250 Box Challenge

6:12 PM, Saturday June 27th 2020

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Hello Critiquer,

Sometimes it was difficult for me to decide how to make the lines that indicate the zed axis of the box converge towards the vanishing point. Any advice would be appreciated. I followed advice from the discord and Iabelled my boxes for the critique to be easier to see. If I made any stupid mistakes, any suggestions on how I can improve would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again,

Lars

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2:03 AM, Sunday June 28th 2020

Hey there, congratulations on making it through the box challenge! You've made a good amount of improvement with both your convergences and line confidence throughout the set.

You start off with quite a bit of divergence present in your boxes. I noticed around box 100 you switched to more extreme foreshortening and stuck with it through to the end. Make sure you practice a mix of both extreme and more shallow foreshortening. Shallower boxes convey a sense of relatable scale whilst the more extreme ones convey a more grand sense of scale, so we tend to use the shallower ones a lot more often. I also noticed they get steadily more extreme as I progress through your album to the point where some of your last boxes have vanishing points so close to the box that they're starting to distort unnaturally. This diagram demonstrates how the distance from the vanishing point relates to the level of distortion in boxes. The explanation is pretty technical but the takeaway is not to draw the vanishing points too close to your boxes.

Despite the distortion issues and heavy focus on extreme foreshortening, there is a consistent improvement in the consistency with which your lines converge. Make sure you're focusing on how the angles of your lines relate to one another rather than specifically ghosting to a vanishing point, as this will make it easier for you to draw boxes with shallow foreshortening. We share this diagram with all students that finish the 250 box challenge as it demonstrates a reliable method for thinking about how the angles of our parallel lines relate to one another as they converge together towards the vanishing point. Those lines on the outer edges (blue/magenta) will converge at a steeper angle than those internal to the box (orange/green).

Finally, it's good to see consistent application of line weight, hatching, and correction lines throughout your challenge with the extra mileage directly improving your line confidence. One thing I did pick up on was a tendency to reinforce the internal lines of your box with line weight - this is incorrect, we only want to reinforce the silhouette of the box in order to clarify it. I'm going to mark this challenge as complete but make sure you're practicing boxes with shallow foreshortening as you will need them in the form intersections exercise of lesson 2 and beyond.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 2, but keep practicing shallower foreshortening.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:51 PM, Sunday June 28th 2020

Thank you for the detailed critique! I will be sure to work on the things you mentioned!

Best,

Lars

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