ZNorb

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, proportions 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:

• When hatching you want to have both ends of the lines touching an edge of the form they're being drawn on rather than being left floating. Usually when left floating like this it's caused by people hesitating while worrying about accuracy. Remember to take your time to space each line with the ghosting method, and then draw them confidently just like any other line, accuracy will improve with more mileage.

• Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge but I do recommend practicing it in your future attempts. It's an incredibly useful tool but one that people often require a fair bit of mileage before they feel comfortable applying it. The sooner you start to build up that mileage the sooner you'll see better results.

• 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.

Overall while you did make a few mistakes your boxes are improving so far and with more mileage you'll continue to become more consistent. 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.

Overall you did a great job. Linework is smooth & confident. Convergence is nice and your extending lines are in the correct direction (you forgot one set for box 201 though). You also went for 5-6 boxes per page in later boxes so good job. Here are some pointers that you can implement in future warm-ups:

• You should start adding line weight. Line weight is a great tool to reinforce a form and make the silhouette appear stronger and more solid (https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/1/lineweight). Additionally, it's a great tool to describe overlapping between two objects, which is a tool you will be using a lot in Lesson 3 and forward (or even Lesson 2 in the construction section). It's also just a nice practice overall.

• Add more variety. Your boxes look similar in terms of rotation, shapes, and foreshortening rate. You should experiment with those more because each variation will pose different difficulties and by trying to solve those different problems you'll get the most out of the challenge. Variety in the initial Y (the angle between each leg of the initial Y, the length of each leg, etc.); variety in shapes (pizza boxes, toothpaste boxes, etc.); variety in foreshortening (dramatic vs shallow foreshortening. Most of your boxes already has dramatic foreshortening so you should focus more on shallow foreshortening boxes where you can't even see the vanishing points).

• Back corners. Back corners of your boxes look good overall but there are two angles you should be on look out for: (1) converging too sharply with a leg of the initial Y (box 217 - blue & red extending lines), (2) diverging with a leg of the initial Y (box 232 - black extending lines).

• Advanced exercises (https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/2) . They are entirely optional but I think you would be interested in checking out if you haven't. A student who completed this course recommended me to hold off the second exercise (subdividing boxes) until Lesson 6 so you should incorporate the first exercise in your warm-up from time to time.

Hello! I'll be critiquing your Lesson 1 material this morning. I'm going to divide it up pretty generally into Lines, Ellipses, and Boxes, which roughly corresponds to the sections in the lesson material.

Lines:

I noticed only a minor amount of fraying on the starting point for your Superimposed Lines, but this is corrected as you move on to your second page. The curves have a bit more fraying, and I noticed that you tend to make your curves flatter as you draw over them. Still, the curves will be tougher to superimpoe than the straights, and you still submitted some pretty solid work.

Your Ghosted Lines are pretty accurate, but there's some slight wobbling in them. Make sure that right now, you're prioritizing confidence over accuracy—we want to make our marks straighter and more confident before we work back and make them more accurate. I noticed that some of your more confident marks (i.e. the lower left) only were slightly inaccurate, and that your lines were largely confident with some wobbling and course correction as you approached the endpoint. Try to free yourself up a bit and allow yourself to miss that second point. In fact, when extending the confident parts of your lines, you would've still been pretty darn close to the second endpoint, so I can say with certainty that if you let yourself make more confident marks, your accuracy won't take much of a hit.

Many of those same points carry over to your Ghosted Planes. Like last time, there was still some subtle course correction at the end of your lines, but your line confidence substantially improved.

As a note for when you use this exercise for warmups: try to plot the endpoints for the lines that span the horizontal and vertical distances of the plane (not the diagonals.) It's only a minor detail, but it gets you in the habit of ghosting all of the lines that you put down and drawing them consciously.

There was a bit more wobbling as you worked on your Rough Perspective, but you corrected much of it as you got through the rest of the box exercises. I assume that you were more focused on convergence to the vanishing point, which is normal. Try to treat the act of plotting the point that convergences to your VP and drawing a clean mark as separate tasks.

In general, your markmaking was strong and only took a dip as you readjusted to new concepts within the course. Just try to keep confidence in the back of your mind as you work through the rest of the course material. It will improve with time, especially with the load of boxes that you must draw for the 250 Box Challenge.

Ellipses:

Your ellipses are drawn smoothly and are well-bounded. Great work! You made a lot of progress during your Tables of Ellipses, and they tended to get tighter as you moved through the lesson.

I noticed that you tended to err on the side of making your ellipses larger as opposed to making them smaller, and this is especially evident during your Ellipses in Planes. This is better than drawing them too small, since you're still practicing drawing them in relation to the plane and using it as a guide. I also noticed some slight deformation (mostly on the first page) as you tried to fit the ellipse in the plane.

Finally, you continue to improve your ellipses as you work through the Funnels exercise. I noticed that your ellipses had some slight skewing about the minor axis, but apart from that they lined up quite well.

Overall, though, your ellipses were drawn extrodinarily well, especially at this part of the course!

