Check Out NMA    Learn More About our Partnership
Close and Enjoy Drawabox Ad-free

250 Box Challenge

4:56 PM, Friday March 24th 2023

250 Box Challenge - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/AsLGy1T.jpg

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

I’m not trying to self-critique, but I’m gonna say this to clarify - a lot of the time it looks like I’ve tried to redraw lines but I promise you that that is almost never true!! I kept having this problem where my pen would slip when I tried to add like weight, so it would start these weird lines that were going way off course, so I would just have to start the line again, and it made some wonky looking lines. I promise I’m not trying to cheat!

Also, I use like thirty different tools for my line extensions because I just used whatever was available, so some of them may look better than others. Also there are a couple times when a single was was extended more than once, because my ruler was apparently tilted at a different angle than the line, so I had to adjust it and do it again.

All that being said: BOXES!

Report
2 users agree
6:30 PM, Monday May 29th 2023

Hello Pinkietastic, I'll be handling your Box Challenge critique.

Congratulations on completing the 250 Box Challenge, it is a lot of work and takes commitment.

You've shown a good deal of improvement across the set, your lines get straighter and smoother and your perspective estimations get more accurate.

What you've done well:

  • You're consistently extending your lines in the correct direction (away from the viewer) to check your perspective estimations, and these convergences become more consistent as you progress through the set.

  • You've done a good job of experimenting with different proportions, orientations and rates of foreshortening for your boxes. This kind of experimentation is great, because you learn more by practising all different kinds of boxes than you do by repeating similar ones over and over.

  • It looks like you applied line weight to your boxes. Seeing as how line weight is not a requirement of the challenge it's nice to see that you're applying it. It's a useful tool but one that most people need some mileage with before they feel comfortable applying it. Getting an early start like this will help you see better results sooner.

  • It’s good that you chose to hatch one of the front faces of your boxes, and you've made an effort to draw them parallel and evenly spaced.

Things to keep in mind in future:

  • You tend to draw pretty small. In future I recommend you experiment with drawing some of them bigger. This will encourage you to engage your whole arm (drawing from the shoulder) as well as making it easier to identify where you make mistakes.

  • Your lines do get straighter and smoother throughout the set, but when I open your images full size some of your lines have noticeable wobbling. Wobbling usually occurs when a student is overly concerned with accuracy and hesitates. You may find it helpful to read this comment from Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation.

  • This might be a factor of how small your boxes are, but there are places where your additional line weight gets really thick and heavy. We want to keep line weight more subtle, think of it as a whisper, no a shout. You'll usually only need one additional stroke to get the desired effect, please look at these notes for more information on how to add line weight.

  • Although your convergences improve across the set there are times when your lines converge in pairs or occasional places where they diverge. 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.

I think that covers it. You've done a good job and I think you should feel free to move on to lesson 2.

Next Steps:

Add this exercise to your pool of warm ups and move on to lesson 2.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
2:05 AM, Wednesday May 31st 2023

Oh my god Dio thank you so much. I cannot tell you how long I’ve been biting my nails hoping I didn’t get told to draw 50 more boxes. Thank you for your thorough examination and clear and concise explanations and critiques!

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.

Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.

These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.

We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.

Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.