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

Things you did well:

• It's nice to see that you tried to experiment with orientations and proportions. Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning new skills and helps form a more well rounded understanding overall. I hope that you'll continue to nurture this habit when tackling any new skill pursuit.

Things you can work on:

• You have some noticeable wobbling occuring in your lines. Remember that line confidence is our top priority and that accuracy will improve as we continue to build up more mileage.

• Your hatching lines could be tidier. Just like any other line we want to take our time planning them using the ghosting method, space them evenly and draw them confidently.

• 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.

• 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.

• One area where it's important to experiment is rates of foreshortening. You kept a similar rate throughout the challenge by keeping your vanishing points far from your boxes and tried to keep your lines quite parallel. Be sure to experiment by brining your vanishing points in closer to create more dramatic convergences.

• Nearyly every box in your submission has at least one set of lines extended in the wrong direction. This leads to you extending your lines in the wrong direction and your boxes becoming distorted because your lines are actually diverging from where the vanishing point would actually be. Here's a guide I wrote that will hopefully help you place your vanishing points and line extensions more consistently. If you'd like some more examples of what incorrect and correct extensions look like you may find this demonstration helpful.

• 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.

As you can see this critique heavily weighed more towards negative issues than things you did well and I did have a bit of a difficult time deciding how it should be handled. The reason it's a bit trickier to handle than the usual critique is you mention getting off paternity leave recently meaning that whether you just had your first child or another addition to your family, you have one of the very limited excuses that are actually an understandable reason for your work to not be up to par. Juggling family life and work can be difficult enough on it's own, adding a baby and trying to learn a brand new skill on top of that must be exhausting.

I'll be honest, without that being mentioned I would have asked for a total redo of the challenge (which would have cost another credit since it would basically be a totally new critique). You're currently not getting what you need out of the challenge because too many instructions and concepts are being glossed over rather than being given the time they need.

Of course I can't and shouldn't assume what life and your schedule are like at the moment but I talked with Uncomfortable and decided that I'll be making an exception and not asking for a total redo this time around. Now, I can't move you on to the next set of course material because that will just create more issues on top of already present issues leading to more frustration for everyone involved.

Instead I'll be asking you to draw 100 more boxes but I do want to clarify a few things as well.

Your ability to get critique on revisions does not expire, meaning that if you only have a very limited amount of free time at the moment it's totally understandable if you decide to take a break and handle home life for now, we completely understand. It's also possible that maybe just drawing for fun until you have a bit more wiggle room is preferred as well.

Ultimately it's up to you, again I can't know for certain what's going on but this hopefully lets you decide what's best for you at the moment. If you feel like you can make time, (even if it means just drawing 1 or 2 really well done boxes a day) then put in your best effort because I know you can do better than this.

I should also clarify that this isn't me trying to talk you out of doing the course, I just don't want you to feel pressured to submit revisions on top of everything else. I hope that at some point I'll get a notification that you've handed in revisions whether it's a few weeks or months from now.

I look forward to seeing your work and wish you and your family all the best.