250 Box Challenge
3:06 AM, Saturday February 6th 2021
Next time I should probably use both sides of the page...
Hello, Alby.
First of all congratulations, it's a tough challenge to complete (at least it was for me). I have to tell you that i chose to review you as i saw you made some critiques for others, that's why i prioritized your submission over others. This is your reward :D. It's also an essential learning step, so keep helping the community.
Let's begin with your submission.
Your lines are confident and the overall technical aspect is good. The bad side is that you missed to extend the lines towards the vanishing points. I have seen that you asked about how to identify which face you should hatch. The answer is, you can choose which one you want, because as you are drawing boxes and not cubes, you can't exactly tell which face is nearer the viewer. Although you can use some rules of thumb to decide, for example the nearest face will be bigger than the rest. Also you can use the convergence of the two axis that forms a face to decide, usually the less convergence the nearer the face is to the viewer (this could be distorted with some boxes that has a corner as the nearest point of the figure).
Your lines are extended most of the time in the wrong direction. I assume this is because you don't know where is the viewer so it's difficult to tell where is the opposite direction. I'm going to elaborate on this so you can get a better idea.
When you begin one box, you place 4 dots. One is the seen corner, and the other 3 will form the axis that separate the 3 faces that are nearest the viewer. You have to choose one of these to hatch, you can try with the advice i previously gave you before to choose it. After placing that 4 main marks you place 3 more that complete the silhouette of the figure and lastly you place the inner corner mark and join every mark that you place letting the inner corner for the end.
After doing that you will have to extend the lines in the same direction your main axis were. From the first middle corner that's near the viewer, to the side of the other 3 points you marked on the first step.
Also you didn't explore foreshortening and you should. It's part of the reason you have trouble figuring out the exercise, because dramatic foreshortening makes clear which faces are near due to the extreme size difference of each face. Also shallow foreshortening is a goal you should be trying to reach for.
You didn't try adding lineweight to the silhouette but in your case, as it's an optional step and you have other problems to worry about, you can deal with this later (if you want). This will be one of the main points of lesson 2 so you will have to practice it sooner or later.
As final advice, please make the submission easy to critique. Yours' is filled with red lines everywhere and it makes it harder for anyone to analyze it. Try to use at least 2 different colors, one for the extended lines, and other for the box itself. This could be also useful to you because with so many lines it's normal to have trouble distinguishing which line is which. Have that in mind for your next submission.
I'm going to ask you for 30 more boxes. At least 15 should have some sort of foreshortening and try to aim for shallow foreshortening. I want you to focus on extending the lines on the right direction. Answer this critique with your revision and i will give you some more critique.
If you have doubts of the process of making the exercise you can check this video of ScyllaStew that has a lot of useful things to deal with common problems like the inner corner. And I recommend you to re-watch the video of the challenge and then re-read the challenge itself.
Next Steps:
I'm going to ask you for 30 more boxes. At least 15 should have some sort of foreshortening and try to aim for shallow foreshortening. I want you to focus on extending the lines on the right direction. Answer this critique with your revision and i will give you some more critique.
Yeah, I kind of realized after I was critiquing other box challenges that I definitely did not do any foreshortening on my boxes. It makes a lot of sense now why I had no idea which direction to extend my lines. Thanks for the review; the video link you sent from ScyllaStew was very helpful in demonstrating an effective way to draw boxes.
How are these boxes? I mostly stuck to shallow foreshortening with these ones but I did experiment a bit with dramatic foreshortening as well.
It unfortunately only occurred to me now that I should have just added the line extensions to the end of the boxes instead of drawing over the entirety of the boxes' lines with my pens. I deeply apologize for this. If you request it, I can draw more boxes with the extended lines not drawn over the original boxes.
You got the point of extending the lines and aiming for shallow foreshortening.
I think you struggle sometimes when you are estimating the 3 intermediate corners. Your marks are not set in stone. You can change them if you spot a mistake. Don't be afraid of changing your marks. Planning phase goal is to place marks to draw what you want, if you fail while using these marks, you can use another ones because a little mark doesn't ruin your drawing as much as correcting a line. Just be sure to not erase your past marks because they are a history of your failures and you can learn from them as well as see your progress by observing how many of them still appear in your exercises.
I think you can improve more just by drawing a couple boxes before each session, so i recommend you to do that. That's all. Good luck with lesson 2!
A little reminder:
You are not supposed to give feedback to others in lessons that you haven't completed. Nobody is going to complain because there are not enough critiques being given but your time is better spent in lessons/challenges that you have completed because you have more experience in them to teach others.
Next Steps:
Continue with lesson 2
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