can see you played with the box sizes to show distance. I see a few places where you overshot the endpoint and that does weaken the 3D illusion a little bit, so keep an eye on that during future exercises. Similarly, there are few convergence errors here and there, but that's nothing the 250 box challenge can't help with.

---

Overall, really strong work. I can see you are quite thoughtful about line-weight and confident with your strokes. You'll want to focus on accuracy with your ghosting and continue to tighten up your ellipses in future practice sessions. I'm happy to mark this as complete and send you on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

svendogee

2019-07-16 23:58

Hey there, Sven here to do your critique today so let's get started.

So looking at your super imposed lines I'm seeing a lot of fraying and wobbling. To resolve the wobbling try to find a better (usually faster) speed to execute your lines as well as using the shoulder. For the fraying, this will come with time and mileage so we don't worry about this too much at this stage. For your ghosted lines, your medium length lines are strong for the most part, with a few exceptions. I feel that these few lines that are kind of anomalies are due to not using the ghosting method and/or rushing through. Just make sure to give each line the attention and care it deserves.

This sentiment continues onto your ellipses. While there are some definite glimmers of potential and success, for the most part they feel rushed and not given attention. In your ellipses in planes there doesn't seem to be much effort to hit the mid points of each side (addressed here) nor is there much consistency in drawing through your ellipses. I know ellipses are difficult, and doing them from the shoulder more so, but we must fight our urges to rush and try to just finish, as the value isn't in finishing an exercise at is a chance to learn and practice.

With your rough perspective you are hitting the major points: attempting to make lines go to the vanishing point, checking them correctly, and (mostly) keeping your horizontals parallel to the horizon and your verticals perpendicular. Where you fell short is the lines themselves. There are a lot of wobbly lines and overshoots, so once again, remember to ghost and prepare each line and execute with the shoulder.

Your rotated box exercise is actually your strongest offering of all of the exercises. Your lines are much more precise, and although there are still wobbles, what really stands out to me was your hatching. Your hatch lines, which most students tend to rush because they view them as secondary or less important, are parallel and consistently spaced, indicating an attention to detail that I want you to have with every line no matter how short or long. You could have afforded to rotate your boxes more, as the vanishing points didn't really translate along the axes much (as indicated by your converging lines being parallel instead of the angles changing, as illustrated here. Do not fret though, as the main priority of this exercise is to show students new kinds of spatial problems and we don't expect a perfect execution, just an attempt which you have done. Overall you should be proud of this work and strive to achieve this quality as your baseline for now.

Finally let's look at your organic perspective. Your lines here are heading in the right direction with fewer wobbly lines, so good job there. Your perspective itself is still in its early stages, which is fine as that's why we have the 250 box challenge. Compositionally, you could have afforded to have more large boxes in the foreground and scale your boxes/make them smaller to give the illusion of depth and 3d space on a 2d page. It seems you have taken your time more on this exercise which honestly at this stage is what I want to see the most. Which brings me to my final point. Before I mark this lesson as complete, I am assigning you one page of ghosted lines and one page of ellipse tables. I want you to take your time on these and make sure you are ghosting enough and using your shoulder. The goal here isn't perfection or to have you grind more because you fell short of some metric (you didn't fall short of anything!), but rather to show us that you are taking your time to really ingest this information and begin to learn the physical mechanics of drawing. Once you have completed these two pages submit them as a comment in response to this one and I will take a look and we can go from there.

spelling_expirt

2019-07-17 02:22

Hello! I am one of Uncomfortables teaching assistants. I will review your work and he will give you your flair. Lets go!

Your lines section is pretty strong, but there are a couple points worth discussing. First off, great job filling up those pages with work. That kind of mileage and work ethic will serve you well in the long run. In the superimposed line section, your lines start off at a consistent point and even within this set I can see a lot of gains. However, it does look like there might be an arc present in some of your lines which is also present in the ghosted lines section. The lines are often clean and confident, but what I suspect what is happening here is that you may be using your elbow a little more than your shoulder. In the future, try to initiate and drive the motion more with the shoulder. In the ghosted lines section, there is also a curious thickening on what I am guessing is the end of the stroke. I am not sure if it was a pen or surface stability issue, but if it was you trying to make that last tiny bit of the line a little more accurate, try to abolish that habit. That splotch of ink mars what would otherwise be a great, if a little inaccurate, line. I dont see much signs of this in the planes section, although I think I am seeing a tendency for you to draw over your perceived mistakes. If you take home one thing from this critique, it is to stop trying to correct bad lines with more lines. This draws the viewers eye towards that line rather than away from it, which surely is not your intent. Otherwise, your success rate with creating confident clean lines rises throughout the entire lines segment.

Moving on the ellipse section, they are drawn through twice, you tried to pack them in together. However, I do see some wobble and distortion on these. This is, in my opinion, the hardest part of this exercise. Remember to focus first on a self-assured and smooth ellipse before trying to get them accurate. Sometimes as you tried to make an accurate mark your brain took over and made the ellipse shaky. For what it is worth, I find it still takes me a lot more time to ghost ellipses then lines. Despite little distortions, you did a good job keeping your minor axis aligned in the funnel exercise. Keep experimenting with ellipses of different degrees too!

The rough perspective is plotted to two vanishing points, has a horizon line, and is framed. I see a couple places where the verticals are not perpendicular to the horizon though. Your rough perspective exercise is, likewise, plotted to one VP and framed, and you also used check lines. It does look like you struggled with keeping the horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon. When ghosting in this exercise, one must constantly be comparing the ghosted stroke to the horizon or frame to gauge your accuracy. As above, I also see a tendency to try to correct your linework. Some of your lines are quite crisp, however, so you are definitely making strides here.

Your rotated box exercise is drawn through and hatched. Your box spacing is relatively even, with some looseness happening in the outer ring. You could have gotten your boxes to turn a bit more. The goal is to rotate each box 180 degrees edge to edge, and your brain will resist this goal very strongly. You can accomplish this with more severe convergence on the outer ring, and more dramatic foreshortening.

In the organic perspective exercise, your line work continues to get better. The section is properly framed and composed. I do think you could have played more with the spacing of the boxes and the size of them to give a better sense of depth to the page. I would also suggest, right now, that you compare each of these boxes to see their similarities. Not that it is an explicit goal of the exercise, but it is worth trying to get the boxes to look a little different from one another in how they are turned. Many of your boxes are pretty similarly positioned. I found that turning a cube around in real life was very instructive. You can also give this site a peek. Regardless, trying to do this mentally is nearly a required skill for construction. The 250 box challenge is a great place to strengthen this mental muscle.

You should know that, even though there are areas for improvement, none of these exercises are going to be perfect. They are not going to be pieces of art to be hung up on a wall. They are designed to give you better muscle control and hand eye control, that is it. Sometimes things are gonna look screwy, especially as you challenge yourself with material that is unfamiliar to you. So remember to not be hard on yourself as you move on. I think you are getting the idea behind lesson 1, which is to ghost and prepare enough that when your pen hits the page, you can release all control of your pen to your adequately primed muscles. Feel free to move on to the 250 box challenge!

spelling_expirt

2019-07-17 02:51

Hello! I am one of Uncomfortables teaching assistants. I will critique your work and he will give you your flair. Let us get started.

Your lines section is really strong. There is little fraying in the superimposed line section, and throughout this whole lesson segment, the lines are really confident and very crisp. I would need a magnifying glass to find signs of wobble. There might be very small inaccuracies, but the amount of ghosting and preparation you did for each line is totally evident.

