250 Box Challenge
7:56 PM, Friday January 21st 2022
I think the hardest part of this challenge was finding a consistent speed. at first i felt like i was making lines too fast and i felt myself needing to slow down to get smooth lines in place.
Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
In the future if you could number your challenge subjects (boxes in this case) it would be appreciated. Currently there isn't really a way for us to tell where you began and where you ended up and if there were issues with specific boxes it would be incredibly difficult to get that point across through your critique.
Anyways, 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:
Good work drawing your construction lines confidently, this keeps your lines smooth and prevents wobbling.
Seeing as how line weight is not a requirement of the challenge it's nice to see that you're applying it. It's a useful tool but one that most people need some mileage with before they feel comfortable applying it. Getting an early start like this will help you see better results sooner.
You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, 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:
It's not a requirement of the challenge but I recommend practicing applying hatching in your future work. It's a useful tool to learn and the only way to improve is to practice.
I recommend experimenting with proportions more, currently most of your boxes are fairly similar shape wise. Try mixing in some longer/thinner/wider boxes more frequently to see how your lines behave in different scenarios, remember that experimenting is an important part of learning.
When practicing boxes in your future warm ups I also suggest extending your lines further. Doing so will give you a better picture of how far off or close to your vanishing points you actually were.
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 moving you on to lesson 2.
Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
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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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