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11:17 PM, Tuesday May 17th 2022

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.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:42 AM, Wednesday May 18th 2022

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.

  1. 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

  2. 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?

6:07 PM, Wednesday May 18th 2022

No problem.

  1. Basically you just want to make good use of your page and drawing larger is helpful. As examples your page labeled 107/250 is nice and large, you could probably fit in another box but these are a good size. On the opposite end you have page 189/250 where you drew quite small and there's tons of page space that could have been used. As for keeping your converging lines tidy it's definitely helpful but you can plan where your boxes are going to extend based on the initial Y's orientation, this means you can do your best to avoid creating a mess of lines.

  2. As long as you're aware that your goal is to have your lines converge as a set rather than pairs you can keep doing boxes in your warm ups and see improvement. Ultimately it's just a matter of thinking about how each line is a part of a set so they should all converge together. Keep in mind that all 3 of your vanishing points are going to be in line with your initial Y as well so if your lines aren't converging with those original 3 lines then you're likely off.

Hope that clears some things up if not feel free to ask for clarification, best of luck.

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