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8:58 PM, Saturday February 26th 2022
Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
Not only does the challenge help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. 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:
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When hatching you're taking the time to space each line evenly which shows that care and thought is being put into each line. This helps your boxes appear solid and tidy rather than rushed.
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You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, and proportions. 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:
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One thing you need to work on is your line confidence, currently your lines have some noticeable wobbling occuring. This is likely caused from hesitation while trying to keep your lines accurate. Remember that line confidence is our top priority and that line accuracy will improve as you continue to build up mileage.
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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.
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You tend to draw fairly small, I'd like you to draw larger in the future. Drawing large will help you become more comfortable working from the shoulder and allow you to see any misakes you've made more clearly.
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I'd like you to experiment with rates of foreshortening. Currently you're trying to keep your lines parallel rather than having a clear vanishing point in mind that your lines should converge towards. Try bringing your vanishing points in closer so they converge more consistently and so you can get some experience working with a more dramatic rate of foreshortening. Remember that experimenting is important.
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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.
I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you end up just creating further issues on top of them.
I'd like you to draw 30 more boxes please. I want you to focus on experimenting with rates of foreshortening as well as drawing confidently. While your confidence does improve by the end of the challenge there's still room to improve. Take your time, you may find it helpful to watch the video on the box challenge page again or to watch ScyllaStew's videos found here, she recorded herself working through some of the early course material.
Once you've completed your boxes reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready I'll move you on to the next lesson.
I know you can do this and look forward to seeing your work.
Next Steps:
30 more boxes please.
12:04 AM, Saturday April 30th 2022
Sorry for the time gap. I did another 60 boxes before these to try to shake off the rust.
7:53 PM, Monday May 2nd 2022
Alrighty, so I'm going to jump in here to take over from Tofu. There's a couple things that I need to emphasize, which I believe are very important.
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Firstly, it's important that you avoid doing "extra" work. I totally get where you're coming from on it, but it really just means that the student is gonna sit there, potentially repeating their mistakes - and so if you then go on to submit what was asked afterwards, only to have issues pointed out and further revisions required, it only gets more frustrating. This is important enough that I really stress it in the updated Lesson 0 video on how to use the course, which you should watch if you haven't yet had the chance. So, I cannot stress this enough: do not do "practice" work, or deviate at all from the instructions provided to you in the feedback you receive either from TAs or from me.
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Secondly, from what I can see here, it does not appear that you're necessarily employing the ghosting method for your linework - or at the very least, you may be intending to employ it, but not are doing so correctly. The signs that point to this include the tendency to have wobbly lines, the tendency to have lines broken up into separate segments, and the absence of the start/end points being marked out prior to you executing your mark. The ghosting method, as explained here, consists of three distinct phases. We first plan our mark out, deciding what exactly we want this mark to do, and asking ourselves questions about it, like how can we approach this mark so we can execute it to the best of our current ability, rotating the page as needed, and checking if any other marks already accomplish the same task. Then we prepare, ghosting through the motion to develop more confidence with the motion required. And finally, we execute the stroke with confidence, free from any and all hesitation, focusing only on achieving a smooth, consistent park. It is normal to worry about accuracy, and this is a common source of hesitation - but as discussed back in Lesson 1, your primary goal is to achieve a smooth, consistent trajectory. In order to commit to this, you must accept that the second your pen touches the page, you have no option but to push through.
Now, looking at your work, I can see that you did make some attempts to address the points about having your lines converge more, and incorporating more variation in your rates of foreshortening, but you have a tendency to focus most of that convergence on one set of lines. The others tend to still remain fairly parallel, or even diverge from one another. This tells me that you're not necessarily thinking about how each mark needs to be oriented, relative to the other lines of its same set, so that they converge consistently. You may be doing this for some, but you're still pretty lax on the others.
Whenever we draw an edge for our box, once the initial Y has been established, we have to think about all 4 edges that are governed by the same vanishing point. Some of them will have been drawn, some of them will yet to be drawn. Those that have been drawn are solidified and unchanging - but you can think of those that are yet to be drawn as though they're free-spinning, giving you the opportunity to orient them all in such a way as to consider how they ought to converge together.
The ghosting method itself gives us additional tools to work through this kind of complex, multi-faceted planning as well, as you can see here in this video by ScyllaStew, where she puts points down for multiple lines in order to gauge how they're coming together, before deciding on a specific location for a corner.
I am going to ask you to do an additional 20 boxes, primarily to ensure that you understand and employ the ghosting method correctly, and it'll also be a good opportunity for you to apply what I've said here about working on achieving more consistent convergences for all your sets of lines. Keep in mind that we're not looking for perfection, but you should be able to at least avoid sets of lines that altogether diverge instead of converging.
And of course, given that you're being asked for 20 boxes, 20 boxes are all that you should do. No attempts that you do not submit, and no attempts that you scratch out. As soon as you start, you need to commit and see it through. Otherwise you'd just be encouraging your brain to rush more by not having those mistakes "count".
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Staedtler Pigment Liners
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).