250 Box Challenge
12:32 PM, Tuesday September 12th 2023
You may notice that I change the colors I use at some point
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1 users agree
7:14 PM, Monday February 19th 2024
Pain
I agree.
Things that were done well
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Strong improvement over time was seen. The first boxes had sets of lines that were rather parallel, which is a common issue, but at around box number 100, they started converging a lot more.
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There was clear thought put into the construction of the boxes. Just like the previous item, boxes felt less auto-pilot after a certain point.
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The back corner was placed well a lot of the time. This is probably the hardest thing to do in the lesson, so good work on that.
Things that could be improved
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Line fidelity. There is a recurring issue where a bunch of lines per page are not straight or have significant wobble. This is usually an execution issue, where there is not enough ghosting or shoulder motion, compounded with the difficulty of constructing boxes. Consider re-visiting the fundamentals in lesson 1.
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The boxes with shallow convergence (i.e. VP is far away) tend to have one line converge too quickly. This is an issue mainly seen in the last 75 or so boxes, especially in the larger ones. Pay attention to the angles between lines, and that should help with seeing the boxes converge.
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There was a lack of diversity in the boxes at the start and beginning, the worst offender being that central box in the last 10 or so pages. It generally improves understanding of 3D space if many different orientations of boxes are drawn, so don't forget to vary it up.
Recommendations
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Hatching the front face is a great exercise to reason about which plane faces the viewer, reinforcing spatial reasoning.
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Do not use Imgur since it's a crap website that constantly messes with ordering and occasionally disappears your images. Some of the early pages are out of order, and I am sure that you didn't do that intentionally.
Overall, I think this is complete. There are areas that need some polishing, but there is ample time to improve. Good luck with lesson 2.
Next Steps:
Lesson 2
8:04 AM, Thursday February 22nd 2024
Thanks for the critique . What do you think about using Pinterest instead of imgur, I know that a lot of people use Google drive but I wonder if Pinterest would be appropriate for Draw a box.
I also agree with your points, especially the line woobliness as it is something I always struggle with. Thank you again for the critique
4:29 AM, Friday February 23rd 2024
I've never used Pinterest before, but I can recommend Google Drive. The only problem is that it requires a Google account, but it will hide your email.
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
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Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
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.
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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.