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10:15 PM, Sunday October 4th 2020

Congratulations on completing the 250 Box Challenge!

You did a pretty good job on the challenge overall. When I compare your early pages with your final sets I can see that you do a better job of making your mark making smoother and more confident looking overall. You have a good variety of foreshortening to your boxes and I can see that you made some efforts towards trying to add extra line weight to your boxes. You also do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!

One thing I notice about your mark making is that, while you have improved quite a bit, you are still hesitating. This is likely due to prioritizing your accuracy over creating a rich, confident mark. Just remember that the confidence of the stroke is far and away your top priority. Accuracy is something that you will improve on as you continue working through Drawabox and practice ghosting. While it is important that you use the ghosting method of each mark you make while doing Drawabox one thing you can try to help with ending your marks closer to where you want them is lifting the pen off of the page rather than stopping the motion of your arm.

I would also encourage you to continue practicing adding extra line weight to your boxes, as shown here. When you go to add weight to a line it is important that you treat the added weight the same way you would a brand new line. That means taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute it the mark blends seamlessly with your previous mark. This will allow you to build and create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines. This is something that you will improve with consistent practice, so make sure that you include this step in your regular warm ups.

Finally while your convergences do improve overall I think this diagram will help you further develop that skill as you continue through Drawabox. So, when you are looking at your sets of lines you want to be focusing only on the lines that share a vanishing point. This does not include lines that share a corner or a plane, only lines that converge towards the same vanishing point. Now when you think of those lines, including those that have not been drawn, you can think about the angles from which they leave the vanishing point. Usually the middle lines have a small angle between them, and this angle will become negligible by the time they reach the box. This can serve as a useful hint.

Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!

Next Steps:

Continue to lesson 2!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:37 AM, Monday October 5th 2020

Thanks!, I'll keep practicing.

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Sakura Pigma Microns

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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