Dr_Scrapjack

Hi Fairuz, and congrats on getting through the 250 box challenge! I will handle your critique, and I will divide my comments in 2 sections.

Linework and confidence

Your lines look generally fairly confident, with quite little wobbling and arching when present. You seem to have achieved a good capacity for line control in your construction lines, as I don't see much overshooting in the lines that make up your box shapes. A mistake that appears more frequently in your first half of the challenge and becomes more rare in the second as you acquire confidence in the task at hand is the presence of repeated lines. Making repeated lines can become quite a gamble, as the presence of lines that do not perfectly overlap can end up undermining the solidity of you shapes. For this reason, in this course we tend to avoid repeating lines unless we have a use for them in making our shapes more believable as a 3d object, like applying line weight, which should be done only with a single overlapping line and only on the silhouette of the box. By contrast, in some boxes here like box 80, there are more than 1 repeated line that are also applied to the inner edges, likely to try and correct an unsatisfactory line. I advise you to try and avoid this attempt at corrections in the exercises of the course, as they end up often doing more harm than good, and also by not forcing yourself to correct every tiny mistake you have some opportunity to learn how to better work around errors, which can save you time and energy in the long run. Lastly, your hatching lines, while looking generally consistent and evenly spaced, suffer a bit from a lesser degree of control, as they end up quite often overshooting the bounds of the face they sit in. Hatching lines are not second class lines, and we should treat them with the same care as our construction lines.

Construction and convergence

In the first half of the challenge you seem to struggle a bit with the construction of your boxes. There are some examples of boxes with a broadly correct shape, but extension lines in the wrong direction (like boxes 15 and 26), and also boxes with actually divergent sides (as in 28, 34, 35, 36). When we are drawing a box, an object with 3 sets of parallel lines that are mutually perpendicular, the presence of a vanishing point for one of these sets means that these lines will look to the observer like they are converging away from them to a point on an infinitely distant imaginary horizon. This means that when a point of convergence ends up in front of a face of the box, we are not looking at an object with rectangular faces, but with trapezoidal faces, i.e. boxes that do actually physically converge at some point. I wanted to make this point clear as it is fundamental to correctly apply linear perspective, even if you eventually understood this on your own as it looks like. This mistake in fact disappears as you go on with the challenge. The solidity of your boxes also improves during the course of the challenge, starting off as sometimes a bit wonky in the beginning, with boxes with some stray divergent line, and ending by the end of the challenge as generally beliavable 3d shapes. The precision of your convergence could use some further improvement, but that's something that you will naturally achieve through further practice. The back corner of your boxes lines up usually less precisely than the other sides, and this is quite an easy and common mistake since the back corner is where mistakes pile up when constructing a box from the front. I will link here some advice I gave in another critique on how to try to tackle this specific aspect of a box (scroll down to the reply with an imgur link): https://drawabox.com/community/submission/87XZS5GL

Conclusion

I feel that, even with some aspects to work on a bit further, you have grasped by yourself the concepts that make the bigger picture of this challenge. As such, I think you are ready to move on to lesson 2. However, before moving on, I noticed that your boxes stop at 244. I don't know if you forgot to post your last page or forgot to do them, but before marking your lesson as complete I will ask you to post the final 6 boxes. If you didn't do them, I'd ask you to try and improve a bit the precision of your convergence through careful ghosting and, whenever possible, extend the lines all the way to the VP. If however you already did them, I will not ask you to redo the page, but simply post them.

These are looking better, 2, 3 and 6 in particular. Only thing I'd like to point out is that box 1 has the top face hidden, like it happens in 2 point perspective. This doesn't normally happen to rectangular boxes in 3 point perspective since it's the perspective of an object with all of its faces oriented at an angle with respect to our line of sight (by contrast, in 1 point we are observing the boxes with their "depth lines" parallel to our line of sight and both verticals and horizontals perpendicular to it, while in 2 point we are in the same situation as in 1 point, but with the box rotated around a vertical axis). I advise you to keep exercising in your warmup routines on box-related exercise. Slowly but surely, you will see improvement. As a last line of advice, I will drop here one of my other critiques where I give some tips on how to improve your back corners (the method I use is illustrated in the replies): https://drawabox.com/community/submission/87XZS5GL

That being said, I'll go on and mark your lesson as complete. Hope you will have some fun with lesson 2. Good luck and good work!

