Since the course as a whole explores the constructional aspects of approaching these drawings, I like to focus my time in providing feedback on the chest challenge primarily on design, as it's a good way to give students a springboard into producing their own stuff, and how to go about thinking about the design choices they make along the way. I did note that it seems most of your detailed chests here appear to be more direct studies of existing designs - I think that is at least partly to blame on the lesson material not being entirely clear on that front (we talk about using lots of references to inform our decisions, and using references in the creation of designs, but never explicitly state that they should be your own designs so I've updated the text to reflect that). That said, I think you still did get a lot of benefit from these studies, and likely found that your visual library for this particular category of objects has been developed a great deal for your trouble.

All the same, I'll still be talking about how to think about the elements of these designs and the considerations that drive our design decisions, as well as considerations as to how we go about representing and conveying these elements, so you're equipped to explore that more on your own.

The first thing I wanted to talk about is thickness. One of the most important things I've found when it comes to piecing a design together is respecting the thickness of the individual components that make up the whole. A whole design can be very overwhelming, and so we tend to think about the big picture of the item as a whole. This is generally a good thing - after all, throughout this course we talk a lot about starting big and simple and working down to small and complex - but when it comes to design, we also want to give ourselves room to think about the individual pieces that make up the whole, and how they fit together.

A common mistake - one that you did not make here, although I'm still stressing this point because this may simply be because the designs you worked off had already solved this problem for you - is to forget that these individual pieces do have their own thickness, and thus can't simply be pasted onto the existing structure like stickers. Not only would this result in them not being entirely believable, and thus undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief, but it can also result in logical gaps where the closer one looks, the less a design makes sense (because once you start giving elements their due thickness, they no longer fit together as the artist intended).

Actually, while I say that this issue didn't come up in your work, I'm not entirely correct on that. It did come up in this one, which does make a certain amount of sense - your reference image here was fairly low resolution and being covered in growths and such, you had to make more design decisions yourself. So, you opted to represent the back edges with a single edge as we see here, which caused it to appear more paper-thin.

I did want to call out a few constructions where you filled in the side planes of such structures with black, instead of leaving them empty. So for example, cases like this and this, as opposed to how you approached this one or this one. Now this is technically more dependent on the restrictions with which we're working - for example, when we work with fineliner, we're stuck with stark black and stark white, and nothing in between (and for the most part you held to this kind of dynamic in the ones you did digitally).

This means we do have to be more discerning in where we choose to use filled areas of solid black - it's a limited resource, and if we use it for many different things, that can undermine how clearly the object itself reads to the viewer. So for example, if we use it for both cast shadows and form shading, then the viewer will have to take an extra moment to consider, "is this filled shape I'm looking at a cast shadow, or the side plane of another form?" (this is a good example of this conundrum) - and while that may only add a few milliseconds, they count. You want the viewer to understand what they're looking at as quickly as possible.

Not all such elements are equal, either. For example, when we fill in the side planes of a structure with black (which is how you approached the side planes which provided the brackets/frame with thickness in the examples in question), the viewer is more likely to first interpret them as being entirely separate shapes - one representing a single plane of one form, and then a second black shape that could very well be its own thing. This leaves the impression that, once again, the structure is paper-thin, while their subconscious sorts through what the black shape is meant to represent. First impressions (or in the context of design, "first reads") have a lot of influence on how one interprets a given design).

Conversely, cast shadows (which the brain is already predisposed to expect, since shading tends to be less harsh and contrast-heavy) convey spatial relationships through how they're shaped - that is to say, they tell us about the relationship between the form casting them and the surface receiving them, which in turn can make the object feel more solid and three dimensional - so, when working within these restrictions, I would definitely stick to that. But of course, it's all about what kinds of visual elements you have at your disposal - if you're working with a wider range of values, then that changes things.

Additionally, while hatching is technically an option, it does introduce other considerations. Hatching creates a lot of visual complexity and detail density (in the sense that there's a lot of white/black juxtaposed together all concentrated within the same space), and that contrast draws the viewer's eye - and that isn't always what you're going to want. A successful design is one that balances areas of interest (high contrast, high detail density) with areas of rest (less detail, less going on, somewhere the eye can take a break), and that guides the viewer's eye through the design in exactly the same way composition allows us to control how the viewer experiences an illustration. But when you present the viewer with an area of interest, an area of detail, you're making a pact with them - that for the expense of them moving their gaze to that spot, you're going to give them something worth looking at. If all they get is boring hatching lines, that's not really keeping up your end of the bargain.

So for example, this one's side planes are extremely visually dense and make it almost impossible to look at anything else - but they don't give us new information. Conversely, a lot of the detail packed into this one - especially the scales along the tongue - reward us for playing along and letting your eyes be guided by the design. This one is an example of a bit of a mix of the two - the heavy use of linework on both the gums and the side planes of the box doesn't break the design or undermine the read, but it still may result in the viewer's eyes drifting to an area where they're not really going to be getting that much out of it.

When it comes to controlling detail density, the implicit markmaking we introduced back in Lesson 2- where the marks we draw are the shadows cast by textural forms that are not drawn comes heavily into play. This allows us to transition smoothly in and out of areas of high detail density - whereas one of the issues you're encountering here is that once you choose a level of detail density, you're pretty much locked into that up until the edges of the shape you're filling.

This kind of approach, which requires us to think about the nature of the textural forms that are present also tends to result in areas of detail that are simply better informed. Yes, we certainly can go ham on the aesthetic side of things (which I think you did with that mimic's gums and such), and there is merit there - but I do think that the way you approached the texture of the wood boards on this chest (which were more directly informed by you thinking, if even just a little bit, about the individual planks of wood involved) provided a more believable result,

Now all of this so far has been focusing on how we convey our details, but how exactly do we decide on which details to ask? Well that is something we achieve by asking ourselves questions. There are the big questions like, "who made this object," "who was it made for," "what kind of technology does the world that produced this have access to," then there are the more intricate questions of "what of that technology would the creator/recipient of this thing be able to afford to have used," - and then the nitty-gritty of "how do the various components used in its creation actually hold together?"

These are questions that, when working directly from available reference, we don't have to answer - we simply look at what's in front of us and copy it to the best of our ability. But by considering these questions on top of even a single existing piece of reference, we can get a lot more out of it. For instance, this is one of y our references, and it's a pretty common type of little novelty chest you'll find at stores. Hell, I have more than a couple I've purchased from the dollar store myself. But here's the thing - the way in which they're designed is focused primarily on how to create something that seems interesting, but that can be produced at scale for cheap. These chests are not made for characters in a world, it's made for someone who wants somewhere to store some knickknacks on a shelf in their home.

This drives a lot of the decisions in its design - for example, the primary answer to that last question, "how do the various components used in this creation actually hold together" is regular old glue. The boards set up along the edges of the structure - which would in a normal chest be made of iron or leather and secured to boards they hold together with rivets, but that's not actually a concern here because the elements that are intended to give the appearance of such brackets aren't serving that purpose. This is purely decorative, and so it was made with that in mind. Only the pieces that actually serve a function - like the clasp that allows it to hold itself closed - use actual screws.

Asking ourselves questions about who made this, who's it for, how old is it, etc. allows us to make design decisions that take an object from merely being decorative - something cool to look at - to actually helping elevate the narrative of an illustration, or develop the world of a video game. Not everything requires this depth of thinking, always starting from the purpose a given object is meant to serve will help us avoid mismatches between the role it plays in something larger, and the choices made in its creation.

Anyway! Hopefully I've given you something to think about, and a path forward to continue exploring how you might approach design in the future. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.