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2:15 PM, Saturday April 18th 2020
Great job completing the 250 box challenge. You have made lots of improvement throughout in terms of spatial reasoning, your grasp of form and converging lines, as well as your overall line quality. You did a good job with your sizing of the boxes and exploring different orientations. You also did a good job with varying lenses (rates of convergence) with a focus on the more shallow convergences which is great because those are more common and also harder to draw!
I am noticing a tendency to redraw lines on occasion so I must tell you that that is a habit you must work to break before it sets in. We use pen because it forces us to live with our marks and helps us learn to plan each mark carefully. So you must plan your line and ghost until you are ready to live with the results. Redrawing lines causes visual clutter and draws the eyes to things you'd normally not want the viewer to focus on.
In terms of your converging lines, you are still having some skewing in the "back lines" which is pretty common at this stage. Uncomfortable made this infographic to further explain parallel lines in perspective and how to approach drawing them. The key point is that parallel lines are a family/ensemble all related to one another by their shared vanishing point. As the vanishing point moves, the angles between the lines all change. As one line moves, the relation to all the other parallel lines changes. Often times students will get tunnel vision with their boxes - they start on the first plane, make sure everything is converging right, then move on to the next plane and repeat the process with no regard to the previous lines they have already laid down which results in multiple points of convergence. It definitely takes some time and practice to be able to "step back" and view all these lines in tandem, but as you practice it mindfully your ability to do so will improve.
Overall though you have done everything asked of you for the challenge. I encourage students to keep practicing boxes during warm ups because it's a long time before the boxy lessons of 6 and 7 and it would be a shame to get rusty!
Next Steps:
You're free to move on to lesson 2.
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Sakura Pigma Microns
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.