Sorry for the late response. The boxes in your first page are not done according to instructions. Perhaps I was a bit unclear with my wording, and if that was the case I apologize. What I meant was that all of the boxes of page one should have been with all three vanishing points for each one inside the page and if you felt you needed it, you could place explicitly with a mark the vps for the first 3. You boxes should have looked like some variation of this: https://imgur.com/a/2NY6Qdi

Your first 3 boxes by contrast have just one vp relatively close to the boxes, while the other 2 are well outside the page, so much outside that the lines look actually parallel. In your other boxes the perspective you used is always very shallow, resulting in boxes that look almost more isometric than in perspective, and some recurring problems like diverging lines do show up here again.

The reason why I insisted that your first page should consist only of boxes with very visible convergence is that with these kind of viewing angles you can get a much clearer idea of what's happening to parallel lines when you look at them from an angle because you can actually see on the page where are they converging. Once your visual memory has some experience with these cases, more complicated ones, like boxes with far away vps, will naturally be easier than before.

I don't want you to burden much more with other exercises, so I will ask you just one last page of 6 boxes before I will mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to try again to stick to the instructions for the first page I gave you the last time: the boxes should look somewhat like the one in the linked image. Of course you should try to vary shape, viewing angle and distance of the vps, but in any case for each box their 3 vps must be somewhere inside the page.

Sorry for the delayed response, here's what I meant: https://imgur.com/a/9YdocB2

The actual convergence in this specific image is very sloppy, but it will suffice to illustrate the technique. In the second image I ghosted in one direction and placed a mark where I guessed the inner corner could have been. This implicitly fixes one direction (which I traced explicitly in green for the sake of clarity). By ghosting in the other direction, now that we have roughly established a side of the base, we can improve upon our guess because now that you have a reference for one direction you can pinpoint better where the 2 lines will intersect (the circled dot) while ghosting back towards the vp. Hope this was clearer.

Hi Sijma, and congratulations on completing the 250 boxes! I can imagine how much you feel relieved, so take a deep breath and enjoy the certainty that you have tamed the beast that this challenge was. I will divide my critique in a couple of sections where I will give you my comments and suggestions.

Linework and confidence

You start your challenge with a good amount of confidence in your construction lines, and throughout the challenge they remain confident and precise, with very little deviation, arching and overshooting whenever present (if at all), and no visible wobbling whatsoever. Overall, I think that you did a very fine job with your construction lines, there's not much to say here. For completeness sake, I will point out a couple of things: first, there are a couple of boxes with either repeated lines on a side of the box that isn't part of the silhouette (such as boxes 11 and 40) or that have more than 2 repeated lines for a single side, likely done to correct an unsatisfactory mark (like in boxes 39, 40, 42 and 47). Remember that in this course, repeated lines are a tool that we should use only in very specific cases and with precise intent: in the context of the challenge, to apply lineweight to the silhouette of the box in order to give it a more solid feeling, and it should only consist of a single repeated line. If a mark doesn't go how we want we shouldn't try to fix it unless strictly necessary, and trying to correct this while working with ink often results in a messy situation that makes the illusion that we are looking at something other than a collection of lines on a piece of paper less believable. Part of the skill set that this course aims to teach or improve is the capacity of accepting and working around our mistakes. Second, your hatching lines in some boxes seem to be done with less care than your construction lines, often resulting wavy and floating inside the face of the box instead of going side to side. In a couple of boxes (as 184 and 185) you even get a bit sloppy and resort to scribbling. Hatching lines are not second rate lines and as such we should treat them the same as any other line, planning and tracing them confidently with the ghosting method.

