Acecat101

With any skill, you are not going to fully understand concepts or be proficient in the beginning. The exercises in the course are not meant to be done amazingly by the time you complete them, they are assigned as warm-ups later to continue practicing them. The exercises are only marked as complete when the person critiquing the work believes that you are on the right track but, that does not mean marking it complete means that you are doing it well. If you look at my lesson 1 submission, the person critiquing mine passed me despite my boxes section not being done well at all. https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/3/gettingfeedback

The 50% rule is assigned to become comfortable with messing up. It is to set you up for failure to be accustomed to it. There is no one who will look at your work unless you want to. You will draw at least hundreds of thousands of drawings that you think are not good and that is the point. A thing that helps me is drawing the stuff I want to draw, at first I didn't like the 50% rule because I would use a drawing prompt from the website and draw random stuff I wasn't personally interested in. But then I focused on what I wanted to do, draw pretty women, and I was having a much more fun time despite not drawing anything of quality. https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/2/failure https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/2/video

There are plenty of times when I am frustrated to the point of tears because I don't understand a concept or not doing well on a drawing. If you are not able to control your frustration and can afford it, go to therapy. If you are attending a school there is probably free therapy services there (however I can't say how good school therapists are, mileage may vary). Therapy can help you understand your anger issues and work on how to resolve them or at least manage them in a way that won't obstruct the things you want to accomplish. https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/2/depression

Another thing that might work is literally fake it til you make it. If you see a drawing that you made and think it sucks, just push the idea in your head that it is the best thing since sliced bread. At least for the 50% rule drawings. To improve on the exercises you need to be aware of what the instructor told you to focus on and evaluate where you are lacking to improve on the next one.

Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.

Congratulations on completing the box challenge, it's definitely a lot more work than most people expect. Not only does it help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. Be proud of what you've accomplished and that desire you've shown. That being said I'll try to keep this critique fairly brief so you can get working on the next steps as soon as possible.

Things you did well:

• Your construction lines are looking smooth and confidently drawn.

• You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, and rates of foreshortening. Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding. I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.

Things you can work on:

• It's not a requirement of the challenge but I recommend practicing applying hatching in your future work. It's a useful tool to learn and the only way to improve is to practice.

• I'd like you to experiment with proportions more. Mix in some longer/thinner/wider boxes to see how your lines behave in different scenarios. Remember that experimentation is important.

• There are times when your lines converge in pairs or you attempt to keep your lines a bit too parallel which results in them diverging. This is an example of lines converging in pairs, and this shows the relation between each line in a set and their respective vanishing point. The inner pair of lines will be quite similar unless the box gets quite long and the outer pair can vary a lot depending on the location of the vanishing point. Move it further away and the lines become closer to parallel while moving it closer increases the rate of foreshortening.

The key things we want to remember from this exercise are that our lines should always converge as a set not in pairs, never diverge from the vanishing point and due to perspective they won't be completely parallel.

While I've noted a few things you can work on in the critique above, you've completed quite the daunting challenge. Overall your boxes are looking solid, good work.

That being said I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to lesson 2.

Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck.

Heyo Koriiph here to have a look at your Boxes

The Box Challenge certainly is a Tough one no matter how you do it. I do however have quite a few thing noted for this submission

Here are the things I've noticed:

1.Line Extensions

You used a single color for your line extensions, which is totally fine, one thing i've noticed however that sometimes you don't fully finish the extensions even on boxes with very rapid convergence, aka with a vanishing point close to the box or on the page. This does make it harder to assess the actual accuracy of your boxes and makes it therefore harder to gauge your accuracy for section 3.

2.Dates

Youre missing Dates on your Boxes making it impossible to see how you paced yourself through the Challenge. The only thing I could inference is the amount of boxes per page but on that theres more to say later.

Your submission says the were ALL done on August 20??

If thats the case that would definively fall under grinding and I would suggest a full redo.

Most people go through the box challenge in a timeframe of about 1-2 months (it took me 48 days) and you will be honing and repeating your lesson 1 warmup skills during your time doing this and improve tremendously in that time, resulting in much more confident lines.

3.Divergences and parallel lines.

Your lines seem to mostly be diverging towards a common VP, there are a few instances in the early boxes where a few lines seem to be parallel but that is a problem that is adressed by your later boxes. Here the line extension thing comes back, sometimes it is hard to see how well your lines converge as you stop your line extensions too early.

4.Hatching lines

You decided to add hatching to the sides of Boxes, this is a optional step, but remember to do those lines cleanly and ghosted, they do sometimes look a tad unconfident, wobbly and rushed. Its better to do less hatching lines but have those fewer ones be more confident in general.

5.Wobbly lines and repeating lines

This is the second big one, the edges of your boxes are still very wobbly and inconfident. Are you applying the ghosting method and are regularly practicing it in your warmups? More importantly are you drawing on a stable surface and with your shoulder instead of your wrist?

