I was told to re-do the planes in ellipses assignment so I included those in here as well. I noticed I had a pattern of sometimes using two vanishing points for one plane, and I began trying to correct that issue. So it may show up sometimes. The top of page shows page # and number of boxes. so 14 - 130 means page 14, 130 boxes total.
Hey there, I'll be handling your 250 box challenge critique.
I'll start this off by apologizing because there was actually a mistake on our end, I was confused when you included your ellipses in planes in this submission and after looking into it I realized that Sven accidentally marked your lesson 1 submission as complete rather than marking it as needing exercises resubmitted. Technically you weren't supposed to be approved to move ahead to the box challenge, but seeing as how you already have I'll go over your ellipses in planes first and then I'll talk about your boxes.
With that being said, I did look over your lesson 1 submission as well as Sven's critique to properly address your ellipses in planes. Your planes are looking better, you're overshooting less which is good to see. Your ellipses do still need work however, they're very loose and give the impression that you're drawing through them because you were told too not because you're intentionally planning them out as well as trying to keep them tight and gain mileage from doing so. It's a step in the right direction and they are improved but you should definitely try and keep improving them while doing warm ups.
Let's move on to your boxes, you had a bit of rough start. For the first 6 pages you extended your lines towards the viewer rather than away from them, you can read more about the mistake here. Remember that the vanishing point can't be between the viewer and the object, the object will always come between the two and your lines will extend away from the viewer as if being sucked into the vanishing point.
After these 6 pages you appear to have realized your mistake which is great, I still need to make note of it just to make sure you do understand that it is a mistake to begin with. Anyways, from here on your boxes aren't bad but there are a few things I want to make note of. While you do improve over the course of the challenge there are still quite a few cases where your sets of lines either converge in pairs or diverge, this results in your boxes not appearing as solid as they should be. Your line quality has also improved over the course of the challenge but there are cases especially in your hatching where it appears you're using your wrist because these lines arc. If you hatch remember that you want to ghost before doing so and keep them as close to parallel as you can.
So overall you did improve but there is still work to be done and there always will be because we're human and can never be perfect all the time, our goal is to improve and become more consistent so we make errors less.
One major thing I do have to point out though is you didn't really experiment at all in this challenge. You drew fairly similar boxes throughout the entire challenge and didn't experimenting with foreshortening or orientation of the boxes at all. While optional you didn't experiment with line weight either. This combined with your lesson 1 submission does show me that you are in fact either rushing or not personally invested in this. I apologize if this comes off as rude or upsetting but I need to make it as clear as I can. The two week limit between each submission isn't a goal post for how fast you should be submitting, some people spend over a year doing this course. Yes you drew 250 boxes, but it seems like you drew them to get them done rather than to learn as much as you could from each one.
There are courses and lessons out there that will hold your hand the entire way through and show you how to draw something specific, that's not the goal here. The lessons are designed to give you the tools to be able to construct objects so you can draw them so they appear that they have form and depth. With that being said it's up to you to experiment with the tools in order to figure out how to use them in each scenario, it's not something you can just read or expect to understand how to do immediately. As an example if you drew the exact same box 250 times, you may be good at drawing that particular box, but as soon as you go to draw a different one you may look like you've never drawn a box in your life, that's why experimentation is important it helps you build a strong foundation of understanding so you can tackle any task with the best of your abilities.
Instead of marking your submission as complete, I'd like you to draw 20 more boxes with different uses of foreshortening, orientation as well as proportions. (Long and skinny, short and fat etc.) When doing these 20 boxes please draw 4 or 5 at most per page, draw large as it helps you see your mistakes and strengths more clearly which will help you ingrain what you're doing better in your mind. Once you've completed them reply to this critique with an album in your comment.
Learning to draw is difficult, but anyone can do it. You just need to sit down, plan things out, and observe what you're doing. Take the time to properly think about your actions and what the results are in order to figure out what you need to do to improve instead of just doing the task because it's what is asked of you.
Next Steps:
Keep doing previous exercises as warm ups.
Submit 20 more boxes.
Here is My twenty boxes submission, and a few comments I would like to quickly add about them as well.
My biggest objectives for these boxes was to make sure I make use of my entire arm and to limit using only my wrist, make a large variety of boxes and to experiment with them, and to make them larger.
