RiggityRenekt

I am sorry, I don't see any unnatural bends in those leaves. They are going into the page, away from the viewer. Similar to the ribbon exercise. Should every leaf be drawn as if they are flowing along a flat surface perpendicular to the viewer's eyes? If so then I missed that from the material.

Everything else I understand and can see.

Thank you for the critique!

A good way to practice proportion is to draw perfect cubes. It can help to have a real cube on hand to look at after every attempt. Most people can find a six-sided die in their home.

Practice rotating cubes in space. Tumble them around the page with the goal to preserve their apparent size/dimensions.

Practice dividing those cubes in halves, thirds, fourths, etc. First do it by eye and then check using the x subdivision method.

Do the same for cylinders - tumble and subdivide.

When you can do that much you should be able to make more progress deconstructing photographs into basic primitives.

It could be low on ink. It is hard to say without seeing the line. But the squeaking would seem to indicate it is too worn.

Of course you should do your best to hold the pen perpendicular to the paper. However, the more worn a nib is the less freedom you have to vary that angle. So an angle might work on a brand new nib but skip on a nib that is worn down.

It could be you are too heavy handed, causing more wear. It could also just be regular wear and tear. These companies don't want you using the same pen for too long. They want you to run out so they can get another money from you. Planned obsolescence.

I found that the superimposed line exercises tend to wear the felt tip out faster. I suspect there is something in the ink that causes more friction once it dries. The additional friction causes more heat and destroys the nibs faster. I've done my absolute best to not be heavy handed and it still seemed to eat right through my Microns in no time. Consider using a different pen for just that exercise.

I've since switched to a metal nibbed refillable technical pen altogether. Rotring Isographs or Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph. There is no guilt of adding to the plastic waste problem. The flow is better. They are longer lasting. They are nicer quality tools altogether. The only downside is the semi regular cleaning you need to do. As long as you don't let the ink dry out from going unused for long periods of time they are really easy to take care of.

There is a higher upfront cost but it cheaper in the long run. I got a college set of three for $35 on Amazon. You may need to wait a while for that price to come around again. You may be able to find a single for around $25 more easily. In my experience, college sets tend to sit around $80-120 normally.

Whenever he uses words you don't know, like perpendicular and parallel, you're going to have to look them up. If you are at the rotated boxes section then you should have already gone through a lot of material on boxes and perspective as well as plotted and rough perspective. Looking into parallel and perpendicular should have been done a while ago, course wise.

Perspective is hard for a lot of people. It takes effort to understand. Rewatch the parts that confuse you. It is good you are asking for other people's explanations. Whenever I am having trouble with something I often find it is helpful to hear as many different people explain the same concept as I can.

Proko is a good resource

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYlW8XC0MlI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Y4K4hqZwo

David Finch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lPfz3BFxCM

The Virtual Instructor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjhkxFDvD78

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fcbk_K5qWA

Plainly Simple

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkp1xfWJ9n4

The Drawing Database-Northern Kentucky University

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMXbAPr21di8DjTKCE3EoS4KFtNZ-FDnP

There is also Marshall Vendruff's $12 course on perspective. It is 6+ hours long and has a ton of good information.

And of course there are a ton of great books books on perspective.

Here are some good tools that may help:

Forms Intersections First Aid Pack

and

eye.training - form intersections(this site has some other handy tools as well.)

I felt Antonio Stappaerts has a good breakdown of the process. Though it may be in one of his ArtWOD videos behind a paywall. He recommended trying to visualize the overlaps one cross-sectional slice at a time. Something like what I believe an MRI Machine produces.

Try to keep it simple at first, with not too many rotations.

There are also people on the discord that have made other helpful diagrams and breakdowns. betweenskyandsea is one person that comes to mind.

Perfect is the enemy of good. While developing bad habits is a danger I think developing something is better than developing nothing. Bad habits aren't an unshakeable curse. Often they can be good lessons in what you don't like and what things you actually need to focus on. You'll also be able to sooner spot people who are going down your same path and tell them your experiences to possibly help them.

Learning a skill is a process of making your internalized choices more deliberate, examining and changing them with an eye to some new you've just studied, and then re-internalizing them hopefuly improved in some way. It is that, over and over again. It doesn't matter if what you are examining was a bad habit or just something you never even knew to consider before. It is all the same. Nobody but the freshest of babies go into anything as a blank slate.

A good community or mentor you show your work to a lot will hopefully help keep you heading the right direction.

If you have all these techniques down, then it should be trivial to do in fairly short order. If you are certain you know everything then you could try to get away with skipping the reading/videos and just doing the exercises/challenges. I would definitely check in with the discord as often as possible so they can tell you as soon as you start diverging from the instructions.

I'd argue you'll be doing yourself a disservice though. If you go into a course thinking you already know better than the instructors you are definitely setting yourself up to overlook things you never considered. It is always best to approach learning from a place of humility - to go into it thinking you could find something you didn't know before. Otherwise it just becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy of sorts. You'll probably only ever get what you expect to get, and that is next to nothing. As long as I've found something I usually feel it was worth the time - no matter the amount of care I've taken or nearly how small the take-away is.

If nothing else, it is good mileage. Everybody can always use more practice with the fundamentals.

Those are just my thoughts. I am just a random guy. That isn't official guidance in any way.

I took a two year break and came back for official critiques as well. I was told to redo lesson 1 and do 50 boxes.

If looking at other people's submissions gets you discouraged then don't do it. Comparison is the thief of joy.

2 weeks is not long enough to see much improvement. The 250 box challenge alone is not necessarily enough to see much improvement. Each person is at a different point in their journey going into the challenge. Sometimes people are close enough that the challenge allows them to break through on understanding some concept or some skill plateau. Often it doesn't. That doesn't mean you aren't capable of improving or not cut out at drawing. You are just starting at a different spot than they were.

Often it takes exposure to many different approaches to get someone to improve. For me, getting a larger pad of newprint and doing large loops, swirls, circles, etc with a thick oily crayon at the end of an extended arm's reach helped me really drive home the physical feeling of drawing with my whole arm.

In my expereince it also a matter of the physical development of your shoulder, arm, core muscles, and your mind/body connection. That is to say, this is a physical activity and so takes a certain level of physical conditioning and bodily awareness before you can break through; not unlike a sport. I believe that is often the answer to the mystery behind why a lot of people can sometimes take noticeably longer time to improve than others.

The 250 box challenge is not the final boss of mastering perspective, it is just a mini-boss. It is about mileage, not footage. Tempering your expectations can keep you from sabotaging your motivation.

If you have done multiple hundreds of boxes then you have to be nearing completion. Try to take heart in the fact that you have almost completed the challenge. You have already nearly finished one of the first big obstacles in this course that cause a lot of people to fall off.

Anybody doing the 250 box challenge should not be using a straightedge on anything but the projection lines that are simply there to check their work. So no, don't use a straightedge other than that. Freehanding is required by the assignment.

If you are wanting more specific advice than that then I suggest sharing some examples of your work.

The lines will converge faster as the vanishing point approaches the center of your pov- as it gets closer to your looking straight down that side.

There are tips and you just have to get better by doing it a bunch. Art is a skill, just like a sport. You can get good coaching to be shown how to properly throw a basketball but it doesn't matter how good the instruction is, you won't be able to consistently sink three pointers without a great deal of time spent shooting at the 3 point line.