Hello Pixelbusterx9, I’ll be reviewing your 250 Box Challenge today.

First off, congratulations on completing the first hurdle of Drawabox. It’s definitely a long marathon, but the quality of work between the start and end pages really demonstrates overall improvement. Now let’s begin with the critique.

Before I continue with the specifics, I’ve noticed your tendency to abandon 1-3 box attempts every other page. Remember from Lesson 0 that as a student, your sole responsibility is to follow the instructions to the best of your ability. There’s no expectation for the submission to look good or even decent. Try to resist the temptation to restart anew at every major or minor mistake. I’ll link the Lesson 0 video here so you can review how we should approach lesson homework.

Things you did well:

• Clear experimentation of box size, foreshortening, and orientation. This is a positive habit to carry forward and helps progress our spatial reasoning.

Things you could improve on:

• Shallow boxes come into issues with 2-3 sets of lines being parallel, ex.) Box 79, 142, 188. Resulting in divergence towards the vanishing point. Here's an example displaying how the lines diverge the more we lengthen those parallel lines. Whether it's gradual or quick, all lines should converge. It may be difficult to judge gradual convergence on shallow boxes, but we want to be aware of angles when estimating to ensure lines aren't parallel.

• Hatching overall looked a bit wobbly, it’s probably the most apparent on Box 220 when you’re tasked to draw over a larger area. It seems to be a symptom of choosing accuracy over confidence. I suggest looking back on the principles of mark-making in Lesson 1 where it’s established that smooth lines above all else is our main priority. It’s okay to sacrifice some accuracy by overshooting or undershooting your line as long as it’s smooth.

• Construction Lines & Line Weight; There is some improvement in line quality towards the end but I can sense some lingering hesitancy is still at play. Take your time with the execution to focus on confident lines.

• The line extensions on boxes were drawn in the wrong direction pretty frequently. Particularly on 1 set of boxes orientated above the viewer, ex.) Box 82, 123, 154. This might be partly due to the accidental inclusion of 2 point perspective. As we’re using 3 vanishing points to check against, we should try to only apply a 3 point perspective approach to avoid confusion. In the future, try to review the instructions consistently as you progress through the lessons in order to catch these mistakes from slipping through the cracks. Line extensions will always start from the initial Y from the center of the box. I’ve done an example here on Box 154 to demonstrate.

Incorrect line extensions can diminish how we’re able to gradually improve our spatial reasoning skills from error checking. I’ll need 20 additional boxes before you move on to Lesson 2 to ensure you’ve understood the core principles mentioned in this critique.