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8:18 PM, Wednesday May 8th 2024

Hello and congrats on completing lesson one. My name is Rob and I'm a teaching assistant for Drawabox who will be handling your lesson one critique. Starting with your superimposed lines these are off to a fine start. You are keeping a clearly defined starting point with all of your wavering at the opposite end. Your ghosted lines and planes turned out well. You are using the ghosting method to good effect to get confident linework with a pretty decent deal of accuracy that will get better and better with practice.

Your tables of ellipses are coming along pretty good. You are doing a good job drawing through your ellipses and focusing on consistent smooth ellipse shapes. This is carried over nicely into your ellipses in planes. It's great that you aren't overly concerned with accuracy and are instead focused on getting smooth ellipse shapes. Although accuracy is our end goal it can't really be forced and tends to come with mileage and consistent practice more than anything else. Your ellipses in funnels are looking fine. I'm not seeing any real issues here. One thing you could have done with these is start with a narrower degree ellipse in the center and then widen the degrees of the ellipses as they move outwards in the funnel. Please check the example here. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3 This helps with practicing different degrees of ellipses. Your ellipses are off to a great start but there's still room for improvement so keep practicing them during your warmups.

The plotted perspective looks great, nothing to mention here. Your rough perspective exercises turned out pretty well. You are getting a mix of confident linework here along with some wobble creeping back into some of your lines. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/wobblinglines This is probably happening because you are more concerned with accuracy now that you are constructing boxes and you are slowing down your stroke to compensate. That hesitation because of your concern for accuracy while making your mark is what is reintroducing the wobble into your lines. Try and rely a bit more on the muscle memory you build up while ghosting your mark and almost make your mark without thinking. This will be less accurate at first but will give you consistently smooth and confident linework which is our first priority. Accuracy will come with mileage and can't really be forced. The other possibility is that you have reverted back to drawing from your wrist for some of these lines. Just something to keep an eye on. You should be drawing from your shoulder for basically every line you draw, even shorter ones. The wrist should be reserved for detail work only. You are doing a good job extending the lines back on your boxes to check your work. As you can see some of your perspective estimations were quite off but that will become more intuitive with practice.

Your rotated box exercise is a good start but it's unfinished. I like that you drew this nice and big as that really helps when dealing with complex spatial problems. You also did a good job drawing through your boxes and keeping your gaps narrow and consistent. You are running into a pretty common issue of not actually rotating your boxes in some cases(happening pretty clearly on the right side) but instead simply drawing them moving back in perspective. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/21/notrotating The problem is that you gave up about halfway through on this exercise and didn't finish the outer rows and corners. A big part of learning how to draw is getting comfortable working outside of your comfort zone and getting more used to failing and learning from your mistakes. Unfortunately in cases like this we can't analyze your mistakes because you didn't finish the exercise. So as a revision I'd like you to either finish this exercise to the best of your ability or try another and draw it bigger overall. Drawing it bigger will make it easier to think through the more difficult rotations at the corners and outer rows. I'm not expecting it to be done well or even correctly but the attempt must be made in order to learn.Your organic perspective exercises are looking pretty good. You seem to be getting more comfortable using the ghosting method and drawing from your shoulder for confident linework for the most part. I'm still seeing a tad bit of wobble which tells me you are still slowing down your stroke for accuracy. Remember to fully commit to your marks and it's okay if your line is slightly off as our current priority is a confident smooth line. Your box constructions are fairly solid for the most part and I can see you are developing a sense for how box lines converge to vps. There are still some wonky convergences here and there so the 250 box challenge will be a great next step for you.

Overall this was a solid submission that showed a good deal of growth. The main issue I'm noticing is that you are still slowing down your stroke for accuracy at times which is causing a bit of line wobble. Remember to fully commit to your mark once you go to make it and that your current priority is a smooth confident line and it's okay if it isn't compeltely accurate. Otherwise, I think you are understanding most of the concepts these lessons are trying to convey quite well. Once you get that revision submitted and I take a look you can most likely move on to the 250 box challenge.

Next Steps:

Either finish the rotated box exercise you have or make a new one and make sure to complete the entire assignment

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
10:01 AM, Friday May 10th 2024

Hi Rob!

Thanks a lot for taking the time and looking at my homework.

I preferred to finish up my rotated boxes, having to face the mistakes I made.

Since some of the innermost boxes were not built right, I had a hard time drawing the outermost boxes next to them as the closest edges should be parallel.

https://imgur.com/a/K8mqpGw

4:53 PM, Friday May 10th 2024

Nice job on finishing the exercise! While the rotations and proportions here aren't perfect this was a good effort overall. The more you draw and develop your spatial thinking ability the easier these rotations are to handle. I'm going to mark this as complete and good luck with the 250 box challenge!

Next Steps:

The 250 Box Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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