The first thing I noticed was that when it comes to making longer lines, I have issues with both making them straight and under/over shooting. When I realized this I started doing the Line and planes exercises as a warmup consistently, and I noticed some improvement. I still have issues with overshooting and undershooting on any lines that go over 2 inches but I feel like I am improving there. Boxes 10 and 8 Are examples of this, my initial line was really bad to the point that I just crossed them out and remade them.
The second thing I noticed is that some of my boxes still have problems in that I sometimes will end up in two different vanishing points for one plane, such as boxes 19, 17, and 9. Other times the box will come out fine with the exception of one line ending up drastically different than the other three. Examples include boxes 20, 18, and 14.
I did my best to take a while with these and to try and think through each box before I drew them. I still see some issues as I mentioned, and for now I am continuing to do the line practice, ellipses in planes, and to continue drawing boxes as I feel those exercises will help me the most.
Hey there.
There are a few things I notice about the 20 new boxes you've submitted.
You are still overshooting and undershooting as you mention, overshooting is preferred and you may find it helpful to lift the pen from the page rather than stopping on the page. You'll build muscle memory and learn when to lift to effectively stop the line where you want it to, this takes time and you'll figure it out as you progress so it's not a huge concern because it's ultimately something that just requires mileage.
There is something that I am concerned with however, and that is that it appears that you potentially get caught up in your personal objectives and individual steps and lose sight of the bigger picture in a sense. To give you some examples of what I mean let's look at your attempts at foreshortening here, you often end up with a case of 1 of the vanishing points being incredibly close while the others you keep as far away as possible. There are cases where instead of focusing on a set of lines and how they should behave you worry about the closest line to it rather than the entire set which is how you end up having multiple vanishing points, because you're not thinking of the box as a whole but the individual plane or line you're working on.
You still try to keep the majority of your lines as parallel as you possibly can which gives the impression you're not actively thinking about where your vanishing point is in relation to the box, because of this you get lines that aren't converging consistently or even diverge from each other in some cases.
Because of the nature of a vanishing point existing, lines may get close to parallel if the point is far away but they'll never diverge and instead always converge. Consciously creating your sets of lines with this in mind, with all of your vanishing points planned to create a box as a whole not just as a set of planes is the goal here.
With that being said I'd like you to draw 20 more boxes, I know it's tiresome but you really need to grasp the point of this exercise as it will be important as you move on.
Next Steps:
Please complete and submit 20 more boxes.
Here are another 20 boxes.
I tried to change the way I draw boxes in regards to vanishing points because before, I would just completely wing it and just try to make the lines in a plane converge at some point and if the vanishing point I intended was to be far away I would try to make them parallel. for the first 11-14 boxes I feel like I struggled in that I was constantly slipping up and making some mistakes I tried to avoid, such as having two vanishing points for a plane.
I ended up making my own arbitrary vanishing points on the paper by making small dots on the left and the right of the box I intended to draw and I used those to help me make my lines. My boxes ended up looking much better this way with less mistakes, but I don't know if using this method bypasses the whole point of the lesson and whether or not I should do it. If I try to make a box with vanishing points off the paper for example, this method will not help me. Should I continue using this method, or is it a crutch that I should use sparingly or not at all? Before this, I made all my boxes freehand, and I just tried to make the lines as a whole work with the lines I already drew.
Thanks for the critique!
On the subject of most of the boxes Ending up similar, I noticed that and I tried to remedy it but in the end most of them still ended up feeling similar. For the arcing lines, I noticed that too. I feel like I did end up relying on my wrist too much,especially because the boxes were very small, with some getting pretty smaller then they should have been. When I made a line that curved way too much I went back to trying to make extensive use of my arm, but quickly went back to using my wrist. Overall I feel that I fell into the trap of "I made a few mistakes this page, but thats fine because I still have many chances to improve it further ahead" without ever really doing so. The last 60-70 boxes I feel like I rushed because I did those in one day. Had a very "Let's finish this" mentality for those boxes. And for the ellipses, (both original and resubmission) the reason I did not go through those ellipses multiple times is because after doing the ellipse once, I found it hard to continue the motion. It's strange to describe but I had to actively push myself to continue drawing through them after the initial stroke. I feel like I just instinctivly stopped myself from continuing the motion in the fears that I would mess it up really badly. After I tried to remedy this, I feel a little more confident but they still seem off. The distance between my draw-throughs is still rather large but I feel better about it after doing the exercise for the second time.
Ill get to work on the 20 more boxes, and I will try my best to make them both larger, and experiment with them.
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.
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