This is not an actual critique for this lesson and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/a/94KWWMx

Hey there ".....". You aren't the first person to get mad at this challenge and you won't be the last, haha! All good. Let's get to it.

So your mindset definitely seems to have changed by the end of this challenge, as indicated by your lines and general approach. There is a lot less rushing at the end made apparent by things like your hatching and overall line quality. You did improve a lot in terms of understanding convergences and such, even if it doesn't feel like it. Your boxes on a string were nice and a good challenge and turned out relatively well. (The trick to these is that all the boxes share a horizon, so all their different vps (well, 2 out of 3) should lie on that shared horizon, but I won't belabor that right now unless you want to know more).

So like I said, you made a lot of growth. Your boxes feel more solid and you definitely have a better intuition now. There's a lot less skewing of the back lines and what you do have is more manageable. So regarding back lines, and overall converging lines, uncomfortable has made this infographic https://imgur.com/8PqQLE0. The main take away of this is that we must change how we look at parallel lines in perspective. Often times we focus too much on individual lines and not enough on them as the ensemble they are. They are all related to one another via the vanishing point and when that moves, the angles between the lines change. This means whenever drawing a line you must take into account all the other parallel lines. You did a good job of this so I won't belabor the point, but if you have any questions about this let me know. Overall though you did a nice job. You followed instructions and made it through. Your mindset changed, which is an important thing we hope to see in our students.

So with this, your time in the box mines is complete and the challenge will be marked as such. Congratulations! In your warm ups don't neglect box practice even though the next few lessons are very organic - you don't want to be rusty come lesson 6.

This is not an actual critique for this lesson and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/a/3C7eRiJ

It certainly is a difficult challenge that tests one's patience, endurance, and their ability to pace themselves. I find that along drilling the development of one's spatial reasoning skills, and their ability to think in three dimensions while drawing on two dimensional paper, it also helps to serve as a filter for those who are ready for the kind of work that follows.

All things considered, you've done a great job overall. The key thing I look for - and which I feel you demonstrate a great deal - is that students end up learning to think more in terms of the convergences of their sets of parallel lines. When drawing a line, we always do so in relation to others, so it's easy to think in relation to the lines with which our mark shares a corner, or those with which it shares a plane - but the key is that we really only need think of the lines with which the mark shares a vanishing point, and to focus entirely on keeping those convergences as consistent as possible.

Now, while you're still not 100% there (and you're not expected to perfect it), you're showing quite clearly that you are largely thinking about how those lines converge, and as you progress through the challenge you've shifted more and more to thinking in this way.

There are of course outliers - like 248's red lines where that far back edge ended up flying way off, but there's a way to avoid this kind of problem. As explained here, we can think about the angles at which our 4 lines leave a given vanishing point. The middle ones will often have a fairly small angle between them, and by the time they reach the box itself, this angle can become so insignificant that the edges can run roughly parallel to one another - or fairly close to it. Considering these relationships can help us avoid situations where we end up with such sharp turns that result in the convergence of two lines coming far earlier than the others in the set.

Anyway! All in all, you're doing a great job and have shown a lot of growth over the course of this set. I'll happily go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Keep up the good work.

Lots of advice to learn from :https://drawabox.com/community/submission/7ZH9YLF

Credit to Uncomfortable himself.

This is not an actual critique for this lesson and should be used purely for reference only

Source: https://imgur.com/a/7u4FjGi

https://imgur.com/a/7u4FjGi

https://imgur.com/a/apKKuBY

https://imgur.com/a/GKzgcdi

Alrighty! So to start, congratulations on completing the challenge. It's clear that you were very thorough in adding your extension lines to all of your boxes, and that you put a great deal of effort into this challenge. It's also quite clear that it was a considerable challenge, and that there was a lot of struggling involved, so I commend you for that.

There are a handful of things I want to point out that caught my eye, and that I feel will help you when practicing this kind of exercise in the future.

First and foremost, the key to this exercise is simple (at least conceptually, though notoriously difficult in practice): All that matters is that we focus on how our boxes are made up of 3 individual sets of 4 parallel lines each, and that our goal is to get the lines of each set to converge as closely to a single vanishing point as we can. Any problem you may encounter - for example, the notorious "back corner" being out of whack - is a symptom, and the problem is always going to be inconsistent convergences towards shared vanishing points. It can be easy to get distracted by these symptoms, attempting to address them more directly (if the back corner keeps coming out wrong, focus on fixing the back corner) - but this merely takes attention away from the actual cause and makes that symptom worse.

When we go to draw a line, we generally do so in relation to other lines present in our drawing. It's easy to get distracted, thinking about the lines that'll share a corner with the one we're drawing, or that'll share a face, etc. Instead, when drawing a line, there are only 4 lines you need to be aware of:

• The line you're drawing

• The other 3 lines with whom it shares a vanishing point

To put it simply, you're only thinking of one set of lines at a time, and no others. This includes the lines that may not yet have been drawn - they're still fluid, and their orientation can be changed up until they themselves are drawn, so you're going to be dealing with some lines that cannot be changed, the line you're drawing now, and the lines that have not yet been drawn - all of which belong to a single group of 4.

When thinking about these lines, we need to think about how to orient them so they converge consistently towards a single vanishing point. At the same time, we can consider the angles between those lines as they leave the vanishing point itself as explained here. Often you'll find that the two middle members of a given set will have a very small angle between them, and this can frequently mean that by the time they reach the box itself, they may as well be running parallel to one another. This gives a useful clue to avoid unnecessary guesswork - so in those cases, you can draw the two middle lines as being parallel on the page, and then focus on getting the outer two lines of the set and how they ought to be oriented to converge more consistently towards the single vanishing point.

Now, to that point, I noticed that with the boxes where you were using very shallow foreshortening, it looked to me like instead of thinking about actual vanishing points, you seemed to just be focusing on keeping them all parallel in 2D space. This is not correct - instead, even if the vanishing point is really, really far away, you need to be thinking about it as a concrete point in space to which all of these lines are pointing.

Related to this, as you pushed on later into your set, I noticed more and more that you were extending your lines in the wrong direction. This makes any analysis of such extensions largely useless - because the point is to study how those lines behave as they recede in space, and whether or not they converge in a consistent manner. Studying how those lines diverge doesn't tell us much of anything.

There are some cases, like box 222, where all three sets of extensions appear to be extended in the wrong direction, but due to how we're drawing through all of our boxes, it's unclear which side is which. They could be extended correctly, but in which case the box itself would have been drawn incorrectly (with the far plane being larger than the near plane). Giving the benefit of the doubt here, my eyes tell me that the box was more correct, and it was merely the extensions that were off. Adding tight hatching to one of the front-facing faces as shown in the bottom right of this diagram helps clarify which side is which.

Then you've got boxes like 224, where some of the extensions are incorrect. Here either the red and green lines are extended correctly, but the blue aren't - or vice versa.

All in all, there are a number of things to keep in mind here when practicing freely rotated boxes in the future - and I strongly recommend that you integrate them into your regular warmup routine, making a greater point to always think about concrete vanishing points, and avoid just trying to draw your lines to be parallel in 2D space, as well as in 3D.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete, and leave it to you to continue applying what I've outlined here.