Boxes:

The biggest thing I noticed for your Rough Perspective was the markmaking, as outlined in the Lines section. Don't stress the convergences too much at this point, since you'll improve a ton during the 250 Box Challenge.

Your Rotated Boxes are done well! They rotate properly and adjacent edges stay relatively parallel. Again, it's just some shaky line confidence here and there, but nothing too major. Also, good work with your Organic Perspective. I got a good feel for the perspective in each frame, and the added lineweight also helps.

Congratulations on completing Lesson 1! You made quality work across the board.

Hello Embient, firstly I'd like to start off by saying congratulations on completing lesson 1.

Lines:

• Your lines are pretty solid, one thing to note would be that they are a bit hard to see cause it is in pencil (specifically in the ghosted lines and ghosted planes exercises).

• There is some wobbliness so do keep in mind that you are looking for smoothness not accuracy

Ellipses:

• For the table of ellipses exercise, remember that the ellipses should be filling up the space they are in, but not go out of the table. In other words, they should be touching each other and/or the edges of the table.

• For your ellipses in planes, it seems like you maybe didn't go over your ellipses 2-3 times like uncomfortable said in his video.

• For funnels, the ellipses should turn into ovals at the middle cause they are getting narrower. These are hard for everyone though, honestly.

Boxes:

• In rough perspective, your boxes are very hard to see, luckily the red lines are there to help.

• Your rotated boxes look really good.

• Organic perspective, make sure to keep in mind that as the boxes get farther away, they get smaller.

Really great work overall. Hopefully in the future you can do work in fine liner, because for some exercises, it was just a bit hard to see.

I believe it does exactly as intended: developing spatial reasoning. I don't know if it is the most affective way, and it may not be for everyone, but it has definitely been affective for me. I have begun to internalize how to think about representing three dimensional on a two dimensional surface. Now, when I am drawing, the lines on the page almost "feel" three dimensional. This is so fundamental that it can't be over emphasized. No matter what medium you use, understanding this illusion is fundamental.

What the program isn't is a method of learning how to draw pretty pictures. But after you have done Drawabox, drawing those pictures gets easier. So when you ask for before and after pictures, I don't know if I can provide those. I have used other programs to improve specific aspects of drawing, but Drawabox laid the foundation.

Also, it is free and online. Hope this helps.

I'm sure you are familiar with the importance of learning your art fundamentals and what drawabox does brilliantly in my humble opinion is to teach you one of them, which has to do with structure and construction. Not only do I think drawabox is effective but I believe it's essential to your journey because it helps you to train your brain to see beyond you normally do. As it is mentioned in the very beginning we're creating an illusion of 3D objects, so you must be able to reproduce them in a convincing way, and you do that by representing form and volume. Also one thing that was vital for me is to be totally ok with pages and pages of not-so-beautiful drawings but attempts that helped me develop this spacial reasoning sense. What I thought I would immediately want to throw away I think it's really cool and I'm so happy I did them. I will certainly keep and treasure them. Contour lines, overlapping objects, flowing ribbons, planes (topology), mass and volume, cast shadows/texture, readability like silhouettes and few lines to suggest forms all of this were a massive level UP in my drawing and painting learning process. Not sure if it answered your question but I hope it can help you in any way :)

Hi Dracosarmor! I'm Flippy, and I will be critiquing your submission today.

First, to answer your question: Yes! You can draw in any Style. If you are studying a particular style though, this would fall on the exercise/course material side of the 50%. If you are simply doodling or drawing in that style because it's fun or comfortable to you, this would fall on the "play" side of the 50%.

Alright, now onto the Critique!

Superimposed Lines

Good job on this. I can see you are taking your time to properly align your stroke to the starting point, and you follow through your lines with good confidence, even for the longest of lines, where there is some arching present, but don't worry, this will go away with time and mileage. 

You appear to already be drawing with the shoulder (simplified as the whole arm, as explained in the lesson,) but in case you are not, this can help resolve the arching. 

https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/2/pivots

Ghosted Lines

Your ghosted lines look good. They are very accurate. Just remember to prioritize confidence over accuracy. I say this just as a reminder. Most of your lines look confident. There are just a few with a bit if a wobble.

Ghosted Plains

Very good. There is really nothing for me to correct here. A couple of instances of wobbling. Some of your bisecting lines are a bit off centered. (Mine were the same.) Don't worry about it, they'll improve in time.

Tables of Ellipses

All good. They're already looking smooth. Continue to draw them loosely, from the shoulder. Also remember to draw through your ellipses 2-3 times at maximum. I see some of yours have been drawn through more than 3 times. Correcting this will help tighten up each pass.  https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/a76a8906.jpg

Ellipses in Plains

It looks like you are have drawn through your ellipses 2-3 times at max now. Good work. Some ellipses are a bit misshapen. This could again be a case of prioritizing accuracy over confidence. For many, however, you managed to hit close to all 4 target points while maintaining an even enough shape. Nice job there!

Funnels

You funnels are looking good. Your ellipses fit well into the confines of the curves, while staying relatively even with the center line (minor axis). Good work. 

