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250 Box Challenge

5:07 PM, Sunday November 29th 2020

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Post with 3 views. BananaJoe - 250 Boxes Challenge

Hello again,

so after a month of almost daily effort here are the boxes. I had a few rough patches along the way when I was struggling to find motivation. Sometimes I would take 20 minutes to finish one box because I would be ghosting a line forty times (really), only to make it completely wobbly in the end. So I tried to force myself to a faster pace and also to draw more intuitively (instead of spending several minutes figuring out how the angles would change when the box rotates etc.)

I would say it was a great exercise and I have gained more confidence, but there is still a lot to improve - for example extreme angles/rotations of the box in relation to viewer. I will continue with drawing boxes as a warm up.

I see a major weakness in line quality. When I would try to highlight the contour I would usually make a lot of messy lines instead of ones crisp and sharp one.

Thank you very much for the critique

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2:00 PM, Tuesday December 1st 2020

Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!

You have done a good job on the challenge overall. I can see that your mark making improved quite a bit as you progressed. Your lines steadily become straighter and more confident looking. You also do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!

One thing I notice about your boxes is the extra line weight you applied. For a few boxes you go very heavy with the extra line weight and in some, I can see you are not applying the extra line weight correctly. When you go to add weight to a line it is important that you treat the added weight the same way you would a brand new line. That means taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute it the mark blends seamlessly with your original mark. This will allow you to create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines that reinforces the illusion of solidity in your boxes/forms. You do not want your line weight to be very bold, so I recommend that you try applying your extra line weight in 1-2 passes, no more. Extra line weight should never be used to correct or hide mistakes. You can also read more about this here. Something to keep in mind as well, when you are working through Drawabox you should be employing the ghosting method for every mark you make. This includes the hatching that we sometimes use for our boxes.

Finally while your converges do improve overall I think this diagram will help you further develop that skill as you continue through Drawabox. So, when you are looking at your sets of lines you want to be focusing only on the lines that share a vanishing point. This does not include lines that share a corner or a plane, only lines that converge towards the same vanishing point. Now when you think of those lines, including those that have not been drawn, you can think about the angles from which they leave the vanishing point. Usually the middle lines have a small angle between them, and this angle will become negligible by the time they reach the box. This can serve as a useful hint.

Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!

Next Steps:

Continue to lesson 2!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:00 PM, Tuesday December 1st 2020

Thank you very much for the critique. I will try to focus on the issues you have pointed out. I do have problem with the convergence of my lines - especially when the angle between them is small. I will have to practice more. And you are right with the ghosting on the hatching - sometimes I was rushing through them without ghosting.

Thank you!

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