drusk

I understand what you are saying and appreciate the feedback. I have already taken it into account a bit. One, this isn't my only sheet. I have made a few more and cycled through them. I posted because I was hoping that others would share and I could cycle through theirs too. Two, I was also concerned that it would become a rote exercise, so I deliberately vary the orientation of the page, line direction, size of ovals, size of the ghosted plane, and type of crosshatching. I even try variations on the original exercises to change that up too. Three, I try to make this a focused activity where I am paying attention to each line, noting mistakes and problems as well as what is done correctly. I plan on making some pages for the remaining exercises in Lesson 1 and Lesson 2, but I am not done with them yet, so I guess you could say that I am practicing those now. Again, thanks for the feedback. Good points to think about.

ah, I see. I was picturing a person walking along thinking to themselves, "Yep, 250 boxes, that was me. Number 1!" : )

Quick question Uncomfortable. I read the story about how the first 250 box challenge came about. The student with some questions and being directed to "go draw 250 boxes". I'm curious, how long did it take that person?

I'm going to give a little bit of a different take here. I completely agree that the 250 box challenge can seem really daunting at first, it did to me too (I just finished it). I did a page or two and it was taking about 20 minutes a page at first. But then something strange happened. I incorporated the pages spread throughout the day, one in the morning, one at lunch, one or two after work and pretty soon it was just part of my day. I also stopped thinking about the whole task and started focusing on one line at a time, trying to get each box correct (which only happened occasionally). I started to get a little bit of satisfaction after each page check and before I knew it I was done. I am including drawing a box and error check into a daily warm up to keep the skill up. My advice is to concentrate on what the task is trying to teach rather than completion. I think you will be done before you know it.

Here are the extra 25 boxes:

https://imgur.com/a/eVEXO4J

Thanks for the feedback. It is helpful. I probably have been conservative with the foreshortening because it still does not feel intuitive to do it in a more exaggerated way even though that could be more accurate. The converging in pairs was just really annoying because I kept trying to correct it but it kept showing up.

I tried to improve the crosshatching. I was a little lax on that.

The first three pages are 3 point perspective and the other two are in 2 point perspective. Some of the boxes are pretty good but a others are still a problem. I am having trouble with drawing through the box and getting the back lines correct. I am thinking of getting out a ruler and making some boxes using vanishing points just to get a better feel for how a correct box should look.

If I didn't mention it on my first post, the boxes were draw on letter size paper with a Sharpie ultrafine marker. Quick question, how would I achieve line weight using the ultrafine marker? Would I just go over the line again to thicken it?

Let me know if there is anything else I need to do. Thanks again.

Everyone has had great suggestions, but I didn't see anyone mention looking at it as form. When you said that you can copy a face and shade it well, how do you think you can do that? Do you shade things a certain way because you understand the shape and light source correctly, or because you can just see in the photo that it is darker and lighter? I am only asking because the loomis method is just creating the head as a basic shape and adding features. Can you draw a rectangular box in different angles from imagination? I think that is all it really is. The loomis head is just a sphere with the sides chopped off. If you can draw that from different angles, adding the chin shouldn't be too hard. One thing that helped me was to actually get a skull (I 3D printed one) and drew it from different angles. I would position the skull, draw a loomis head and then add the details of the eyes, nose and mouth. The loomis method is essentially creating a skull in simple form.

Hi Benj,

Thanks for your reply.

You are correct in all the things you mentioned. I am a 100% newbie to this and I am still getting used to drawing from the shoulder. This is affecting my speed because too slow gets wobbly and too fast becomes inaccurate. I am VERY self conscious of drawing from the shoulder. I was inconsistent with plotting start and end points and it shows. I have started in on the box challenge and can already feel a little improvement. I think I am starting to get a sense of why massive amounts of repetitions are necessary.

I will work on taking better pictures.

And now my critique on your critique:

That was awesome! Thank you! I did not expect more than a cursory review of the work and you really too the time to look at each page. Spot on with your observations too. The completeness was unexpected and really encourages me to continue with the lessons. Thanks again.