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3:57 PM, Thursday June 25th 2020
Howdy, TA qzhans here!
Before we begin, I just want to congratulate you on giving those 250 boxes a good ol’ pen and ink smackdown. It is a MASSIVE undertaking and you’ve joined the prestiged club of its completers.
You’ve painstakingly drawn through all your boxes and extended every single last line out to check your errors, and your boxes have been better for it. Indeed, you’ve made a marked improvement throughout the set in terms of your understanding of convergence.
The main issue that concerns me here is your line quality. I'm seeing a lot of re-drawn and patched up lines, despite the majority of your linework being fairly straight and accurate. I thought that this may have been some lineweight gone awry, but a lot of the times, you're thickening lines on the invisible, back end of the box, instead of the visible silhouette. Remember that all lines we put down are law, and laying down more lines to fix something will only create more contradictions and draw eyes to a mistake. Attempt each line only once, and then work around it if it was a little flawed.
Also, although you've done a pretty good job with convergences, some of your middle back lines are still stubbornly not jumping in line with the rest of them. That’s okay, and is something that gets ironed out over time, but I’ll offer some advice. When you go to draw a line, think only about the lines that are supposed to be parallel to it (share a vanishing point). Lines closer to an existing line will converge slower, while the opposite is true for lines further away.
A few that you didn't do could help you when practicing convergence. First, it'd be a good idea to draw your boxes bigger; I'd say 6 is the maximum amount of boxes you should be fitting on a page. This actually helps get more accurate boxes because your margin of error increases by a lot. Second, you should also extend your error lines out 2-3 times the original line length, crashing into other boxes if need be. Finally, it'd be good to try out less isometric boxes first, and try ones with noticeable convergence first, as these are little easier to verify visually that they're converging.
Overall, I think the skill is here, but the mindset could be dangerous if I let you go on, especially in terms of linework. Thus, I'd like to see 10 more boxes from you before I let you move on.
Next Steps:
10 boxes, focusing on confident linework and more variety in sizes and convergence.
8:14 AM, Friday June 26th 2020
Thank you for the critique! Here are 10 boxes. Tried to focus on the lines. Funny how thinking too much about the lines makes it harder for me to draw them straight!
8:15 AM, Friday June 26th 2020
forgot to add the link: https://imgur.com/gallery/mMlyO8Z
4:34 PM, Friday June 26th 2020
Hey, the convergences are looking a lot better here! Your lines are a lot cleaner as well. However, I'm still seeing some pretty inconsistent line weight, with some lines being reinforced and others not. I won't assign extra boxes, but please check here when you do boxes for warm-ups in the future. But regardless, you are now clear to go onto Lesson 2! Good luck!
Next Steps:
Lesson 2
PureRef
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.