Hey there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
Unfortunately your pdf is too large for me to view through your link. If you can reduce the file size so it's visible or upload the images separately to a Google Doc folder or imgur etc. I'll take a look at them as soon as I can just reply to this comment with a corrected link.
Thanks, I look forward to seeing your work.
Next Steps:
Reply with a corrected link please.
Sorry about that! Noted for next time. Here's a smaller file. It's ~20mb.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g_7JInibz-ElU_YaiQl93aZs0d9c3ZFf/view?usp=sharing
Let me know if that's still too large for you.
This works, thanks.
Congratulations on completing the box challenge, it's definitely a lot more work than most people expect. Not only does it help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. Be proud of what you've accomplished and that desire you've shown. 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:
Your construction lines are mostly looking smooth and confidently drawn. There is the occasional wobbly line so just remember that confidence is our top priority and accuracy will improve with mileage.
Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge so it's nice to see you're applying it anyways. Most people need to build up some mileage before they feel comfortable applying it so I always recommend starting early. The sooner you feel comfortable the sooner you see better results. One thing to remember when applying it is that you want it to be subtle, one extra line is all you need (you get a bit heavy handed at times).
You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening. 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 misakes you've made more clearly.
When hatching you want to have both ends of the lines touching an edge of the form they're being drawn on rather than being left floating. Usually when left floating like this it's caused by people hesitating while worrying about accuracy. Remember to take your time to space each line with the ghosting method, and then draw them confidently just like any other line, accuracy will improve with more mileage.
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.
Overall while you did make a few mistakes your boxes are improving so far and with more mileage you'll continue to become more consistent. That being said I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to lesson 2.
Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
Thank you for the really helpful feedback. I had been wondering about hatching and sizing a bit. A few questions as I quite enjoy this as a warm-up exercise.
do you have any examples of a sheet with boxes of a larger size and spacing? My main concern was keeping the boxes far enough apart so that I could see where the lines converge
I noted early on and throughout the exercise that my lines would converge in pairs rather than all at once. Any advice or other exercises I can try and do to fix this?
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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