250 Box Challenge

6:04 PM, Thursday June 22nd 2023

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Sometimes I add the broken lines for correction in terms of how I would have laid out that line

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8:32 PM, Friday June 23rd 2023

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

Not only does the challenge help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. That being said I'll try to keep this critique fairly brief so you can get working on the next steps as soon as possible.

Things you did well:

  • Good work drawing your construction lines confidently, this keeps your lines smooth and prevents wobbling.

  • When hatching you're taking the time to space each line evenly which shows that care and thought is being put into each line. This helps your boxes appear solid and tidy rather than rushed.

  • You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, and proportions. Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding. I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.

Things you can work on:

  • 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 mistakes you've made more clearly.

  • 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.

  • I'd like you to experiment with rates of foreshortening more. Currently you tend to keep your lines close to parallel and push your vanishing points far from your boxes. Try bringing your points in closer so that your lines have to converge more dramatically. Remember that experimentation is important.

  • 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.

The key things we want to remember from this exercise are that our lines should always converge as a set not in pairs, never diverge from the vanishing point and due to perspective they won't be completely parallel.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you end up just creating further issues on top of them.

I'll be asking you to draw 30 more boxes. For the first 15 I'd like you to draw all 3 of your vanishing points explicitly on the page after you've drawn your initial Y shape, this will force you to work with vanishing points closer to your box. For the latter 15 you can go back to the original method which should hopefully be easier an easier task after the first 15.

Once you've completed your boxes reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready I'll move you on to the next lesson.

I know you can do this and look forward to seeing your work.

Next Steps:

30 more boxes please.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:23 AM, Thursday July 6th 2023

Hi there,

Here are the 30+ boxes , I did extra because I wasn't happy with how some of the other boxes came out so I did 36 boxes overall. I took 2 photos of each page - one without the lines just for clean presentation, and the other with lines

https://imgur.com/a/xr0Rr0M

3:41 PM, Thursday July 6th 2023

These look solid but you've misunderstood the instructions a bit. In the future be sure to follow instructions or ask for clarification if you feel they aren't clear enough.

These boxes aren't meant to all be in the same 3D space. You should draw your starting Y shape, then draw all 3 of that box's vanishing points. Then complete the rest of the box with those in mind. Then for the final half of the boxes you'd go back to the challenge's original instructions where you wouldn't use explicit vanishing points.

That being said because these look solid I'll be marking your submission complete and just advise that you practice a bit more in your warmups.

Keep practicing boxes and previous exercises in your warmups and best of luck in lesson 2.

Next Steps:

Move on to lesson 2.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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