I would suggest exaggerating the ellipses' shift in degrees more, starting narrowest in the middle and working your way out to almost 90 degrees, though this is optional. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/step3

Plotted Perspective

Looks good. Nice even hatching lines, very minimum distortion. Remember that distortain mostly happens when the boxes move close to the VPs (Vanishing Points).

Rough Perspective

Your boxes are looking good. Many of your angles came quite close to the VP. 

Remember to keep the horizontal lines of your boxes parallel to the horizon line when in 1 point perspective.

https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/d5b7c639.jpg

Also, I see that you have repeated some of your lines. Please avoid doing this in the future. I know it is difficult to resist the urge to correct our mistakes, especially when we know we could have done better, (I still struggle with this myself!) but it's for the best we draw the line, then move on, no matter how good or bad the result. Allowing ourselves to redraw a line disincentives us to draw it properly the first time. Don't worry too much about it though, there will always be another line for you to draw with the best of your ability.

Rotated Boxes

Now let me just say, this exercise is meant to be hard.

If we look at the overall shape, we can see some of the boxes coming unaligned. My tips here (well, not mine, but Uncomfortable's) would be to: 

1. Try to imagine how the VP, for each box respectively, shifts away from the box you are rotating, along the vertical and horizontal axis which serve as our horizon lines

2. Look for the (almost) parallel lines shared between boxes. They won't be exactly parallel, but they'll be pretty close. Try starting with the box closest to the center. First draw it's vertical line almost parallel to its neighbor box, then extend its converging edges almost towards the center box's VP, and so on and so forth.

Good job keeping your lines, along with your hatching lines, nice and clean.

Organic Perspective

Good job conveying depth by varying the sizes of your boxes. 

Many of your boxes came out a bit distorted. Remember to keep the rate of convergencies for each box consistent, as this will help sell the idea that all boxes exist within the same space. 

Also remember that boxes consist of 3 sets of 4 parallel lines. This is really a key to understanding boxes, and you will learn more about it in the 250 Box Challenge.

Overall, you did a very good job with this lesson, and I am confident you have a grasp on the concepts taught here. Well done!

Points to keep in mind:

• Prioritize confidence over accuracy

• Do not repeat lines

• Boxes consist of 3 sets of 4 parallel lines

As a next step...

You will be moving on to the 250 Box Challenge, where you will both further your understanding of working with vanishing points, as well develop your ability to rotate boxes in 3D space intuitively.

A tip going into the 250 Box Challenge: Posting a page of boxes every now and then on the Drawabox Discord is a great way to correct any mistakes early on.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in a reply right here.

Good luck!

Superimposed lines: Your lines are pretty wobbly and not confident but you align your pen at the correct place.

Ghosted lines: Dots doesnt need to be that big and your lines are still wobbly, we want them to be smooth and confident

Ghosted planes: Your line quality increases a bit but remember, you need to use your arm and draw your line without hesitation

Ellipses in planes & Table of Ellipses: You need to complete your ellipses in 2-3 motions you can't build muscle memory with only one round

Funnels of ellipses: They get a bit better but remember, you need to use your arm

Plotted perspective: You could be a bit neater with your paper but it looks correct

Rough perpective: We don't draw over the same line in order to correct it. If it's not correct, leave it be and do better next time.

Organic perspective: I think this page looks like it's done a bit quickly. Make sure you read through the exercise page before you commit. I also recommend you to take a cube on your hand and examine how it looks like in different positions

Superimposed lines

• There is arching in your lines. Make sure you are making a straight stroke, looking toward the end point

• Try not to go beyond or stop short the the end point of the line

• There some wobble in the curved lines but overall your lines are confident

Ghosted lines and ghosted planes

• Majority are confident strokes, but some are slightly curved

• You are hitting about half of the points, make sure to take your time ghosting and are confident in the line you are drawing

Ellipses in ghosted planes

• Some ellipses are wobbly but generally they fit in the planes

Table of ellipses

• You should only be drawing through the ellipses 2 times ideally and 3 times is okay

• Take your time to do these - Ghost through the ellipses until you are confident

Funnels

• Your ellipses here are very wobbly, you should be ghosting your ellipses

Rough perspective

• When plotting the corners of your boxes, ghost while looking toward the vanishing point

• Many of your lines are wobbly, ensure you are ghosting every line

Rotated boxes

• You have done very well in rotating the boxes

• You should have repeated some of your lines multiple times, you should only make one confident line after ghosting unless stated otherwise

• It seems you have left out some of the edges on the top and bottom corner boxes

• Uncomfortable outlined in the exercise how to add line weight if the lines become confusing

Organic perspective

• The sense of perspective is well conveyed with different sized boxes

• Towards the end it seems rushed as you have repeated some lines

• There are some issues in the construction of your boxes but this will be addressed moving onto the 250 box challenge

Well done for completing the exercise

Unless you were gone for a really long time, it should be enough to just revisit some of the exercises as a refresher and then continue where you left off.