Your patient and thorough work continues into the ellipse section. Each ellipse is drawn through and nestled up against both its neighboring ellipse and bounding frame. The ellipses are even and smooth with little to no distortion or wobble. Even the ellipses for which you have given yourself an F are still self-assured. They are simply a little inaccurate. The accuracy will come with continued practice and time, be sure to recognize that and dont expect perfection from yourself. The place where the biggest improvement could be made would be in the minor axis of the funnels section. I am seeing a bit of drift towards the outer edges--but the ellipses there are also the largest and therefore the most difficult. There is also occasionally some tilt through the whole funnel. Just keep an eye on it in the future, as adhering to the minor axis is pretty important for lesson 2.

Moving on to your boxes section, the plotted perspective is correctly executed. Framed, plotted to two vanishing points, and well aligned verticals. Enough said. The rough perspective exercise, despite your concerns, is also quite strong. It is also correctly framed and plotted, and you also used the extension lines to good effect. All things said you convergences are decently accurate; they predictably become less so as you box is drawn further from the vanishing point. This is normal. Your horizontals and verticals are parallel and perpendicular to the environment, respectively. The strong line work from the earlier section is evident here as well. Sometimes a students confidence will wane as they do the more difficult box section, but I see no evidence of that here.

The rotated box exercise is well structured, with drawn through boxes and even spacing between them. You also did a great job turning the boxes on the axes to nearly the full 180 degrees. The corners were not quite rotated as far as they could have been. It looks like as you used the neighboring lines to guide your corner boxes, you didnt quite adjust the convergence enough. This is also normal. To turn these boxes you really have to ignore whatever discomfort the greater angles might cause to your mind. I also wanted to note your added line weight was very well done. Even your added lines were confident. Sometimes, the secondary lines are a bit more wobbly as people strive for accuracy.

Lastly, the organic perspective exercise is quite good. It is framed and composed well, and you chose a consistent degree of foreshortening. You used size and occlusion to give a sense of depth to the page. If you wanted me to nitpick, I do see one spot where you drew over lines. I am not sure if that was for clarity or if it was to fix a line. If it is the latter, try to avoid doing so in the future. It is worth noting that this is basically the only time I saw this in the whole set.

This is a really good submission. I can really tell you ghosted and prepared a ton, and then once your pen hit the page, it was all muscle. You did not let your brain get involved again; you trusted your muscle memory to make the confident stroke you were practicing. Great job! Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge!

svendogee

2019-07-18 01:21

Hey there. First of all I want to say you've done a lot of good work here, not only in terms of value, but it is clear you have taken your time and took all of the work very seriously.

You've got a ton of good mileage in with all of your superimposed lines already. I see some slight wobble, but not much that would indicate you aren't primarily relying on your shoulder. The same goes with your ghosted lines. As far as overshooting goes, what I like to do is instead of trying to stop at a point and fight inertia+muscle memory I instead just lift my pen. It has the added bonus of adding a nice taper to the line which is a little more interesting than uniform lines.

For your ellipses you mention it takes a few go around to get in a groove, so to speak. For this I would just recommend more ghosting before execution and when you finally do execute, just continue with the ghosted motion without skipping a beat. They are already off to a very nice start and I think mileage is the biggest thing you're missing here and they will continue to improve with more practice. Your funnel exercise is also nicely done, but if I were to have to nit pick, there are some ellipses that have minor axes that aren't aligned to the funnel axis. Ellipse alignment is very important in constructional drawing, as a poorly oriented ellipse can kill a lot of the illusion that we are working to build up, so keep that in mind.

With your rough perspective boxes, things start to get a little shaky. This happens a lot with students and I think it's because it's the first "real " thing you are tasked to draw. Just remember to stick with the tried and true ghosting and drawing with the shoulder and let muscle memory take care of the rest. Your boxes are oriented correctly with respect to the horizon - horizontal lines parallel to it and verticals perpendicular, so good job there. On the downside, I'm seeing a lot of re-do lines which is a big no no. Drawing over a line or trying again just draws more attention to our mistakes. Instead we must work on practicing and preparing more and then living with the result we get. It sounds hard/harsh at first, but it gets better.

Good job on completing the rotated boxes, as I know that can be a big hurdle for a lot of students. As this exercise's main goal is to introduce you to new types of spatial problems and how to solve them, we care less about producing a nice picture and wayyyy more about just completing it and gaining knowledge of how much there is to learn. My first suggestion is to draw much larger, as that gives our brains more room to solve these spatial puzzles and more room for us to use our shoulder to get those clean, strong lines. Additionally, you could have afforded to pack your boxes closer together so you could use adjacent lines to aid in perspective. It's a nifty strategy so make sure to go back and read that section over and really digest it now that you've completed this attempt and have more context. Finally, your boxes weren't rotated as much as just translated and skewed, similar to this example. You can refresh your memory on how rotation works in relation to moving our vanishing points here. I know this is a lot to take in, but don't lose heart, you've given it really great attempt, and like I said in my opening, that is really the only thing we ask from students at this stage.

Finally let's look at your organic perspective. The hardest thing about this critique is that you've done a really good job of seeing a lot of your major shortcomings that I would talk about which leaves me searching for ways to give you further insight. You are right about your boxes being wonky, but I am more focused on the line quality right now. Like I said in your rough perspective exercise, make sure to ghost your lines and carefully prepare each one before execution. You do a nice job scaling your boxes to make them recede in space to aid in the illusion of 3d space on the page so good job there! And with that your lesson 1 is complete! From here your next step is the 250 box challenge. Make sure you take advantage of all of the great resources uncomfortable has provided, and continue to approach the work as you did in lesson 1 with the same care and patience. Take breaks for fun to avoid burn out and we will see you when you finish. Keep up the good work!

spelling_expirt

2019-07-18 18:31

Hello! I am one of Uncomfortables teaching assistants. I will critique your work and he will give you your flair. Lets go!

Your lines section is off to a strong start, and a lot of growth is also visible. Your superimposed lines are a little wobbly, and there are some spots where your lines are a bit frayed on both sides, but they are nonetheless clearly ghosted. Furthermore both issues start to lessen as you move forward through the homework. It might be worthwhile to experiment with your drawing speed a little, as there is some persistent hesitance even to the end of the planes section. Try to prepare enough that when your pen touches the page, you are confident your muscles could do the work without further input from your mind.

In the more difficult ellipses section, you did a lot of things correctly. The ellipses are drawn through and packed into either their table, plane, or funnel. In the beginning, there is a bit more wavering in the linework, and some visible distortion, caused by trying to keep the ellipse accurate to itself and neighboring lines. I recommend you continue to experiment with ghosting for this section as well. You may need to ghost for much longer than you think for ellipses, and dont forget to trust your muscles. I think reworking your ghosting strategy might also help make your ellipses float a little less. By the end of the funnel exercise, your ellipses are starting to get under control with smoother, cleaner ellipses, although there is some asymmetry and minor axis misalignment. If you keep up with the exercises (and keep learning from them so well) you should have this sorted out quickly.

In the boxes section, your plotted perspective exercise is correctly framed and uses two vanishing points. Likewise, your rough perspective exercise is also framed and uses one vanishing point. Furthermore, you took a lot of care to keep you verticals and horizontals properly aligned with respect to the environment and frame. it does look like your lines regain their earlier shakiness as you stepped up to this more difficult challenge. I see this pretty often and it is totally normal. Just remember a box is essentially 12 ghosted line exercises, so try to use the mentality that you have by the end of your planes exercise to tackle more difficult subjects.

Your rotated box exercise has excellent structure. Most boxes are drawn through (other then top right and bottom left) and the spacing is tight and consistent. Besides addressing this, you could fill in more boxes in the corner quadrants as well. I am starting to see some spots where you try to remedy a stray line with further linework. I really encourage you to get out of the habit of doing this, even though I know it is difficult coming from a background with pencil. Those extra lines draw the viewer's attention to the mistake, rather then away.

Lastly, the organic perspective exercise uses the size of the box to show the viewer the depth of the page. I think you would have benefited from using a less severe degree of foreshortening, and can also make some use of occlusion to indicate which boxes are closer to the viewer.

