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250 Box Challenge

9:24 PM, Thursday August 20th 2020

250 Box Challenge Part 1 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/36bW8vI.jpg

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Hi,

I finally made it through the 250 Box Challenge, which I definitely got sick of by the end. Sorry for the first 45 or so, I was using a thick marker and also my direction of perspective was a bit off. I believe on the Part two of my submission the scanner ate a page or two, but it took a while to scan all of it so I didn't attempt again. If you need the missing pages I can redo them at a later point. Overall I didn't mind doing the challenge but I think if it were about 50 boxes shorter it would have been a bit more reasonable and I grinded through the last 60 or so in 3 days and I think my quality dropped off a bit.

Here are the two albums of boxes:

https://imgur.com/a/36bW8vI

https://imgur.com/a/s3tzi7T

Cheers,

DrReverendJ

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12:42 AM, Friday August 21st 2020

Howdy, TA qzhans here!

I'm sorry that you found the challenge tedious, but it really is a good number that helps solidify some key things and makes your drawing more intuitive. Nevertheless, I congratulate you on giving those 250 boxes a good ol’ pen and ink smackdown! It really is a MASSIVE undertaking, and you’ve joined the prestiged club of its completers.

You’ve diligently drawn through all your boxes and extended every single last line out to check your errors, and your boxes have been better for it. Indeed, you’ve made an improvement throughout the set.

In general, your linework here is pretty nice. I am seeing a few cases where you re-drew lines or tried to patch things up, but those are few and far between.

However, your internal understanding of convergence seems to be not clicking somewhere. There's divergence in a large number of boxes here, even on those front-facing lines. Generally, as long as the front-facing lines look like they're converging, if the back, "hidden", lines aren't perfect the box will still look fine.

When you go to draw a line, think only about the lines that are supposed to be parallel to it (share a vanishing point). Lines closer to an existing line will converge slower, while the opposite is true for lines further away.

What I like doing is drawing the 3 lines (forming a "Y") from the corner that's closest to us, then dealing with the visible edges (2 per branch of that "Y") and making sure they are properly converging towards a shared vanishing point. Then, only after that do I pick a far corner in the back and finish the box with the drawn-through, "unseen" lines (not sure if this is what you were doing already, however).

Another thing that might've caused the divergence was a tendency to draw more and more isometric boxes towards the end; if you find yourself struggling with divergences, it can help to go back to more obviously converging ones.

Additionally, you have drawn a lot of your boxes quite small. I would say 2-6 boxes is a good number per page, as you want to do some especially big ones. As of right now, you're sticking to this number, but using up very little of the page.

Overall, I like your linework here (even if you didn't add line weight to the silhouettes), but I think that you probably need more boxes to really get that internal understanding of convergence ticking. Thus, I'm gonna assign you 15 more boxes, and this time I really try and visualize that invisible vanishing point when you're drawing your boxes.

You said that you did 60 in 3 days, which is about 20 a day, and you are right that it decreased the quality. So, this time I don't want to see this lesson returned in a day. Take your time on these, and if you feel like you're getting sick of it take a break.

Next Steps:

15 Boxes, focusing on good convergence

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
9:59 PM, Sunday September 13th 2020

Hi,

I've attached the 15 more boxes, it took me a lot longer than I would have liked because I was so burned out on drawing just boxes I needed to do *anything* else. I still feel like it's not perfect, but I think I'm getting better, but I'll let you be the judge. Anyways, here's the link.

https://imgur.com/a/xxmeWwY

Cheers,

DrReverendJ
4:50 PM, Monday September 14th 2020

Hey, these are looking better, and I'm glad you took a break when you feel you needed it.

I think an issue you keep running into is how you tend to try to make one set of lines in each box parallel to each other. Usually, especially for boxes where a corner points towards us more directly, all lines will be converging to some shared vanishing point.

Additionally, there's a bit of a trend in this one where you tried to do a lot of boxes in 2 point perspective (boxes where you can only see two faces). These are easy to tackle once you really get 3 point perspective boxes down, so I wouldn't worry about throwing too many of these into the mix. #9 is a good example of a box that is showing 3 faces (this allows you to apply the steps I talked about in the original critique).

Although, now that I look at it, #9 has an issue where you've drawn the error lines in the incorrect direction (green set). This calls back to the issue of trying to make at least one set of lines parallel in any given box. Like I said before, if you find yourself struggling with divergences, it can help to go back to more obviously converging ones.

Overall, I think with this set of feedback you'll be able to tackle this slowly on your own. I think it'd be best for you to move on while continuing to do these on the side diligently. For feedback, feel free to use the community discord or the forums on this site.

Good luck on Lesson 2!

Next Steps:

Lesson 2

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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