Construction and perspective

You seem to start the challenge with an already good understanding of how one should intuitively apply 3 point perspective. Your boxes look generally believable as outlines of 3d objects and your line extensions confirm that indeed you achieved a fairly good accuracy for a drawing with perspective established through the naked eye alone. You also experimented with a fair amount of shapes for your boxes, which is good. You also handled pretty well the back corner most of the time. It's still not perfect, but that's to be expected since the back corner is where mistakes in evaluation of perspective tend to pile up if we start drawing our box from the front, be it through rigorous ghosting towards the imagined VP or by placing your endpoints of the segment through visual intuition, the former because of how we construct the box, the latter because we may subconsciously tend to privilege convergence with one side at a time due to the tendency of our brain to simplify things as much as possible. One thing we may do to improve this aspect is to construct the box from the back corner instead, or fixing one direction when we are inspecting one set of sides of the base by placing a provisional dot around where you guess the intersection with the other direction may be, and then check for the other set of sides to improve upon your original guess. The only thing I will criticize here is that I feel you could have experimented a bit more with boxes with shallow degrees of foreshortening, i.e. boxes that, while still having visible perspective deformation, have quite far vanishing points, often lying out of the page, which is a good way to train our sense of perspective intuition since we are not necessarily able to trace back to the vp in that case and we have to think carefully about what looks believable without precise tools.

Conclusion

I think you did an overall very good work with your challenge. To answer two of your questions/notes: regarding the construction method you used, as the goal of the challenge is ultimately understanding how objects look in 3d space and how to replicate that through our geometric intuition, it doesn't hurt that after a certain number of boxes you decided to ditch the complete detailed process, and that's in fact our final goal, sort of like when we try to take off the training wheels at a certain point while learning how to ride a bike. As for your question about why some images where flipped in the uploading process, I'm afraid I don't have a clue.

Anyway, those are my thoughts about your submission. I think you are ready to move on to lesson 2. Good luck and good work!

My idea was to make you do 2 more pages of 6 boxes each, so 12 boxes in total. For the first page what I meant is that you should still pick and choose 3 VPs for each box with the additional limitation of having the VPs always inside the page. For the first 3, as I said, you can explicitly place the VP on the page, indeed like a 3 point perspective version of the rough perspective exercise, but with different VPs for each box as you did throughout the challenge.

Hi Pandacatlad, and congratulations on completing the 250 boxes! I will handle you my thoughts on your submission here and divide my critique in two major sections.

Linework and confidence

There's definitely some uncertainty in your linework at the beginning of the challenge, with noticeable wobbling. However you get quite quickly more comfortable once you have acquired sufficient familiarity with your task and by the 50th box or so your construction lines look smooth, confident and quite precise. Your hatching lines however do remain throughout the challenge quite imprecise and curved, as if done without much planning. Remember that hatching lines are lines just like any other and just as them they require making conscious decisions and planning and construction through the ghosting method. Another mistake in your mark-making is the presence throughout the challenge, especially at the beginning, of multiple repeated lines. As tempting as it may be to correct ourselves, in this course we always try to work with or even exploit our mistakes and in fact corrections such as repeated lines often end up actually worsening the situation by making everything messier and making our shapes feel less solid. The only reason we may repeat a line is to apply line-weight to a shape, which is always done through a single repeated line and, in the case of out boxes, only on the silhouette of the shape and not on the internal sides.

Shape and convergence

In this section we begin to look at the aspects that are specific to this challenge. Starting with your line extensions, as you already pointed out we see quite a few boxes with extensions drawn in the wrong direction. The problem seems to be prevalent in the beginning of the challenge and to become less frequent as it goes on, but begins to pop up again near the end of the challenge. Remember that our extension lines are a tool we use to check for convergence and for this reason they should extend away from the viewer, towards our established vanishing points. If, when you have finished a page of boxes, you have some doubts about where lines should extend, do not hesitate to rotate the page to put each box at an angle where things look more clear to you.

