250 Box Challenge

10:11 AM, Thursday September 29th 2022

250 boxes - Album on Imgur

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I can hardly believe this challenge is finally over! I thank in advance anyone who will take some time to review my homework for the challenge. Let me know if I accidentally didn't post some boxes.

4 users agree
10:24 AM, Monday October 10th 2022
edited at 10:31 AM, Oct 10th 2022

Hello Dr_Scrapjack, congrats on completing all 250 boxes.

Starting with your lines and mark making, your lines are looking smooth and confident throughout, good job. Sometimes they miss or overshoot slightly but you’ve generally resisted the temptation to redo them to correct them and have kept up the confidence of your marks which absolutely the right thing to do, so well done! I’m pleased to see that you’ve also added line weight to the silhouette of your boxes, this is optional, but great practice for your superimposed lines, bravo. You’ve done a good job of hatching one of the front faces of each of your boxes. These lines are smooth, parallel, and evenly spaced, which is great. Something you can work toward in the future is having the lines start and end more precisely on the edges of your boxes, sometimes some of your hatching lines sort of “float” with neither end touching the edges of your box. Think of treating your hatching lines as extra practice for ghosted lines and an opportunity to improve your accuracy. Overall your mark making is great though, so well done.

Moving on to your box construction and perspective estimations, this is looking great too! You’ve been experimenting with a wide array of different rates of foreshortening, box orientations and box proportions throughout, really getting the most out of what this challenge has to teach us, nice work. You’ve extended your lines correctly (away from the viewer) and have made them long enough to be a useful checking method for your perspective estimations. Your convergences start out good and you continue to hone them throughout the challenge. There’s the occasional line extension going a bit awry, and a few sets that converge in pairs, but you have so many sets that are damn near perfect I’m sure you must now have a great intuitive sense for converging lines, amazing job.

Before I mark this as complete I will note that sometimes you draw boxes that are a bit distorted, such as 223. While this may have been something you did deliberately as part of your experimentation, I’ll leave a link to Comfy’s explanations on the subject here https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/7/distortion in case you were wondering why the box looks a bit wacky even though your convergences are good. A simple way to avoid distortion in the 250 box challenge (without having to wrap your head around perspective jargon) is to make sure all the angles in your initial Y are at least 90 degrees.

I think that about wraps this up. You’ve done a great job, so feel free to move on to lesson 2. As well as adding these boxes to your warm up pool, you can also try these additional box exercises https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/2 to spice things up a bit. They're a bit more challenging than 250 boxes, and totally optional but I thought I'd give you the link as it's easy to miss them and they might interest you.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move on to lesson 2

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 4 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
edited at 10:31 AM, Oct 10th 2022
5:14 PM, Monday October 10th 2022

Thank you for the time you put into reviewing my homework, I really appreciate that! The overshooting/undershooting you pointed out has been a problem that followed me since lesson one, and I suspect that the reason is because prior to starting with drawabox I was not used at all to drawing from the shoulder. I guess that now that my straight lines look reasonably smooth I should focus more on trying to have better control on pressure and endpoints.

Also thank you for the reminder on perspective deformation from lesson 1, in trying to have the broadest possible set of different initial y shapes this is something that I forgot to take into account.

I am excited to move forward to lesson 2. Thanks again for your advice!

7:06 PM, Monday October 10th 2022
edited at 7:10 PM, Oct 10th 2022

No problem! I mentioned overshooting but didn't really give you any advice to help with it, oopsie. A strategy to help with overshooting is mentioned here https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/10/lifthand if you lift your hand as you reach the end point instead of stopping the movement it may help you increase precision without losing that line confidence that you've worked so hard to achieve.

You're very welcome, and I hope you have fun in lesson 2. I found it more interesting than 250 boxes.

edited at 7:10 PM, Oct 10th 2022
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