Overall, you got a lot out of these exercises. Your line work is coming along nicely and I can tell you are starting to grasp the purpose of the ghost-then-execute methodology. Feel free to move on to lesson 2!

sluggydragon

2019-07-19 02:30

Hi there! Welcome to Draw-A-Box!

So, it seems that you've completed your homework in marker, rather than the required fineliner. I've sent a note to Uncomfortable about how to handle this submission, as all Patreon students are required to work with fineliner, but it is rather late where we are, so I don't expect to hear back from him immediately.

Sorry for the delay!

sluggydragon

2019-07-19 03:23

Alrighty, just heard back! I'm going to go ahead and critique, but in the future, please make sure you get the correct tools for further work. This will establish a baseline which ensures that we can give you the most effective critique we can and that you're learning as much as you can from the lessons. Let's get started!

Lines

While there is improvement over this portion of the homework, especially after you learn the ghosting technique, I do continue to see a bit of a wobble. This tells me that you haven't quite found the speed at which you're both confident and consistently putting down a straight, smooth line. I also noticed you were experimenting with both drawing from your wrist and your elbow - try to focus solely on drawing from your shoulder for now. Once you feel confident with that pivot, you can go ahead and try others, but I believe you'll glean more from the lessons that way.

I can see you wrist drawing again in your ghosted lines. This is where cementing the habit of both ghosting and shoulder drawing together is essential. You said you've been drawing for a decade now and I understand that it may be a bit of a pain to unlearn the habits you've already developed, but continued practice with superimposed lines and ghosting from the shoulder (do these during your warm-ups) will be highly beneficial for you.

Ellipses

You display a lot more control with your ellipses than you did with your lines. While I notice there's still a bit of a wobble in the curves, the ellipses as a whole are pretty snugly grouped and though they may be in marker, I can see that they're pretty tight.

You are able to ghost ellipses as well, so remember to do that. Planning and preparing before you place each line or curve down is also a good habit to get into your drawing toolbox.

Your funnels are looking pretty good, but keep a close eye on that minor axis. In a few, your ellipses drift off of it. It should be going through the center of every ellipse you draw for that particular funnel. Other than that, solid job keeping your ellipses between the arcs of your funnel and the bounds of your planes.

Rough Perspective

This is a fairly solid attempt at this exercise. You seem to understand the goal of drawing these boxes in perspective and are keeping your verticals perpendicular to the horizon and your horizontals parallel. The main issue here is your line-work. I understand it's a bit of a balancing act drawing in perspective and ensuring that your lines are clean - just continue to practice the ghosting technique in order to achieve smooth, straight lines.

Also, as a side note, try to use a pencil or more neutrally colored pen for check lines - this will help you learn where you're making mistakes with your convergences without the distraction of a shiny ink.

Rotated Boxes

I know you mentioned this gave you some trouble, but this is actually really strong - While you didn't complete the hatching, I can see that your marks are fairly neat and ordered. You've kept your gaps consistent, your boxes closely grouped, and on one side, you've almost hit the 180 degree rotation. Nice job!

The reason that this one squares out on the right side of the drawing is that your boxes are no longer rotating. You want to make sure you shift the VP along the axis enough that the box rotates rather than simply move back in space. However, over all, solid work on this one.

Organic Perspective

You did a fairly solid job with this as well. I can see you playing with line weight to bring the foreground boxes closer and push the illusion of distance, so that looks good. There are a few convergence errors, but that's nothing the 250 box challenge can't help. This is meant to be a challenge and overall, this is pretty good work.

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Overall, I can see improvement over the course of your homework. From here try to focus on ghosting from the shoulder with both your ellipses and lines, to really cement that habit. I'm going to mark this as complete and send you on to the 250 box challenge. Remember to submit this next one with the required fine liner and good luck!

Uncomfortable

2019-07-18 13:37

Assuming the hatching being on one of the faces oriented towards the viewer, your lines are indeed being extended in the right direction, which is one of the first things I look for. That said, you do have lines that are very clearly diverging as they move off into the distance - if not for that hatching, I'd assume the boxes were the other way around. This begs the question, are you placing the hatching on the correct side of the box?

Other concerns include:

• Convergences need to be considered while we actually construct the box, not just after the fact. The error checking is intended to reveal the importance of those convergences, and where you're going wrong, so you can think about how to adjust your approach while drawing to correct those uncovered mistakes.

• Are you applying the Y method discussed in the video and in the organic perspective exercise from lesson 1 when constructing your boxes? It embodies the focus on convergences, which is what this exercise as a whole is all about.

spelling_expirt

2019-07-19 02:55

Hi there! I am one of Uncomfortables teaching assistants. He will give you your flair after I critique your work. Lets take a look!

Your lines sections starts off well with the superimposed line exercise. For the most part the lines are fairly self assured. However, there are some trends worth addressing. We occasionally see individuals that have frayed or poorly grouped start and end points on their lines. While many of yours are grouped well to start, there are some that have some space between them. Furthermore, it also seems like you fairly consistently overshot your endpoint in both the superimposed and ghosted line exercise--sometimes straight off the page! Fraying and overshooting is totally expected at this stage, but as you practice your ghosting motion, include some consideration for where your pen is going to touch down and lift off the page. Lastly, I do still see a bit of arc in your straights--try to address this future as you return to these lessons during warm up. All of that said, the lines are crisp and confident, you just need to slow down to allow a little more precision in your ghosting.

In the ellipses section, all of your ellipses are properly drawn through and are pretty smooth and strong on the page. Similar to the lines section though, the ghosting may have been a little rushed, which led to a lot of asymmetrical ellipses--usually sharper on one side then the other-- that do not touch each other (for example, the table and funnels sections). You are doing a great job with a bold mark on the page, but I think you might need to slow down a little bit and really focus on what your ghosting motions are telling you about what that mark you are practicing is going to look like. In the funnels section, you have a mix of ellipses in terms of minor axis alignment. Some are decent, and others are quite skewed. In the future, try to get those ellipses to huddle together more tightly, work on the symmetry, and keep an eye on that minor axis. Just like the lines section though, your marks are confident, just take your time.

The plotted perspective has all necessary components. They are framed, plotted to two vanishing points, with well aligned verticals. The rough perspective is also plotted and framed, and you also used extensions to check your work, which is excellent. However, a little more care could be taken to get your verticals truly perpendicular to the horizon, and your horizontals more parallel to the horizon. Part of the reason you frame the drawing is to make it easier to line up your verticals and horizontals, so take advantage of that. I am also seeing a bit more arc in these lines then previously, although there is less over shooting!

The rotated box exercise contains drawn through boxes and is hatched for clarity. The spacing between the boxes is a bit irregular and I think you may have been able to leverage your neighboring lines a bit more. Remember, as you move farther away from the center of the box, the lines are going to converge more and more tightly. Additionally, you got off to a great start with your initial set of turned boxes on the axes, but you could have pushed the turn on the outermost boxes a bit more. The accuracy of your confident line work continues to improve though!

The organic perspective exercise is pretty decent. You really pushed size and occlusion to sell the depth on the page. The larger boxes are clearly closer to the viewer. The line work remains bold and self assured and is possibly the most consistently accurate in the submission, which implies to me that you started to slow down and focus on this aspect while ghosting, which is great.

Overall, you should be proud of how strong your marks are. I urge you to continue your trend of improvement by making sure to take your time with each exercise and focusing on your ghosting. This trend has clearly already started, just keep building on it. I think the 250 box challenge will be excellent for you. But sure to give the notes a thorough read and dont forget those extension lines. Paying attention to them will give you huge benefits.

spelling_expirt

2019-07-19 03:47

Greetings. I am one of Uncomfortables teaching assistants and will be critiquing your work. He will update your flair afterwards. Congrats on completing the lesson! Lets dive in.