Another more structural problem that some boxes show is an inconsistency in your convergence. Two very clear examples of this are boxes 211 and 212: in both of these boxes both of our horizontal sets of sides are extending away in a manner consistent with each other, but the vertical set is actually diverging away from us. According to the rules of perspective, these two and similar boxes do not have rectangular lateral faces, but trapezoidal. If you have difficulty with how to place your vanishing points, remember that a way to tell is from our initial y: if we draw a box from the initial y, the two arms will tell us in which direction we should place the 2 vanishing points for the horizontals of the box, and the leg of the y will tell us which direction for the vertical is consistent with the other 2. Here as well, if you have difficulty to visualize how a box could look like if a y is shaped or oriented in a certain way, it is perfectly valid to rotate the paper until you find an angle where things look clearer.

Another problem that I see often is that you tend to keep your foreshortening very shallow, and while this is not a bad thing in itself, keeping our foreshortening that much shallow in a learning phase and especially while we are eyeballing perspective can lead to some unsatisfactory results like parallel or subtly diverging lines, an effect that is particularly present in the first half-to-middle of your submission. Sometimes your boxes, box 45 for instance, also show a "convergence in pairs" in a set of sides. This is a quite common mistake that often happens when our box has a vanishing point relatively close in one direction but relatively far in another, and what happens if we first traced the lines of the far VP is that, since we are eyeballing, our brain is kind of tricked into making things more even and making our lines less inclined than they should be. A possible fix for this would be probably just to ghost a bit more carefully for each side, making sure to ghost first on the existing sides to remember ourselves where the next lines should go.

Conclusion

I hope I didn't come off as harsh in my critique, but I just wanted to point what were in my opinion some issues of this challenge that are worth a bit more time. Having gone through the ordeal of the challenge I understand how much frustration it can cause and how many little factors sometimes contribute to give us a less than ideal result. Given all of this, I think that there are things worth revisiting but I don't want to load you with too much work, so before moving on I will assign you just 2 more pages of boxes. What I'd like you to do in these 2 pages is this: draw 6 boxes with extension lines in each page as you did in the challenge, but in the first page focus only on making boxes with all of the vanishing points contained inside the page. The VP doesn't necessarily have to sit close to the box, but it should still be inside the page. This way, ghosting with a certain degree of accuracy will be a bit easier and will also make it easier for you to reason on how the form looks and extends in 3d. If you have difficulties, you could also try for 3 (but not more) boxes in the first page to actually place a mark for each VP during contruction. In the second page you can do your boxes however you'd like, with either shallow or radical foreshortening, VPs inside or outside the page and anything in between, but make sure that here too you try to ghost very carefully and think about the 3d shape of the object. Take all the time you need, remember the 50% rule and when you are ready reply here with your work. Good luck and good work!

Hi Kittensmittens, congrats on completing lesson 2! I will handle your critique by dividing it in sections for each exercise.

Organic arrows

Your arrows look generally fluid and confident, flowing well through space. Most of them have also a clear sense of perspective and directionality. However, I noticed that in all of your arrows limited yourself quite a bit in the amount of apparent extension of your arrows: most of them indeed appear to flow towards or away from the viewer, but the perspective shrinking is consistently quite subtle, meaning that the width of your ribbons doesn't change that much. Also, many of your arrows show little change in curvature going towards the viewer, and the curves remain narrow. As a result, most of your arrows, while looking indeed 3-dimensional, look rather short or at least with their entire length being contained in a volume of space very close towards the viewer, as if the ribbon is being folded. To show some concrete examples of this we can look for instance at the 2 arrows on the left in the second page, which look a bit flat. Some arrows also tend do grow in width advancing but then shrinking again after a certain point, as if the ribbon was curving away from the viewer (like the central diagonal arrow in the first page and the second from the top on the left in the second page). A thing that you could have done, and should do in your future exercises, is experimenting more with radical perspective. Try to do more arrows like the biggest one in the first page and the one on the bottom left in the second but push things even further: make the farthest end even smaller and the nearest end even bigger, and make the curves wider and wider the further you go towards the viewer. To make myself clear, I'm not saying that what you did here is wrong, just that you could have tried to do arrows with more depth.

