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2:06 AM, Wednesday May 18th 2022

Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.

Congratulations on completing the box challenge, it's definitely a lot more work than most people expect. Not only does it help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. Be proud of what you've accomplished and that desire you've shown. That being said I'll try to keep this critique fairly brief so you can get working on the next steps as soon as possible.

Things you did well:

  • You're doing a good job of drawing the lines constructing your boxes smoothly and confidently.

  • It's nice to see that you're taking the time to plan each of your hatching lines and space them evenly. This helps keep your boxes looking tidy rather than looking like they were rushed on to the page.

  • You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening. Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding. I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.

Things you can work on:

  • Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge but I do recommend practicing it in your future attempts. It's an incredibly useful tool but one that people often require a fair bit of mileage before they feel comfortable applying it. The sooner you start to build up that mileage the sooner you'll see better results.

  • There are times when your lines converge in pairs or you attempt to keep your lines a bit too parallel which results in them diverging. 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.

The key things we want to remember from this exercise are that our lines should always converge as a set not in pairs, never diverge from the vanishing point and due to perspective they won't be completely parallel.

To answer your question the simple answer is practice but the more complicated one is that the rear corner lines will nearly always be off and while you should try to make them accurate you shouldn't let them stress you too much. The reason they'll nearly always be off is that they're the last ones we tend to create and they amplify any mistakes we've made up to that point, meaning that if any other line is off they will be as well. Ultimately the goal of the challenge isn't to create perfect boxes (we have tools like rulers and digital tools to help with that), it's to develop our understanding of 3D space which you've done a good job of so far. Just remember to try your best, and remember the tips mentioned above (think of your lines as a set rather than pairs, remember they should always converge at least a bit etc.).

Overall while you did make a few mistakes your boxes are improving so far and with more mileage you'll continue to become more consistent. That being said I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to lesson 2.

Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck.

Next Steps:

Move on to lesson 2.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:49 AM, Wednesday May 18th 2022

Ohhhhh that was so fast! Thank you very much for the in-depth feedback. I‘ll try my best to keep what you said in mind. I initially tried to use line weight but didn‘t see any other way than drawing some edges twice which often resulted in lines that were slightly off and made everything look messy. Is that the right way to approach line weight in this exercise and it also just takes practice to get right? I would usually think that pen pressure might be a solution but given the drawing medium and requirements of drawabox the effects that can be achieved with this are rather minimal. Is there something I am missing?

Either way, thank you very much. These critiques really help a lot.

5:58 PM, Wednesday May 18th 2022

No problem.

You're not missing anything.

When applying line weight we recommend adding an additional line, in the beginning you'll likely not be very accurate but with more mileage you'll get become more accurate (exercises like the super imposed lines exercise from lesson 1 help as well so be sure to rotate it into your warm ups from time to time).

If your line weight line isn't accurate don't keep adding more to try and correct it, that will actually just create a mess and not correct the mistake anyways.

Best of luck.

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Sakura Pigma Microns

A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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