Your superimposed lines look really great. The marks are bold and there is little if any wobble. This tells me you let your muscles do the work once your pen hit the page, and didnt let your brain interfere.The beginning of the mark is also tightly focused, which tells me you were really using your ghosting to get feedback on what your predicted mark would be. The ghosted lines exercise is also bold. There is a little bit of wavering here that gets ironed out by the end of the submission. Great work.

The ellipses looked like there were a bit of a struggle. The good news is that they are a struggle for everyone. There are a lot of successes to point out: the ellipses are well packed together and are all drawn through. Many of them are smooth and fairly symmetrical. The marks are for the most part pretty confident as they show little wavering. Your minor axis is fairly well aligned in the table and funnels exercises. Some of the ellipses are a little flat or distorted. This can happen when you are focused really hard on getting the ellipse to touch its boundary points (such as a neighboring ellipse or the frame of the table). We want to prioritize a smooth and evenly shaped ellipse, and to do that we need to commit to our ghosted motion. I also might suggest varying your ellipse degree more to get more out of the exercise. There is some strong work here, you just need some more mileage to fine tune your drawing muscles.

The plotted perspective exercise is correctly executed. It is framed, uses two vanishing points, and the verticals are well aligned with respect to the frame. The rough perspective also has some crisp line work despite the increase in challenge. It is also framed, and you do a decent job keeping your verticals and horizontals perpendicular and parallel to the horizon, respectively. You did seem to have more issues aligning your horizontals--don't forget you can turn the page here! Lastly you used the extension lines properly to check your work. Great work here.

The rotated box exercise continues to have strong line work, and each box is also drawn through. The spacing between the boxes is a little inconsistent, but nonetheless solid. The boxes along the axes nearly do a complete 180 degree turn, which is great. As you moved to the corners, you struggled a little bit in determining how steeply some lines might converge. This is also pretty normal--our brain resists our desire to get a really foreshortened box. If you leveraged your neighboring lines a little more aggressively, you would have gotten those corner boxes to turn a little more.

Lastly, the organic perspective exercises shows a good sense of space. I like how you had the boxes move away and then back towards the viewer. You may have been able to exaggerate the change size a little more. By the end you were clustering the boxes more closely to clearly show which box was in front.

This is a strong submission. You clearly took a lot of time to be deliberate and patient with your work. Everything is clearly ghosted and executed to the best of your ability--which is all we ask for. Please remember that these are just exercises. They dont need to be perfect, they just need to be able to teach you something, and I would argue that they have. Please feel free to move on to the 250 box challenge!

svendogee

2019-07-19 23:29

Hey there, I'm one of the new TAs and I'll be going over your work today.

Your super imposed lines are off to a good start, as are your ghosted lines. They are mostly smooth, confident, and drawn with the shoulder. There are a few hiccups here and there with wobbles but overall you seem to be applying the ghosting method and using your shoulder effectively.

Your ellipses are developing nicely throughout these exercises. You are doing a good job getting the overall shape and feel of an ellipse with a continuously curving line and minimal flat spots (ideally none). When you are drawing through on your second pass there is quite a bit of variance and wobble, so try to really make sure you are ghosting until the muscle memory is seated, then continue the motion but move the pen to make contact with the paper. With your funnel exercises your ellipses are pretty good, but remember that the minor axis of the ellipse should align to the funnel's central axis. Aligning your ellipses to a desired angle is a valuable skill, so it's good to get started practicing it early on in your development.

Moving on to your rough perspective boxes, your lines continue to be strong, with the exception of a few misguided lines. Additionally, you do a good job orienting your boxes correctly with respect to the horizon - horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular. Your convergences aren't on the money yet but that will come in time with lots of practice.

First and foremost, great job completing the rotated box exercise. Our top priority with students is just for them to complete it so they can be introduced to new types of spatial problems and strategies to solve them, a perfect execution is far and away a secondary concern. On the positives: while the completed product doesn't look exactly like the sphere uncomfortable produces, you do a great job attempting to rotate your boxes. In some cases you skew them more than rotate them (like this) but overall the correct mindset is starting to show. I do see that you did not pack your boxes as tightly as you could have like this. Read through that again now that you have completed the exercise for context, and see how utilizing adjacent edges can really help decipher perspective when we start juggling lots of individual vanishing points. Overall good job with this, although I would have liked to see you do some hatching for visual clarity as well as more line practice.

Finally let's look at your organic perspective exercises. Your boxes and sense of space are heading in the right direction and with some practice you'll really be improving. While you do a good job scaling your boxes to make them appear to recede into space, you could have also utilized more overlapping to continue to sell the illusion of depth, like in this example. Like I said, your sense of space is coming along and I see improvement in your perspective even throughout just this exercise. That being said there is still room for improvement, as with us all and we have plenty of time to practice that in the 250 box challenge. I am now marking your lesson 1 as complete, good job. Before jumping in to your boxes make sure to go through the material provided and remember to take your time, both during the drawing, and by taking breaks to draw for fun. Keep up the good work.

sluggydragon

2019-07-20 16:31

Hey there, welcome to Draw-A-Box! I'm sluggy, one of the TAs. Uncomfortable will be by later to check through this critique and give you the appropriate flair.

Lines

These are looking pretty good: there's very little wobble in your super-imposed lines and your ghosted lines are straight and clean. I do notice that you tend to under- or overshoot the endpoint of your ghosted lines, but now that you seem to have found a speed where you're both comfortable and consistently, I recommend focusing on accuracy during future practice sessions. To achieve this, continue to practice the ghosting exercise, planning and preparing before placing down the line and trying to hit that end point.

Ellipses

So I will say that I don't see too much wobble in your ellipses, they seem to lack the same confidence and control that your lines display. Remember that you are able to ghost these as well, planning and preparing before placing your lines down. This way, you can bring them under control and get them snugly within the bounds of their tables, planes, and funnels. Similarly, continue to draw through them, so you can begin to tighten them up.

With your funnels, however, you do a fairly decent job of keeping them aligned with the minor axis you placed down. Nice work there! That will come in quite handy for future exercises.

Rough Perspective

With this exercise, I can see you understand the intent behind it. Your lines are well placed, with the horizontals parallel to the horizon and your verticals perpendicular. Nice work!

What I do need to warn you against is the instinct to go over misplaced lines with another line to cover up the mistake. This actually tends to draw the eye to the mistake because of the increased line weight. Unless a line is wildly off the mark, it will generally go unnoticed, so keeping it neat without drawing over things too much is a good habit to establish now.

Rotated Boxes

Fairly strong work here! Your lines are pretty neat, your boxes are well spaced, and your gaps are consistent. While you didn't do the hatching between the boxes, it reads pretty well. The reason it squares out around the edges is because your boxes aren't actually rotating.

To avoid this, make sure you shift the VP along the horizon enough that the boxes rotate rather than moving back into space. Similarly, in the future, make sure you stick close to the directions as written, so you can get the maximum benefit from the lessons.

Organic Perspective

This is looking pretty good as well. While I do see a few convergence errors here and there, I can see you playing with box sizes to create the illusion of distance. I do notice you overshooting your endpoints here - I'm only pointing this out because this may have the effect of weakening the illusion of 3D objects in 2D space, which is why it's important to get that accuracy down.

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Overall, you have a strong start here! Your linework is pretty strong, but continue to practice both ghosting and your ellipses exercises during warm-ups. I'm happy to mark this as complete and send you on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-20 22:47

Hi there, I'm one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be along later to give you your flair so let's get started.

Starting off with your superimposed lines and these are looking okay. The second page is a definite improvement over the first however I can see some fraying on both ends in some cases so make sure you take the time to line up your pen before you execute. Your ghosted lines and planes are displaying a little bit of arcing which is completely natural at this stage, it's just something we need to learn to consciously counteract when we're drawing.