Organic forms

The organic forms look quite confident and fluid, and remain simple. There is some wobbling here and there, probably caused by an attempt to be precise in making a closed form. Remember that you should always put confidence over accuracy, even if you sausage shape ends up being not perfectly closed. If that happens you can always unite the disjointed curves with a ghosted curve. Regarding your ellipses, they look smooth and are correctly drawn through 2 times. The precision could be improved a bit, but the mostly deviate quite little from the bounds of the sausage. Their orientation follows quite well the "spine" of the sausage (which sometimes shows wobbling however: the previous point about confidence still stands, when in doubt ghost more instead of trying to consciously adjust your lines while you are tracing them). A thing to note is that your ellipses do change in degree of foreshortening, but it's a subtle change that doesn't convey the idea of 3d space as well as using a range of degree that is a bit wider could: remember that when we view even a simple cylinder from the side in space the degree of observation increases the farther the cylinder gets from our eyes, resulting in wider apparent dimension of its circular cross-sections (visual explanation from https://imgur.com/rXLBxSg). Similar points apply to your contour lines.

Texture analysis

You did a very good job here. Your textures are very detailed and manage to convey well the structures of the objects you have studies with the limitation of using only cast shadows. I particularly like what you did with the coral texture: instead of trying to cram a larger chunk of the "coral labyrinth" in the limited space of the panel you decided to "zoom in" and replicate from observation the finer structure of the coral, which helps the viewer to get a better idea of how the surface looks. In all of your textures in general you handled well the shade gradient.

Dissections

As in the texture analysis, the level of detail is good. You break the silhouette of the form depending on the composition of the material of the texture, which helps giving the form a solid consistency and making the textures feel more like actual details of a shape rather than mere lines on the paper. A difficulty I think you have here, however, is wrapping the textures around the forms. As an effect of the curvature of the sausage, details near the silhouette of the shape should look more "compressed" and crammed, and this effect become less and less pronounced flowing down the contour of the shape (example: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/e58b7887.jpg) . In some of your textures, the bricks and fish scales for instance, this effect isn't really visible, and as a result the texture ends up feeling a bit flat despite the amount of detail. Remember also that for textures we should use cast shadows and not form shadows, which you used in the olive texture. As a general rule for this course we should not use form shading unless stated, and when we choose a texture to reproduce we should always try to pick something that we can indeed convey through cast shadows only, and if not pick another texture.

Form intersections

The main objective of the exercise is to create a group of forms that look like they belong in the same scene, and I think you managed to do that quite well. The foreshortening is consistent both in your page of boxes only and in the pages with mixed shapes. You also made good use of the space if the page and didn't shy away from piling them close together. As this is your first introduction in the course to intersecting shapes, the accuracy of the intersection is a secondary point and I won't spend much time talking about them. I will only say that you boxes intersections are quite believable, and, with a bit more uncertainties, the same can be said for the mixed-shape pages. If you want to know more about how shapes intersects, there are several softwares and online tools that could help you. Aside from the usual reliables like Blender, I think that the 3D calculator of Geogebra can prove very useful for quickly visualizing simple overlapping shapes.

Organic intersections

Your organic forms keep looking fairly confident and they stack neatly on top of each other. I think you handled very well the way the shapes sag on one another following the curvature of the ones below, giving a nice sense of weight to your shapes. However, the shadows that they cast could have been handled better and in many cases they do not follow the curvature of the shape below or behind it, but follow the curve of the shape that is casting the shadow instead, almost making it look like there is a black halo surrounding the figure instead of a proper shade. This subtracts from the otherwise good sense of solidity of your collection of shapes.

