Mosselmemory

Hello Lordsagan, I’ll be reviewing your 250 Box Challenge today.

First off, congratulations on completing the first hurdle of Drawabox. 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.

• Hatching: from the start of the challenge, it's evident you patiently place your lines with the same confidence as every other line.

• Lines confidence was definitely a major strength here as you practiced drawing straight from the shoulder. Construction lines are relatively straight, and you maintain confidence in your lines.

Things you can work on:

• Shallow boxes run into issues with 2-3 sets of lines being parallel that don’t converge towards their respective vanishing point. Whether it's gradual or quick, all lines should converge. It may be difficult to judge gradual convergence on shallow boxes, but we want to be aware of the angle when estimating to ensure lines aren’t parallel. Here’s an example showing parallel lines straying away as the extension line lengthens: https://imgur.com/mWLlnYl

• Line weight is well done overall; however, the attempted superimposed line sometimes wobbles or arcs slightly. Confidence is our first priority at all times. Overshooting your lines is fine as long as the superimposed line remains smooth.

Overall, you seem to have consistent line and convergence accuracy. I’ll mark this down as complete and send you off to Lesson 2. Good luck!

to start, please merge all of the submissions to one link in the future if you plan to submit it by the end of the lesson. it would make it a lot more convinient.

but it's no big deal.

so let's see here.

L1E1:

i'll be honest, i have no idea what you had in mind trying to draw those "swirls" it is not mentioned in the exercise, and nor shown in the example drawing. on top of that, i have no idea which is the original line, which doesn't help either. esp for those circles. which i suppose you know by now, have their own execises.

i have no idea what you used to make those swirls, but hopefully not just with your arm. but if you do want to learn to draw "curves" which is mentioned, and something you could try. then use the edge of a circular object or ,if you have one, an eliptical ruler. this lesson is more so to get you used to using your whole arm, not yet to really make any complex weird curvy lines with them.

but overall you did what was asked on the lesson, very confident with your strokes! good job! but i do see some fraying on both ends on those lines, you seem to have resolved that as time passed by however. varrying line lengths are also a good plus.

moving forward, if you intend to do this exercise again, stick to simple, straight curves.

TL;DR : confident but still some fraying. and refrain from doing swirls, instead try simple and straight curves

L1E2:

good job on this one, i see that is slight arching, as in the lines are a little bent on some of those. but it is to be expected, a bit of undershooting and overshooting. but you always hit at least one point of the line, good job! overall you did what was asked.

try and push your pen to the opposite direction when making those lines, so that they are more straight.

L1E3:

good job here as well. i don't see mistakes that can be critiqued here. maybe just a bit of arching here and there. but overall you did good!

L1E4-6 (funnels) :

okay here's where there might be some issue. you've drawn through your elipses, good job! overshooting and undershooting those edges are a challange of course, so not hitting them is no big deal.

you also draw them very confidently, maybe a little too much as i see some "flying" lines on your planes.

which, one of those planes does have an odd circle that doesn't touch one side, but that seems to be an exception and not a rule. so that's okay.

but if your arm is getting tired don't force yourself to make more lines,lay your hand down and take a breather, maybe even stretch. you could also just be spinning your hand a bit too enthusiatically, if so, then slow it down slightly.

however, you don't add much or even any variation with your elipses. all of them are very much the montonous potato shapes. try and play around with them! do more circular shapes, or even extremely sharp ones, and make the slanted or rotated slight at an angle. because even on the pages with the slanted slopes you seem to really insist of making those longitudal potato shapes by forcefully fitting them in place. on top of that all of your elipses are very straight and aligned with the axis of the page itself. as the lesson mentioned, each section should contain a different variation of elipse exercise.

L1E7-10 boxes

good job on the plotted presectives. on the rough prespectives i see that you superimposed some of those lines. please refrain from doing this in the future especially on the 250 box challange. however since it isn't the point of the lesson that should be alright. but now that you are aware of it, don't repeat the same mistake in the future, all your lines should be done in a single brave, and confident stroke!

apart from that most of your boxes seem alright except for one of those boxes in the final panel you did where you messed up the alignments of the axis, it's alright but be sure to keep it in mind moving forward!

your rotated boxes seem okay to me, you seem to have not rotated some of the boxes on the top right quadron but that's alright because most of the other boxes seem to be at least somewhat rotated.

your organic prespectives are a bit messy, but that is to be expected. and yet again, you have superimposed your lines. you have also seemed to refrain from drawing boxes that overlap, you shouldn't have done that because it actually helps to add depth if you draw boxes that cut through each other and overlap. they look very messy, but that is okay, because the purpose of the exercise is just to get you thinking about 3d space.

as a final note don't be afraid that your lines are undershooting or if they miss the shot, it's completely natural and okay. if your intent was to add line weight, what you should have done was rotate your pen to spew out more ink as you stroked, not superimpose the line.

when a line is drawn, a line is set, there is no changing it, you can't do anything to fix it, so don't try to! even if it's just slightly off, or super off, let it be. the purpose of the lesson is not to make good looking boxes, but to learn how to draw them, and that is done by messing them up! possibly 250 times over! that is, after you go and finish

you'll get used to drawing straight lines that hit the mark after a while. so don't worry too much that you're messing that up right now.

as of now however, i do believe you can benefit greatly from trying to draw a more varied types of elipses.

Hi! I will be correcting your 250 box challenge today.

I will try to be brief and concise.

I see you applied Crosshatching and it looks concise. You didn't rush the lines and it's uniform.

I think you didn't apply much lineweight, although it's not mandatory I recommend you to start practicing it, because it will be almost indispensable in the following lessons.

Here you can see how to apply it well: https://imgur.com/OHvr7Mb

Here when applying it to boxes: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/980a575e.jpg

You may notice that some of your lines arc a little bit.

When this happens it is somewhat dangerous as it can change the direction of the axis of your boxes.

I see that this is something constant in your boxes, so I will recommend you to read this section about lines, where you can see how to avoid this bowing:

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/10/arc

It is very good that you have drawn boxes with sharp and soft foreshortening. Use soft in your next lessons, since you will be working with objects of common size.

(sharp foreshortening is used on things very close to the eye or huge things).

Lastly and just as important: Your lines seem to converge to their correct vanishing point, but they do so very quickly.

Remember that we imagine the vanishing points very far away (outside the sheet) so you'll want the convergence to be lighter in your next boxes.

I'll leave you some homework to correct these mistakes.

Try not to rush through this, you have several things to work on here, so do it at your leisure!