Hello!
This is my 250 Box Challenge. Thank you for taking a look at it, I would be appreciative of any critique or feedback you have to offer! The posted link is to an imgur album containing all of the pages of images, totaling 40. The first 21 were done on printer paper, with the last 19 being one in a sketchbook as I ran out of printer paper. Have a lovely day, be well!
Cheers and best, Will :)
PS. I am a little confused,
Congratulations for completing the 250 box challenge!! Really nice work! I can see you put a lot of effort in this and it shows in how much you’ve improved. You’ve improved a bunch, and you’ll only continue to improve with more mileage, with that said here are some things that I noticed:
Convergences:
To start, from the start your convergences are already pretty good, though I can see that you had some trouble with your inner corner convergences. They got better though towards the end. Elodin made this demo which might help. Here you draw the inner corner first before completing the outline. Personally I found this method useful as it helped me to better picture and think of the relationships that one of the of the 3 sets of 4 parallel lines will have, instead of fusing over each line individually trying to make them conform to their set (to the other lines they’re parallel to). There’s no one correct method btw, at the end of the day just do what works best for you.
Line work:
In some of your boxes I noticed that you sometimes do 3 passes for your lines. The first line being the “original” line and the second for line weight. Now because you only occasionally added that 3rd line I’ll assume that it isn’t for line weight (plus you’re only supposed to go through it once for line weight) and it could be that you sometimes try to correct a wrong line. I’ve also looked through your Lesson 1 and saw that you had this bad habit as pointed out by Elodin, so I’ll assume that this is the case.
To combat this make sure that you ghost through your marks, thinking and planning them out before each and every stroke. Forcing yourself to think in this manner is necessary as it helps you draw with a greater sense of purpose and intent. Your first 10 boxes for example only two of them have those extra “correction lines” (4 and 8), which tells me that you are doing this, but do it more consistently.
Be patient, ghost as much as you need to. If you feel that you’re starting to lose focus take a quick breather, just pause for a minute then resume again. Don’t try to finish more than you can handle in a session such that your line work begins to suffer as a result of it.
Line weight:
Line weight is optional for this challenge and it’s cool that you decided to experiment with it. Compared to how you started out, again I can see some clear improvement. You’ll definitely do better with more practice. Some stuff that I noticed though:
Your accuracy in putting in line weight has definitely improved but they still have that slight wobble.
• When adding line weight especially, make sure that you are rotating the page to an angle that is most natural and comfortable to you.
• Make sure to be patient and ghost as much as you need to. The lines you add for line weight should be drawn with the same amount of effort and forethought that you gave to your first ones.
Another thing when drawing your lines I feel like you tend to slow down at the end, which may be part of the reason for the wobbliness at times. Instead lift your pen at the end. Especially when you do hatching there a those little stop marks at the end of your lines. And even if you put down a wrong line, draw it with as much confidence as if it were correct and finish it. You sometimes don’t continue some of your lines.
Another another thing.. When you do boxes for your warm-ups, vary the angles more. Here's a diagram and here's a 3D model which will help you get a better idea of the various angles a box can have. I also recommend looking into advanced exercises, so you can keep challenging yourself.
Yeah that’s it oh yeah! Nice work, plus I can see anyway that you more or less already have a good grasp of what your mistakes are and are working to correct them. This is the first time I critiqued someone btw hehe.
Good luck with lesson 2!
Next Steps:
Keep doing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups.
When doing your boxes I recommend you do more that have shallow foreshortening, as many of the boxes that you did have dramatic foreshortening.
Consider doing Lesson 1 and 250 box Challenge critiques. If you decide to do this you will: (1) learn a bunch, (2) Help some people, and (3) get faster critiques in the future by reducing the amount of current submissions that people who do critiques first have to finish before reaching your work.
Move on to lesson 2!
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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