Conclusion

Overall I think you have understood the main objectives of the lesson, with some caveats and things to improve, and that you are ready for lesson 3. Remember to keep repeating these exercises by incorporating them in your warmup routines, especially the ones with more uncertainties. Good luck and stay motivated!

Hi Mermanomania, good job getting done with the 250 box challenge! I'm sure you will be quite relieved by the knowledge that you finally made it. I will give here my thoughts on some aspects of the challenge, pointing out where I think you did good and where you could eventually improve.

Convergence and 3D reasoning: You start the challenge I'd say with already a fair grasp of how box shapes rotate in 3D space, with some occasional imprecision. As one expects, your precision gets better and better further down the challenge and by the 100 mark your boxes are generally very believable as outlines of 3d objects, with some caveats that I will explain in the other section. The extension lines correctly extend away from the viewer all the time and generally show a quite precise convergence, or at least look convergent enough when the vanishing point is outside the page. In many of your boxes you handled very well the back corner, which is usually for most students the hardest part of the box if they draw the box from the front, so good job on that. Another good thing you did is that you have experimented with a wide variety of box shapes. The only thing in this section that I feel you could have tried to do more is playing with a wider range of foreshortening. While there's a few boxes with at least a set of sides with fair amount of foreshortening, most of your boxes tend to have moderately shallow foreshortening, meaning that perspective doesn't deform their apparent shape too much from their actual geometric shape. While in the instructions of the challenge it was recommended to draw more boxes with shallow foreshortening than not I think you could have pushed things a bit further in your experimentation with angles and make more boxes with radical foreshortening and try to experiment with different viewing angles, for instance by placing very close to the box 1 or 2 VPs.

Mark-making and confidence: You general mark-making is quite good. Your individual lines almost always lack wobbling. There's a bit of subtle arching in some of your first boxes, but going further down the challenge it begins to disappear quickly and by the end you lines look almost perfectly rectilinear. However, there are some problems with how your lines interact, making sometimes the whole a bit less than the sum of its parts, specifically when it comes to repeated lines and line-weight. Your boxes often show multiple repeated lines on what should be a simple, clear-cut edge of the box. Whether these lines were intended as added line-weight or not, the result subtracts from the illusion that we are trying to create, that we are looking at objects in space and not lines on a 2d surface, because even if the lines are individually confident the messiness of having multiple lines that are close but not completely overlapping makes it harder for our eyes to interpret the marks on the page as the bounds of an actual solid shape. For this reason, in drawabox we always try to work with the first mark we make, even if it is wrong: trying to correct these results often ends in messy situations that make the illusion of the drawing harder to sell. It's always confidence over accuracy in this course. The only time we should repeat a line is when we place line-weight, which is not a tool to correct a previous mistake but to make the shape feel more solid: it should always be limited to a single overlapping line. Also note that for this reason line-weight should only be placed on the silhouette of our boxes, so under no circumstance we should have repeated lines in the edges inside the outline of the box, as it is often the case with your homework. As a minor point, I feel that since your ability to make straight ghosted lines is quite developed by the end, you could start to focus a bit more on not overshooting your lines, which has also improved a bit during the challenge but could be improved even further. Another, final, minor point is that in the second half of the challenge your hatching lines become disconnected in the middle of the face, and also look a bit too much spaced in my opinion. Remember that hatching lines are lines just like any other, and as such they should be confident, smooth and continuous.

Keeping in mind all that I said, I think you handled well the major objectives of the challenge. In my opinion you're ready to move on to lesson 2 whenever you feel. Good luck and stay motivated!

No worries, keep in mind that unless you are following the paid review track it's absolutely not mandatory to wait for a critique to go on with the following lessons, even if it's advised. Good luck with your other lessons then!