12:49 AM, Thursday July 21st 2022

Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.

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:

  • Your construction lines are looking smooth and confidently drawn.

  • You're doing a good job of experimenting with orientations, proportions 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:

  • Your hatching lines could be tidier. Just like any other line we want to take our time planning them using the ghosting method, space them evenly and draw them confidently.

  • Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge but I do recommend practicing it in your future attempts. It's an incredibly useful tool but one that people often require a fair bit of mileage before they feel comfortable applying it. The sooner you start to build up that mileage the sooner you'll see better results.

  • Keep experimenting with foreshortening, you do a bit so I'm not worried about your ability to but most of the time you kept your vanishing points quite far from your boxes. Try brining them closer more often so that your lines converge more dramatically,

  • Early in the challenge you were placing your vanishing point between the viewer and your boxes. This lead to you extending your lines in the wrong direction and your boxes becoming distorted because your lines are actually diverging from where the vanishing point would actually be. Here's a guide I wrote that will hopefully help you understand how to place your vanishing points and lines if you still feel unsure.

  • 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 move you on to lesson 2.

Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck.

Next Steps:

Move on to lesson 2.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:57 AM, Thursday July 21st 2022

Thanks I wasn't aware I was supposed to be ghosting the hatching lines. I was drawing confidently from the shoulder, but no ghosting led to them being untidy.

I honestly forgot about line weight. Early in the challenge I was so overwhelmed I decided to put line weight off until I get more comfortable. But by the time I started feeling good and consistent about the boxes (just before 200), I had forgotten about this.

Thanks for the critique!

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Printer Paper

Printer Paper

Where the rest of my recommendations tend to be for specific products, this one is a little more general. It's about printer paper.

As discussed in Lesson 0, printer paper (A4 or 8.5"x11") is what we recommend. It's well suited to the kind of tools we're using, and the nature of the work we're doing (in terms of size). But a lot of students still feel driven to sketchbooks, either by a desire to feel more like an artist, or to be able to compile their work as they go through the course.

Neither is a good enough reason to use something that is going to more expensive, more complex in terms of finding the right kind for the tools we're using, more stress-inducing (in terms of not wanting to "ruin" a sketchbook - we make a lot of mistakes throughout the work in this course), and more likely to keep you from developing the habits we try to instill in our students (like rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach).

Whether you grab the ream of printer paper linked here, a different brand, or pick one up from a store near you - do yourself a favour and don't make things even more difficult for you. And if you want to compile your work, you can always keep it in a folder, and even have it bound into a book when you're done.

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