Draw them and post the imgur link (or whatever other link) here down in the comments. So you reply to my first critique comments with your revisions basically.
I will then look at it and mark the lesson as complete :)
So short answer: No, it is not counter-productive.
First of all i think you have a good approach on draw-a-box, i liked how you said that you want to finnish it in a marathon. This is a very healthy approach.
In the end its all a matter of what situation you are in. If you were trying do to as many courses in a shortest period of time possible, that would be counter productive. This way you would try to gain as many informations and knowledge about drawing as you can, but things just dont work like that. In the end it all runs down to you having to draw a lot, courses will only point you into a certain direction or path so to say.
Draw-A-Box is not supposed to be some kind of prison or dark room you need to stay in till you finnish every single last lesson. Furtermore its no "betrayel" if you want to gather informations about other topics such as anatomy. Im just gonna say it as it is, as the same name already suggets "draw-a-box" is no complete guide to every single field of the spectrum of art, that means that you will sooner or later will need to do other courses if you want to gather more skills. Draw-A-Box strengthens fundamentals, which will always be very very important. You learn how to construct primitive form and how to put them into perspective. Essentially things will always run down to these fundamentals, thats why it is so important. You will soon realize how anatomy becomes easier for you because you are able to abstract those organic shapes into simplier ones. Thats why i think that putting other courses in addition to draw-a-box might help you actually apply those things you learned in draw-a-box to other topics.
Now to still warn you and not let you dive into some rampage of doing new courses every week. Just dont overgrind. Remember the 50/50 rule uncomfortable talked about. Always keep yourself a piece of fun that you can come back too. Im not saying that courses are always super dull and stuff but i think you already know what i mean. If you expect too much of you, you will just burn-out and stop drawing. We all dont want that.
First thing i noticed is that you sometimes extended the lines into the wrong direction:
Box 19 shows that, the red lines should be going the other way, this way they would converge towards the same vanishing point. If you draw them diverging, you will not even know if you were right with your perspective.
You should remember to really extend those lines a little longer so you can actually see if they touch at the right point. You tend to only extend them a few centimeters which does not really show you, if you were actually accurate.
Box 16 and 27 show that you seem to have a tendency to give the most outer edge a weird shift. You probably now see that yourself, but a good trick to avoid this mistake is that if 2 edges are visually (so in 2D) very close to each other, that they are gonna be almost parallel. The further they are apart from each other the more convergence they will have.
Another mistake you made is that you cross-hatched the wrong faces. You should only crosshatch the faces/planes that actually face the viewer and not the ones that are on the back side. This just makes it more confusing to yourself. You can see that on Box 42, where you cross hatched the bottom plane of the box. You were probably confused because you seemed to have started by cross hatching the plane faceing the viewer but than you ended up not continuing the cross hatching long enough. You have that same issue on Box 118.
Your boxes got way better towards the end, but you still have some issues with edges diverging instead of converging like on Box 231. Try to really maintain convergence, because this way your perspective will at least make sense. Accuracy is secondary and will come over time. As long as you master the convergence and get rid of the divergence you should be good to go. Problem is that even Box 250 has this issue.
Next Steps:
I know this might be annoying but i advice you to draw 25 more boxes that have no divergence where there should be convergence. I see how you got way better trough those 250 boxes but this is just too big of an issue to just ignore. Trust me you will be grateful to have fully mastered the box later in your journey. Try to also make the perspective a little more extreme this way this convergence problem will probably be more understandable and easier to handle for you.
Alright and dont forget the 50/50 rule, give yourself some time to do what you want and dont get discouraged by this!! You already got a lot out of this :)
Good job on completing lesson 1!
Your lines are very confindent and i can see that you took the time to think every excersise trough. There is not much to say except of the things you probably already see yourself. (So when you slightly cross the border with your ellipses on the tables of ellipses, but this will get more accurate over time).
As for the ghosted lines: You can try to to them even more diverse, so some really long ones and some really short ones. Yours are all kind of "medium length" so to say.
Remember to still do these basic excersises of lesson 1 as a warm up throughout your furter journey :).
Next Steps:
You should now start with the 250 Box challenge :)
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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