Onto your ellipses and you've actually done a really solid job of keeping these consistently shaped, even when constrained to a plane. There's a few issues with your second and third passes not sitting tightly with the ellipse but again, this is something that will come with practice and even over the set of images, does seem to have improved. Your funnels are also looking really good with only one or two misalignments of the ellipses.

Your rough perspective is looking really solid and there's a definite jump in your line quality at this point. There's still the occasional hiccup where you redraw a line as a kneejerk reaction but overall it as improved. The fronts of your boxes are definitely displaying the perpendicular nature we're after though the backs of the boxes not so much. That said, your estimation of perspective here is not too far off the mark for a beginner. Onto your rotated boxes and although you've not managed the full rotation of boxes, you've taken a really good crack at it, which is all that we ask. The gaps between your boxes are nice and consistent for the most part, which helps place the next box, but there are some gaps on the back plane where you've missed that opportunity, particularly on the far outer layer.

Finally, your organic perspective is looking really quite solid. You've got some interesting compositions and you've experimented well with scale. The boxes themselves need a little work with diverging lines and far planes larger than the near ones but this is a great place to start for the 250 box challenge, because it gives you something to work on.

Overall you've done some pretty solid work. There's inaccuracies in your line work here and there but it's definitely something that will come with mileage. I'm happy to mark this one as complete and ask you to move onto the 250 box challenge.

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-20 23:02

Hi there, I'm one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be along later to check this and give you a flair.

Starting off with your lines section and your superimposed lines are looking pretty good. You're taking the time to line up your pen and then executing with confidence. Your ghosted lines and planes are also looking pretty solid and it's clear your focus is more on flow than accuracy, which is what we like to see.

Onto your ellipses and it looks like you struggled a little here with some of your ellipses looking a little lumpy in places, possibly due to overthinking the movement when you came to execute it. This is a pretty normal reaction to this exercise since it feels much weirder to draw ellipses with your shoulder than any of the lines. :) Your ellipses definitely improved once you started trying to fit them inside the planes and it's good to see the focus returned to flow here. The funnels are also looking pretty good, with only a few minor alignment issues.

Looking at your rough perspective boxes now and I can definitely see you've struggled a little here. You seem to grasp that the lines of the front and rear faces of the boxes need to be perpendicular, but it does seem to be an execution issue in this case possibly due to being overwhelmed and starting to guess where the next line needs to be placed.

Good job on completing the rotated boxes. You've done pretty well at keeping the gaps between the boxes consistent however I can tell you were very clearly overwhelmed here as well as your line quality definitely suffers. Make sure that you're thinking through every line you put down and consider what it's adding to the overall drawing. In your organic perspective, your line quality definitely picks up again. Your compositions are really interesting and the experiments with scale, while subtle, definitely work well. There's a few issues with the boxes themselves including diverging lines and near planes being smaller than far planes.

Overall, you've done some good work here but you do seem to let new tasks overwhelm you a little. Remember that these are exercises, think through your lines, and just breathe. Feel free to move onwards to the 250 box challenge and consider this lesson marked as complete.

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-20 23:25

Hi Borja/Kerith! Welcome to Drawabox, I saw you on the Discord. I'm one of Uncomfortable's TAs and I'll be looking over your work today. The man himself will be along later to check on your work and update your flair.

Let's start with your superimposed lines. These are looking really good and confident and I'm glad to see you're lining your pen up with the starting point before you execute. The ghosted lines and planes are also looking pretty solid though I see a few little wobbles particularly in the planes - possibly a result of focusing a little too much on accuracy here.

Onto your ellipses and these are looking pretty good for the most part with only a few lumps and bumps. You mention accuracy in your post however this tends to be something that develops in time and I wouldn't suggest favouring it over the flow/smooth shape of your ellipses. I can see little signs of this preoccupation in the ellipses in planes, though for the most part they're pretty good and accurate on the ones that don't sacrifice flow for accuracy. On your funnels, I can definitely see you struggling a little to align your ellipses to the minor axis. Make sure you're using a ruler to draw the minor axis on these because it's a difficult enough exercise without the added difficulty of a wonky minor axis. That said, there are a few instances where you've nailed it there.

Onto the boxes and I notice you've missed a page of plotted perspective here but I'm going to let it slide because you've clearly grasped the concept on your following exercises. Make sure you go back and do a page count before you submit to ensure you haven't missed anything. Your rough perspective shows a few signs in the line quality of getting a little overwhelmed but for the most part, you've kept your lines perpendicular and your estimation of perspective is not too far off the mark.

Good job pushing through on the rotated boxes. It's good to see that you tried different things on each quadrant to try and achieve what you needed to. The second attempt is a definite improvement in terms of rotation though the gaps are very inconsistent. You've kept the gaps between boxes most consistent on the inner layers on the first but I can tell you lost track of things as you noted in your post. Being able to distinguish the relevant information amongst the noise is an important artistic skill and the reason why a beginner might get overwhelmed if you told them to draw a realistic tree. Can't see the forest for the trees... or the tree for the leaves, as it were. It's a challenge so we need to meet that head on and not shy away from things that get complex and confusing.

Finally, your organic perspective has some interesting compositions and the experiments in scale are working well. Your boxes definitely need some work with some of your far planes being larger than near planes... but that's why we put people through the 250 box challenge.

Overall, I think you've done some really solid work though you definitely need to work on those feelings of being overwhelmed when looking at complexity. I'm happy to mark this one as complete, feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

P.S. I noticed a cat drawing (it's adorable). If that's your cat, I require you to pay the cat tax in the Discord Patreon channel. ;)

svendogee

2019-07-23 02:39

Hello there, I am one of the TAs and I'll be going over your submission today.

​

Your lines are coming along nicely. You are developing a solid, confident flow to them and you are showing that you are successfully applying the ghosting method and drawing with your shoulder.

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Moving on to your ellipses, they are also coming along very nicely. Your ellipses are smooth and continuous with very few occurrences of flat parts or signs of stuttering/slowing down. You are taking good care to try and hit the necessary points in your ellipses in planes exercise and you are drawing through your ellipses appropriately. Continue to practice tightening up your "draw throughs" and you will continue to improve your already strong ellipses. With your funnels you do a great job aligning the ellipses' minor axes to the funnel's central axis with only a few skewed ones, and overall you are doing a really nice job with everything so far.

​

Your rough perspective box exercise continue to be the solid caliber you have produced up until now. Your lines are confident and well prepared before executing, and your boxes are positioned with respect to the horizon correctly; that being the horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and your verticals perpendicular. With practice your converging lines will continue to become more accurate, and for practicing this I suggest more ghosting towards the vanishing point (whether it is on the page or in most occasions off the page).

​

Good job completing the rotated box exercise. While our main priority for this exercise is that a student just complete the exercise so they are introduced to new types of spatial problems and solutions, you have certainly done a great job with it! There are however some areas that I can point out where you could improve, such as more leveraging of line weight to further clarify the forms and to include hatching on the boxes' side planes. Not only does this help the viewer decipher what is going on easier, it is great mileage for using the shoulder on shorter lines. Overall though you have done a really good job with this; your boxes are packed neatly together, your lines continue to be ghosted and confident, and you successfully rotated your forms.

​

Finally let's look at your organic perspective exercises. For the first time in this lesson I am starting to see some signs of rushing. While the overall quality is still high, you have set the bar high for yourself from your work thus far so little things start to stand out more. You start to overshoot and undershoot lines as well as having some curves happening; things that were not present in your work up to this point. I am going to assume this is because you were nearing the end of the lesson and people tend to start to speed up due to the excitement of finishing. Other than that, your boxes are coming along. You are showing the beginnings of a solid grasp of 3d space and perspective, but still have some issues with near planes being smaller than far planes. Your compositions are are good and you utilize overlapping forms and scaling boxes to really sell the illusion of three dimensional space on a two dimensional page.

