Check Out NMA    Learn More About our Partnership
Close and Enjoy Drawabox Ad-free
View Full Submission View Parent Comment
1:26 AM, Saturday June 20th 2020

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.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
4:30 PM, Friday June 26th 2020

Here are another 20 boxes.

https://imgur.com/a/PHl9c2X

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.

2:30 AM, Saturday June 27th 2020

As you do still appear to be having some difficulty with this, I'm jumping in just to try and explain the concepts as clearly as possible.

I'm glad to hear what you mentioned at the start, specifically that you've no longer doing the following: "if the vanishing point I intended was to be far away I would try to make them parallel". As I believe Nihlex mentioned beforehand, regardless of whether the vanishing point is close by or far away, you should still be thinking about there being an actual vanishing point present, somewhere. As long as there's a vanishing point, then those lines will converge, even if very gradually. So you've improved on that front... somewhat.

The issue comes down to the fact that you actually started putting down vanishing points for yourself. This is expressly against the instructions of the challenge, and it ended up resulting in an issue. Sure, you were able to converge your lines more purposefully towards the vanishing points when they were on the page, but that ends up being a crutch. As soon as the vanishing points fall anywhere off the page, you struggle to get them to converge more consistently.

Ultimately what the box challenge demands of you is to learn not to focus so much on the vanishing points themselves - know they're there, know that your lines are converging, but you can estimate how much lines need to converge by studying other lines with whom the one you're drawing is meant to converge. As soon as you've got at least two lines to a set, you can look at the third you're going to draw and how it relates to the two that are already down, to determine roughly how rapidly it needs to converge with them. Instead, it seems that you're constantly trying to rely on a physically existing vanishing point, which is largely beyond what our brains can manage.

So to put it simply: there is a vanishing point, your lines are converging towards it, but you don't need to focus on it specifically. Instead, you focus on the information that implies where it is - the edges that converge towards it.

Now, I am going to instruct Nihlex to mark this challenge as complete, but you are going to have to incorporate these kinds of freely rotated boxes - along with their line extensions - into your warmups. Focus on what I've explained here, and try not to distract yourself with anything beyond what has been laid out in the instructions for this exercise. There's no need to try and overcomplicate things - you will make mistakes, and you will find your convergences to be inconsistent, but this will improve. Mistakes don't necessarily mean you need to change your approach. Even if you're following the process perfectly, there is going to be an aspect of practice and mileage that helps close gaps and improve your results.

7:06 PM, Saturday June 27th 2020

Thank you for the detailed explanation and advice. I will continue to do these boxes along with most of the other exercises from Lesson 1 as warmups.

2:36 AM, Saturday June 27th 2020

Uncomfortable left a comment helping you out, so I'll be marking your submission as complete as requested.

Next Steps:

Do previous exercises and boxes as warm ups.

Move on to lesson 2.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

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.

These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.

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.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.