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12:50 AM, Thursday April 15th 2021

Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!

I can see you made some good improvement with the quality of your mark making. Your lines steadily become straighter and more confident looking as you progressed through the challenge. You drew your boxes at a pretty good size and with a variety of orientations and foreshortening. You also start to do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!

Before we begin I just want to let you know that in general TAs will ignore student self assessment or critique so as not to contaminate our own critique of your work. If you have any questions not answered in your critique, feel free to ask them here.

Back to your critique.

While your mark making has improved, I do see that you still hesitate in some areas. This is likely due to prioritizing your accuracy over creating a smooth, confident looking line.

Just remember that the confidence of the stroke is far and away your top priority. Once your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid mistakes has passed, so all you can really do is push through. Hesitation serves no purpose. Mistakes happen, but a smooth, confident mark is still useful even if it's a little off. If the line is wrong, we leave it and move onto the next step. Accuracy is something that you will improve on as you continue working through Drawabox and practice ghosting.

Now, while it is important that you use the ghosting method of each mark you make while doing Drawabox one thing you can try to help with ending your marks closer to where you want them is lifting the pen off of the page rather than stopping the motion of your arm. You can do this with extra line weight as well. I would also recommend that you read this comment by Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation.

I would recommend that you try adding extra line weight to your boxes as a permanent step for your future warm ups as it gives you more opportunities to practice employing the ghosting method. 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 your extra line weight, it is done confidently and so that it blends seamlessly with your original mark. This will allow you to create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines that reinforces the illusion of solidity in your boxes/forms. Extra line weight should be applied to the silhouette of your boxes. I recommend that you try adding your extra line weight in no more than 1-2 pases so that you can easily identify mistakes in your work. This diagram should help also you better understand how to properly apply your extra line weight.

Finally while your converges do improve overall I think this diagram will help you as well. 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.
5:47 PM, Thursday April 15th 2021
edited at 8:29 PM, Apr 17th 2021

thank you for the time you've spent to critique :) I'll bear all of this in mind as I continue - Edit: trying to be less defensive!

your video was really helpful for me - so thank you for that too! I think I was thinking about ghosting to a vp rather than the differences in between the converging lines, I'll try thinking on that in some warm ups during lesson 2.

edited at 8:29 PM, Apr 17th 2021
9:01 PM, Thursday April 15th 2021

also - good link to the uncomfortable comment. I'll try to remember that, thank you

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The Art of Brom

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