250 Box Challenge
7:25 PM, Monday August 21st 2023
Look forward to your critique!
Thank you
Rooksana
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7:38 AM, Thursday August 24th 2023
Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
Not only does the challenge help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. 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:
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You're doing a good job of drawing the lines constructing your boxes smoothly and confidently.
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It's nice to see that you're taking the time to plan each of your hatching lines and space them evenly. This helps keep your boxes looking tidy rather than looking like they were rushed on to the page.
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Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge so it's nice to see you're applying it anyways. Most people need to build up some mileage before they feel comfortable applying it so I always recommend starting early. The sooner you feel comfortable the sooner you see better results.
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You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, and proportions. 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:
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You tend to draw fairly small, I'd like you to draw larger in the future. Drawing large will help you become more comfortable working from the shoulder and allow you to see any mistakes you've made more clearly.
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I'd like you to experiment with rates of foreshortening more. Currently you tend to keep your lines close to parallel and push your vanishing points far from your boxes. Try bringing your points in closer so that your lines have to converge more dramatically. Remember that experimentation is important.
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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.
I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you end up just creating further issues on top of them.
I'd like you to draw 30 more boxes please. For the first 15 I'd like you to draw all 3 of your boxes' vanishing points explicitly on the page after you've drawn your starting Y, this will make it so you have to keep these vanishing points in mind. For the latter 15 go back to the challenge's method without drawing the vanishing points which will hopefully be easier after the first set.
Once you've completed your boxes reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready I'll move you on to the next lesson.
I know you can do this and look forward to seeing your work.
Next Steps:
30 more boxes please.
8:35 PM, Tuesday August 29th 2023
Hi,
Thanks for the critique!
I totally see what I tried to achieve!
Yes I can draw the perfect box ????
I am not sure why I am having such a hard time with the concept. I have attached a few pages of boxes with a marked VP.
Could you give feedback before I proceed with the exercise?
Thanks,
Rooksana
9:00 PM, Tuesday August 29th 2023
Unfortunately as our teaching assistants are only paid for the initial critique (for which we compensate them more than what our students pay for the corresponding work, in order to keep our prices as low as possible), we leave it to them to decide how much additional work is required prior to receiving any further feedback.
To put that a bit more simply, while we understand that the student's time can be saved by pointing issues out early with feedback in the middle of a set of revisions, we don't have the resources for that, since we're prioritizing keeping our prices as low as possible. So in exchange for a lower price, the student instead must spend more of their own time and effort.
That said, we do have a very active Discord chat server where students can get feedback from one another - so you could post a link to your work there and have other students help you if you need assistance between rounds of revisions.
All that said, I will mention one major issue I noticed in your work: you're not extending all three sets of lines, you only appear to be extending one. So for example if we look at this page, you've extended 4 lines (2 in red, 2 in blue) for each box. All of those lines share a single vanishing point, but you've completely skipped the other 2 sets of edges, for the other two vanishing points. Compare this to what's shown in the instructions, where all 12 of the box's lines are being extended, 4 per vanishing point.
I hope that helps.
11:34 PM, Sunday September 10th 2023
Hi,
Attached are my extra boxes for marking.
Look forward to your feedback.
Thanks
Rooksana
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