And with that your lesson 1 is complete. You have done a great job and your next step is to move on to the 250 box challenge. Be sure to take your time and keep up the good work with ghosting and using your shoulder, and remember to take breaks to draw for fun so you avoid burning out or anything of the sort. Keep up the good work.

spelling_expirt

2019-07-24 02:30

Hello! I am a member of Uncomfotables cohort of teaching assistants. I will review your work and then he will give you your flair. Lets take a look.

Lines

Your superimposed lines are very strong. There is little to no fraying, and little to no wobble. You are clearly ghosting, and even better, committing to your marks. You are not letting your brain take over in the middle of a line. On both the superimposed and ghosted lines, I am seeing a very faint arc. This is totally minor, and easily missed, but its my job to nitpick. Just try to be slightly more mindful to initiate and carry through from the shoulder. The lines overall in the planes section are equally solid, with perhaps a bit more wobble then the previous two sections. It looks like maybe you were pressing harder. I should also note that you forgot to add horizontal and vertical division lines. Other then that, great job.

Ellipses

All of your ellipses are drawn through, and packed up against their neighboring ellipses. You could in fact draw through fewer times--remember the ceiling is 3 times tops. I dont really see any flat spots, and they have good symmetry. I do see a slight amount of wobble. Just try to adopt the mindset you used for your lines: once your pen touches down, the time for hesitation is over. I like how you marked some of your minor axes on your ellipse table, this is a good check against other ellipses, and extra line practice to boot. It paid off, as aside from a few strays the ellipses in the funnels exercise are decently well aligned. Ellipses are quite challenging, but you are off to a great start.

Boxes

Your plotted perspective is correctly executed: framed, two points, well aligned verticals. The linework here is pretty thick here though, I would try to stay away from that in the future. The embellishment of white is visually pleasing, but unnecessary for these exercises. Your good line work in the lines section really paid off in the rough perspective exercise. All of your boxes are drawn through, and you used extension lines to check your predicted convergence against the actual convergence. The hatching was not requested here, but is precise and clean. Your horizontals and verticals are very consistent, and are well aligned with respect to the horizon. The rotated box exercise is fantastic. It is very well structured, with even, tight spacing between the boxes, each of which is drawn through. You clearly used neighboring lines to guide each subsequent line. The hatching and line weight clarified the drawing--although again I think you could make the line weight a little less extreme. Line weight should be handled with subtlety. This will become more important in later lessons, but as you move to the 250 box challenge, try to take a crack at making the difference in line thickness less exaggerated. Finally, the organic perspective exercise is really solid. You have a good grasp of space. You strongly varied the size of the box to show the depth in the page, and you used occlusion to help the viewer identify which box are closer. There is the same trend with line weight though, and I do feel the color is a distraction.

Summary

You did a fantastic job here, and you are cleared to move on to the 250 box challenge. The two big take homes I have for you is 1) Try a less exaggerated, bold line weight on the box silhouette and 2) Keep in mind these are *not* supposed to be finished drawings. They arent supposed to be a pretty, final product. Rather, the point of these is to hone a skill. If you want to dress up the drawings, this is fine, but the underlying construction is always the highest priority, and should always be the most visible. Keep up the good work!

spelling_expirt

2019-07-24 03:08

Hello! I am a member of Uncomfortables cohort of teaching assistants. I will review your work and then he will give you your flair. Lets take a look.

Lines

As a whole, your lines are planned, ghosted, and executed with confidence. The time and care you took with your ghosting, and then the absolute commitment to your muscle memory, is totally evident. I see very little fraying and perhaps small amounts of wobble (solely in the superimposed line section). I also dont see any arcing, which tells me you are really working from the shoulder.

Ellipses

Your ellipses are a fantastic, really strong submission. They are all drawn through and packed into their allotted space, nestled in to their neighbors. They are often smooth and symmetric, and dont show any warped, flat sides, or waviness. In the ellipses in planes section, I do see a few ellipses that are a little more pointed on one side then the other, but the line work is nonetheless self assured. Additionally, you paid a good deal of attention to your minor axis, In both you ellipse table and your funnel exercises, you succeeded at keeping your ellipses either aligned to one another or to the central line. To really push yourself, I suggest that you try to vary the degree of the ellipses more in both the table and funnel exercises. Great job here as well.

Boxes

The plotted perspective contains the required components, which is a framed, two point plotted perspective in which the boxes are drawn through, and lines are plotted to their correct vanishing points. The verticals are consistently perpendicular to the horizon. In the rough perspective exercise I at last have some real advice to give. There is a lot done correctly here. Everything is framed, the boxes are drawn through, and you applied your extension lines to check your work. Your verticals are often perpendicular to the horizon, while your horizontals are parallel to it. The lines here look a little bit rougher though. Overall they are a little more wobbly, and there are occasionally thin, wispy lines that are sort of misaligned, next to very bold lines that are perhaps a little better oriented with respect to the rest of the box. Furthermore, you tried to add line weight to your best line--which is a good thing to try and practice--but the confidence you exhibited from earlier sections is wavering a little here, which undermines the solidity of your boxes. This part of lesson 1 is hard, and perhaps was your first real challenge of the set. This is great, it means you are in the right place! Remember, a box is just 12 lines, which you have been specifically practicing drawing. You may need to ghost more, or warm up with line drills, but try to apply that committed confident mindset here.

The rotated box exercise turned out well. The boxes are drawn through and you did a great job turning the boxes--on both the axes and the corners of the drawing. You used line weight and hatching to make things clearer for the viewer. This is a very well structured, tightly gridded drawing, so good job. The line work is a step up from the rough perspective section, but still has some of its trends--slightly wobbly lines which you attempt to rework. Drawing over a line second time has the effect of drawing the viewers eye to it--this is something you can leverage to great effect, but when you use it to correct mistakes it just draws the eye to the mistakes. I think you may have been able to push the convergence on the outermost ring a bit more--the boxes there have very similar angles to those of their inner neighboring boxes.

In the organic perspective, there are a lot of successes. The boxes have a consistent degree of foreshortening, and you use size and occlusion to try to convince the viewer of depth on the page. I would also say these are some of your strongest boxes. You started to draw over your initial lines less as you started to become more comfortable with drawing each box. Your added line weight becomes a more confident and crisp.

Summary

There is some great work here, and you are definitely ready for the 250 box challenge. As you move on to this challenge, keep doing lesson 1 as warmup. Try to be disciplined and commit to your lines, both in the sense of how you handle your pen on the page, as well as how you treat those lines afterwards. If you choose to add line weight, do so mindfully to enhance solidity, rather then to correct a mistake. Furthermore, approach these secondary lines with the same mindset that you use for your superimposed lines. Have fun!

sluggydragon

2019-07-25 00:32

Hey there! Welcome to DrawABox! I'm sluggy, one of the TAs. Uncomfortable will be by later to check this critique and give you the right flair.

One quick note before I go into it: in the future, please try to upload your homework in order and right-side-up.

Lines

Your super imposed lines are looking pretty clean, but I will note that there is a significant wobble across the board. This is a pretty good tell that you're going a bit too slowly, rather than allowing muscle memory to guide your mark-making. At this point in the homework, it's better to focus on smooth, confident line-work, working up to a speed where you're consistently making clean marks. A bit of feathering at the end of your super imposed lines is nothing to fret about in this case - once you've nailed down the right speed, you can focus on accuracy.

However, I will say that the wobble disappears after you learn the ghosting technique, which is a good sign that you're moving in the right direction. Nice work there. Like I said before, when you find the speed at which you're comfortable and consistent, you can move on to accuracy.

