Basic shapes and fundamental form

The boxes and books exercise I actually found quite tricky - it took three or four goes before I got the perspective more or less correct. I think they are all now the right size, and about the right shape but I freely admit to having a bit of trouble with perspective and the idea of drawing 'as if you can see through the boxes' kind of threw me a bit. I found focusing on the shapes between the objects helped a lot more with getting the size and shape right. I tried to see the objects as angles and lines as opposed to boxes and books. I think the objects look pretty solid considering there is no tonal shading whatsoever. As long as the perspective is correct, then a feeling of depth should be created easily, but as I said I find perspective a wee bit difficult (it takes me many attempts) so that in turn makes it hard for me to tell if it is absolutely right. I need a second opinion!

The jars and jugs exercise I actually found a lot easier, perhaps because there weren't so many dead straight lines to have to worry about..? The final drawing I did with pen (I did three pencil drawings before this) and this was actually the best one of the lot. The size and shapes of the objects are pretty much spot on in relation to one another, and again trying to carefully draw the spaces in between the objects really helped to get their shapes correct. All the cyclindrical objects look as solid as they could in a 2D drawing with no shading. The feeling of depth has been quite well created in these drawings - more so than in the boxes and books ones - because you can see quite clearly that there are objects closer to the viewer than others, some things are tucked behind others and the ellipses of the cylinders are more circular nearer the foreground.

In the supermarket shop drawing the objects are more or less correct in size and in relation to one another, except the tomato ketchup bottle ended up being rather squat, which I didn't notice at all until I'd finished the drawing. Also I think perhaps the lasagne box is a bit too big. I wanted the drawing to be quite large, so deliberately drew the objects in more or less actual size. I put the groceries quite close together so there really wasn't much space in between them to worry about. I think the objects look fairly solid but I haven't managed to create much depth in the drawing. I think maybe what happened was that once I'd started adding colour (oil pastel) I got more interested in getting the colours correct and failed to recognise I was losing the solidity of the objects and the overall depth of the drawing.