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250 Box Challenge

7:46 PM, Friday October 9th 2020

250 boxes challenge – from 13/04/2020 to 16/08/2020 - Album on Imgur

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Hi there!

After 4 months of not-at-all-grinding-but-rather-a-sustainable-art-schedule I have managed to finish 250 box challenge.

Around box 61 I have figured out that I have been doing the exercise wrong, trying to make lines parallel, and not thinking about convergence. This was strange for me, because I really thought I understood everything... I have read the instructions carefully, but apparently not everything sank in. Much welcome humility lesson included in this challenge. I reread all the content from Lesson 1, watched some YouTubers and other people doing the challenge and tried to reitarate.

After this „tiny” error, I have decided to continue anyway with the challenge and not redo the 60 boxes, because I was afraid I would get discouraged by restarting the challenge and in consequence give it up. I also thought that it is in line with Drawabox's advice „not to grind and redo exercices”, but finish to the best of my abilities.

Box 250 is still far from perfect and there are some rotations that are trickier for me than others, but hopefully it's enough to keep going with Drawabox.

Thank you for your time and critique.

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8:49 PM, Saturday October 10th 2020

Congratulations on completing the 250 Box Challenge!

Before we begin I just want to let you know that in general TAs will ignore student self assessment or critique (unless you have a question!) so as not to contaminate our own critique of your work. I will say that you did do the right thing by pushing through once you realized your mistake. Starting over would have been the worse move to make for sure. Back to your critique.

Overall I would say you did really well on this challenge. While I can see that you struggled to understand some of the steps early on, which you mentioned. You do later on correct that and make a lot of improvement in the quality of your mark making. You also, by the end, start to do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points.

One thing I notice about your boxes is the extra line weight you tried adding in some areas. I can see that you struggle a bit with getting that added line weight to blend seamlessly with the original mark. When you go to add weight to a line it is important that you treat the added weight the same way you would a brand new line. That means taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute it the mark blends seamlessly with your previous mark. This will allow you to build and create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines. This is something that you will improve with consistent practice, so make sure that you include this step in your regular warm ups.

Finally while your convergences do improve overall I think this diagram will help you further develop that skill as you continue through Drawabox. So, when you are looking at your sets of lines you want to be focusing only on the lines that share a vanishing point. This does not include lines that share a corner or a plane, only lines that converge towards the same vanishing point. Now when you think of those lines, including those that have not been drawn, you can think about the angles from which they leave the vanishing point. Usually the middle lines have a small angle between them, and this angle will become negligible by the time they reach the box. This can serve as a useful hint.

Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!

Next Steps:

Continue to lesson 2!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:30 PM, Sunday October 11th 2020

Thank you for your critique and much appreciated tips ScyllaStew! :)

Your videos and documenting your journey going through the exercises on YouTube helped me a lot, so I am happy that you were the one to rate this challenge.

And thanks for letting me know about self-critique. I'll be sure to keep that in mind in my future posts.

Take care!

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