Ellipses

You display a good amount of control over your ellipses when it comes to fitting them in their respective planes, tables, and funnels. They are pretty snug within their bounds. However, I'm seeing a good amount of wobble in these as well. Remember that you are able to ghost ellipses the same way you can ghost lines. Planning and preparing before putting down your first mark will help you tackle that wobble and smooth out your curves. And the next step is similar to lines: once you're consistently and confidently putting down ellipses, you can start to tighten them up as you draw through them.

Nice work keeping your ellipses aligned with the minor axes for your funnels. That is something that will come in handy for later lessons.

Rough Perspective

It seems like you have a pretty good handle on this exercise. Your boxes are aligned with the horizon, with the verticals being perpendicular and the horizontals being parallel. Two things, however:

- no correction lines. You want to try and follow the directions listed in the homework as closely as possible to get as much as you can from each exercise. Part of this one was to draw extension lines back to the vanishing point. This is meant to help you train your eye, identifying where your perspective is drifting so you then know where to focus your efforts next.

- drawing back over mistakes. Fight the urge to go back over mistakes with another line because this just has the unfortunate effect of drawing the eye rather than fixing the mistake. Once you put a line down, the idea is that you commit to it, and unless a line is wildly off the mark, a slight mistake will generally go unnoticed.

Rotated Boxes

It looks like this one gave you a bit of trouble, but that is no issue. This exercise is intended as a challenge rather than as a test, combining the two previous exercises. What you're trying to do is keep the boxes close enough so as to eliminate guesswork, allowing you to estimate where each box is placed based on the previous boxes. I can see a few places where you pull this off and a few where it misses the mark. However, overall, I would say you understand the purpose of the exercise, but going over the instructions again may help for future practice sessions.

Organic Perspective

Your boxes here are looking pretty good! While I do spy a few convergence errors and your lines are a little hairy, you've built each box pretty solidly. Nice work! Again, like I covered with the rough perspective exercise, you want to avoid going over mistakes, as this weakens your work as whole, but overall, this is looking strong and shows that you've definitely improved over the course of the homework.

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Overall, this is pretty good work. I urge you to continue practicing ghosting for both your ellipses and your lines. Similarly, rereading and perhaps even redoing the rotated box homework will be of great help to you. Still, I'm marking this as complete and sending you on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-25 06:22

Hey there, I'm one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be along later to check on this and give you your flair so let's get into it.

Your superimposed lines are looking great. Really smooth and confident, even on the curves. Your fraying is confined to only one end of the line, which is excellent to see. Likewise your ghosted lines and planes are strong, with very few signs of arcing. Your line section is extremely well done overall.

Onto your ellipses and it's good to see you drawing through these in every instance and they generally sit nice and tight to the ellipse. Your ellipses in planes are quite accurate but you have not sacrificed your flow for this - exactly what we like to see. Your funnels are pretty good overall though there are a few alignment errors in some of your ellipses, and it definitely feels like you were drawing with a little more uncertainty here.

The box you pointed out on your plotted perspective with the word "Distorted?" is in fact distorted due to its proximity to the vanishing point. These notes explain the reason for this quite well, if you're interested. Your rough perspective is looking pretty good overall though there's a definite dip in line quality here as you were thinking through the problem in front of you. The convergences are rather off but they follow the usual patterns we see when people misjudge perspective, particularly the boxes that are further from the vanishing point, being the most inaccurate.

The rotated boxes are quite well done and you've even managed a good degree of rotation here. The diagonal boxes have misdrawn lines in their rear planes, which makes them appear distorted. You've managed to keep your gaps nice and tight too, which is good to see and it has clearly helped you rotate your boxes. Finally, your organic perspective, you've got a good range of sizes and rotations. The boxes of themselves could definitely use work as they're falling into some common pitfalls such as distortion and having far planes larger than near ones.

Overall, you've done some great work here and your confidence in the first two sections is something you should strive to apply to everything you draw for Drawabox from hereon out. I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete and ask you to move onto the 250 box challenge.

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-26 06:33

Hi there, I'm one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be along later to check this and update your flair, so let's get started.

Starting off with your superimposed lines and these are looking pretty good. You're taking your time to line up your pen at the start of the line and for the most part, executing with confidence. That said I do see some wobbles of uncertainty here and there where you've realised you've gone off course and you're trying to course correct. Even when things go off course, make sure you continue to execute with confidence. This seems to be something you worked out for yourself since your ghosted lines and planes are much straighter and more confident.

Your ellipses are looking good for the most part though there are a few stragglers where you've executed with less confidence or your brain has taken over partway through the executed motion. Your ellipses in planes demonstrate far less of this and are quite well done but the issue does rear its head again in the funnels. On your funnels, you have not executed with as much confidence as you should have. Additionally, you have several instances where the minor axis is not cutting the ellipse down its centre.

Onto your boxes and you've actually done a really solid job here of the rough perspective. Your lines are reasonably straight and the front/rear faces are for the most part perpendicular. Your estimation of perspective here is pretty good too and where it strays, it does so in expected ways. You've taken a good crack at the rotated boxes and kept the gaps between your boxes nice and tight to give those little contextual hints about the next box you draw. You haven't quite nailed the full range of rotation here but that's okay, we don't expect that at this point.

Finally, your organic perspective is coming along nicely. I particularly like composition number 3. There's something really dynamic about how you've laid out your boxes and experimented with scale here. The boxes themselves could use some work as there are some common pitfalls present here like diverging lines and far planes that are larger than near ones, but that's exactly why we assign the 250 box challenge after lesson 1.

Overall, your work is coming along nicely. Particular areas of focus for you would be to work on funnels and aligning your ellipses as well as your confidence in executing both your lines and ellipses. I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete, please feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-25 13:41

As homework submissions are meant to only be made when complete (so we don't get buried in people asking for partial critiques), I'm just going to point out three issues I noticed at a glance:

• You seem to be focusing entirely on boxes with very shallow foreshortening, rather than a healthy mix of shallow and dramatic foreshortening

• You're pretty consistently drawing sets of parallel lines that diverge ever so slightly rather than converging as they move farther back in space. This is contrary to the standard rules of perspective, and is exactly what you should be looking for through the use of the line extensions and attempting to correct. Don't just extend the lines and move on - think about what errors they're revealing (in terms of your convergence) and keep that in mind when you approach the next page of boxes.

• On box 100, you seem to have extended your green lines in the wrong direction (towards the viewer), and you don't seem to have extended the lines you usually mark in blue.

I hope that helps. Make sure you read the provided notes carefully, as the things I've pointed out here are all explained there, and don't submit your work until it is completed. You can get additional eyes on your work throughout the process by sharing it with the community on the subreddit, or perhaps even better, by sharing it on the discord server.

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-26 22:54

Hi there, I'm one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be along later to check on this and update your flair.

Starting off with your superimposed lines and there's minimal wobble here and your lines are grouped nicely on one end, which is good to see. I did notice that you only seem to have gone over the lines 3 or 4 times. Make sure you read and follow the instructions closely.

Your ghosted lines and planes are looking pretty straight and confident though I can see signs of hesitation as you approach the end point, suggesting you are focusing too much on accuracy. We want to focus first and foremost on flow at this point and accuracy will come with time and considerable mileage as you get used to the exact pace you need to execute a straight line every time.

Onto your ellipses and it seems like you struggled to execute your ellipses confidently here. There are a lot of wobbles and while drawing through your ellipses has smoothed this out a little, it's still clearly present. A lot of students struggle here because we're asking them to move their shoulder in different ways to how we did previously. Again, I think there's a preoccupation with accuracy here that is causing you to lose confidence. The alignment of your ellipses on your funnels is actually quite well done with only a few straying from the minor axis line.

Your rough perspective is looking quite good here (though again, line confidence). Your front and rear faces are nicely perpendicular and your estimation of perspective is not too far off the mark. Onto your rotated boxes and you've made a pretty solid effort at this one. The gaps between the boxes are nice and consistent for the most part and you've managed to get quite a bit of rotation. The outermost boxes aren't quite rotated enough but overall it's a good effort.