Goal of the Challenge isnt to perfectly hit the VPs with every set of lines every time. I am unsure about the instruction of the old version of the Box challenge but atleast for the first 50 Boxes youre very much allowed to ghost towards a marked vanishing point on the page. I dont see any of those here

6. Orientation and Boxes per Page

So when doing the Box Challenge the recommended(correct) Number of Boxes per Page is 5 to 6 Boxes. This is something you stick to most of the the time. However there are quite a few pages with way more very tiny boxes.

All your boxes are very small in general. Due to the small size it is actually quite difficult to draw differently sized boxes. You do try and experiment with wide and flat boxes here and there but the variance of the boxes is quite limited by their small size. Try instead to "fill" the page with the 5 to 6 Boxes. Small boxes will and should still happen of course.

Congratulations on completing your 250 boxes!

• Your line extensions generally go in the right direction. Good :)

• Your lines do not wobble. Also good.

• Some boxes, like box 2 for example, have opposite faces with very different dimensions. Remember that the face furthest away will be proportionally wider than the one closer to the observer (this image is about ellipses, but the principle can still apply to boxes).

• Some boxes, like box #134, have vertical vanishing points that are too close to the box. This creates unnatural distortion. Generally, the vertical VP will have the most distance from the box compared to the two horizontal VPs.

So we can start working then! I am Feldspar(apparently you already knew me :p) and i will be critiquing your submission today. Without further ado lets start!

First and foremost congratulations on getting through this tough challenge! It’s definitely a long marathon, but the quality of work between the start and end pages really demonstrates overall improvement. Now let's begin with the critique.

Things you did well:

• Clear experimentation of box size, foreshortening, and orientation. Foreshortening was especially pushed to its limits as you progressed through the challenge. This is a positive habit to carry forward and helps progress our spatial reasoning.

• Strong improvement over time was seen. The first boxes had sets of lines that were rather parallel or diverging, which is a common issue, but at around box number 30, they started converging a lot more and gradually your line extensions meet at one point.

Things you can work on:

• I see some of the lines frequently tend to be wobbly.(Boxes 30, 33, 126, 167, 196, for example ) Like in the first lesson all lines have to be drawn by drawing first its starting and ending dots, ghosting it, and drawing it confidently with the shoulder prioritizing confidence over accuracy.

• I see repeated lines.(Boxes 65, 78, 85, 99, 110, 140, 150, 158, 171, 231) In DrawABox, you are not allowed to "fix" lines, you only have one shot at a line, and if you miss it, tough luck. This will force you to have a better planning phase, be mindful when ghosting, and will help your accuracy in the long run. Again its okay when you over or undershoot line or miss it slightly until your line is confident and straight.

• Lineweight should only be added to the silhouette of the boxes, and with a superimposed line, one is enough, as it's important to keep it subtle and consistent. When doing this superimposed line, it should be done ghosting and drawing it confidently, having it lose accuracy is acceptable, but having wobble is not. As always, confidence beats accuracy.

• Inner corners are often off. It's pretty normal to have the inner corners come out pretty off, as they are affected by the accumulation of previously done mistakes. A way to improve them is to start thinking about the relationships between lines instead of just thinking about the lines in pairs. When drawing the lines of the boxes, keep in mind all the other lines in the set, comparing their angles and making a guess based on them.

I think you are ready for the lesson 2. Just remember to keep your line execution confident, and to review some of the fundamentals. Also while you were doing this, 250 box challenge was revamped so you should check that out. Good luck!

Hi Kort3! I afraid there is only one page of your 250 box challenge within link you provided...

Splitting it up by day - studying one day, then playing the next day, is what I'd go with because it'll give you more time to stay on one task without interruption.

Everyone's got different goals and a different path to follow, so that's a difficult question to answer. What I do find useful in helping to answer it though is the 50% rule. As we indulge in drawing as play, we highlight areas of weakness we may wish to reinforce, allowing us to seek out ways to address them. In a sense it serves as a compass pointing to our next stop.

Hi there, and congrats on finishing the challenge! Looking through your work here, I see strong, confident lines and boxes that consistently converge towards their respective VP's. Your analysis was clean and easy to review, and I believe you are well on your way. Well done!

Hello there! I don't have many notes for you; your work demonstrated clear understanding of the material as far as I can tell. Not many notes, but consider the following:

• When you do the tables of ellipses going forward, make sure your ellipses are touching the edges of the plane. This can be tricky, but will get easier over time.

• Your Rough Perspectives don't have any line extensions. Line extensions are a big part of the 250 box challenge, as they'll help you see how your boxes converge. If this exercise comes up in warmups, make sure to take advantage of the extensions.