Finally your organic perspective. I definitely feel the second page is a bit more solid than the first as you've experimented more with scale and rotation, which has in turn made your compositions more interesting. The boxes themselves are showing a few signs of common pitfalls including far planes that are larger than near ones.

One of the big issues that I have seen throughout your work is a focus on accuracy over flow and the effect that has on your linework. Before I mark this one as complete and ask you to move onto the 250 box challenge, I would like to see another page of the ellipses in planes with a particular focus on getting your lines and ellipses nice and smooth.

ElectricSquiggaloo

2019-07-26 23:21

Hi there, I'm one of Uncomfortable's TAs. He'll be along to check on this later.

Welcome back to Drawabox. I did a brief scroll through your old work and compared it to your new and you've definitely improved a bit since then.

Let's start with your lines. Your superimposed lines are looking nice and confident and they're very well grouped together. Your ghosted lines and planes are also looking pretty good too, nice and smooth and fairly accurate in most cases. One word of advice I have for you is to try and make the dots you use as guides slightly smaller. We want that dot to fade into the line, not be an obvious feature of it.

Onto your ellipses and these are looking pretty smooth though they feel a little stiff, which suggests you're not entirely comfortable with the way you need to move your arm to execute these yet. I did also notice that you're drawing through them quite a few times, which is probably contributing to the stiffness, try to only draw through them 2-3 times. The alignment on the ellipses of your funnels are pretty good, with only a few little tilts off the minor axis here and there.

Your rough perspective is, I would say, more confident than your original submission, but somewhat less accurate. You've made a clear attempt to keep the front faces of the boxes perpendicular but struggled a little to carry that through to the rear faces. The second page is definitely an improvement in both keeping the rear faces perpendicular and the accuracy of your convergences.

Whilst Uncomfortable did not mention in his original critique that the gaps between the boxes in your rotated boxes exercise are its biggest weakness, it seems like you've picked up and corrected this yourself since your new submission keeps these gaps consistent for the most part and even manages a little bit of rotation. You didn't quite nail the full rotation but it's a definite improvement over your first submission.

Finally, I'm really liking the compositions you've created on your organic perspective. The experiments with scale are fantastic, the boxes definitely look like they're coming at me and convey the 3D space nicely. The boxes themselves are coming along well though there's a few hints of diverging lines here and there.

Overall your work here is a definite improvement on your previous submission. You still need to work on your confidence with drawing ellipss and moving forward, trying to bring those dots down in size to make them disappear into your lines more. I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete once again and ask you to move onto the 250 box challenge.

svendogee

2019-07-27 03:15

Hey there. So you have done a good job of really squeezing every inch of space out of your pages for mileage, and that is great! Your super imposed lines are confident and smooth, but are showing a lot of fraying which indicates that yo might need to slow down a tad (or even speed up, since everyone is different), so just keep experimenting with that in your warm ups to find out what works best for you. For your ghosted lines you have done a good job using your shoulder and ghosting, but you have a lot of wobble at the end or overshoot. What I like to do is instead of stopping the motion of the pen and fighting against the inertia is to just lift the pen up and continue the motion. Not only is it easier than fighting muscle memory you built up while ghosting, but it gives the lines a nice taper which is more visually interesting. Try it out, you might like it.

Moving on to your ellipses, you are giving them a good shape; no flat spots, no asymmetry or bulges, but your accuracy could use some work. With the planes you are missing the target midpoints of the sides, and when you draw through them there is a lot of variance. Just continue to practice with ghosting and using your shoulder and they'll tighten up. Your funnels exercise is much of the same - very, very nice ellipses, but not quite hitting the target sides of the funnels in a lot of them. Perhaps you need to slow down a little? I'm not sure but like I said, keep practicing and you'll get it!

Moving on to your rough perspective boxes the first thing that jumps out to me are your lines and how they all overshoot. Remember to always apply the ghosting method and draw a confident stroke with your shoulder trying your best to hit your marks. You have done a good job keeping your boxes' horizontal lines parallel to the horizon and verticals perpendicular, and you applied your perspective checking correctly, so next time you do an exercise like this try to really tighten up those lines.

Good job completing the rotated box challenge. While your work doesn't look exactly like the example, it is actually quite a strong submission. First of all, you really pushed that rotation, which is the main goal as this is the rotated box challenge, so good work there! You also stuck to your own system you made as you drew your boxes, resulting in the corner boxes being nearly invisible. This is good though because you were consistent and didn't try to adjust things just to match the example! You could have afforded to tighten up your lines a little more, same as your rough perspective exercise, but overall you did a good job with this. One more thing is you could have benefited to tighten up your boxes to better utilize the adjacent lines for perspective guides, as explained here. Overall, really good job here.

Finally let's look at your organic perspective exercise. While there still is some overshooting going on here, you have reigned it in quite a bit so keep it up. You do a good job composing your scenes with depth in mind, really getting in there and not being afraid to overlap you boxes. To further improve your overlapping selling depth, you can start to play with line weight; heavier lines denote one form in front of another. You also do a good job scaling your boxes to further sell the illusion of depth on a two dimensional page.

With this your lesson 1 is complete and uncomfortable will be by to give you your flair. From here, your next step is the 250 box challenge. Make sure to take your time and be mindful of lines - I don't want to see all this overshooting next time. Remember to also take 50% of your time to draw for fun and to take advantage of all of the resources uncomfortable made for this challenge. Keep up the good work and we will see you on the other side of 250!

sluggydragon

2019-07-28 11:25

Hi there, welcome to Draw-A-Box! I'm Sluggy, one of the TAs. Uncomfortable will pop by later to check this critique and give you the right flair.

Lines

From the get-go, I can see that you have a strong start here. Your lines here well on their way to being very confident and clean. However, I do spy the tiniest bit of a wobble - it's more apparent in your super imposed lines, but you seem to more or less iron it out by the time you get to your ghosted lines. There, I can see it at the tail ends of your ghosted lines, which may indicate that you're slowing down so you can hit the end point. However, it's not anything too off the mark; just continue to experiment with speed until you find the one at which you're consistently creating straight clean marks. After that, you can focus on accuracy. Nice job!

Ellipses

Like your lines, this is a strong, clean start. Your ellipses are smooth and pretty well controlled, sitting snugly within their tables, planes, and arcs. Good work here! I think you can continue to work on tightening these ellipses up during future practice sessions, as they are a little loose. Here's what you're aiming for in terms of tightness.

With your funnels, make sure that they're sitting solidly on the minor axis you've laid down. You're aiming to have the minor axis going through the middle of each ellipses. Overall, you've done this, but outer ellipses are falling off the line, so keep a close eye on that.

Rough Perspective

It's pretty clear to me that you understand the purpose of this exercise. Your boxes are clean and aligned with the horizon, with the horizontals parallel and the verticals perpendicular to it. You also did a very nice job with lineweight on the outer edges of the boxes. Nice job!

Rotated Boxes

This exercise is meant to be a real challenge and you tackled it exceedingly well. Your boxes are neat and well-spaced, with consistent gaps between them. Your hatch marks are neat and you get pretty close to a full 180 degree rotation. Similarly, your line-weight is well-used, if a little inconsistent.

The reason your image squares out around the edges is because the boxes are not rotating enough. You want to make sure you're shifting the VP along the horizon enough that the box rotates rather than moves back into space. Still, really nice work here!

Organic Perspective

Again, it's pretty clear to me that you understand the purpose of this exercise. While I do see a few convergence errors, these boxes are solidly constructed. Really nice work here!

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Overall, this entire set of homework is very strong work. Your line work is clean and confident, with only minor wobbling and it's clear you're very thoughtful when you place down each mark. Really good job! I'm happy to mark this complete and send you on to the 250 box challenge. Good luck!!