250 Box Challenge

12:59 AM, Sunday May 16th 2021

250 Boxes Challenge - Drawabox.com - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/KDTmyr0 .jpg

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1 to 50 - https://imgur.com/a/KDTmyr0

51 to 100 - https://imgur.com/a/4ISXPX0

101 to 150 - https://imgur.com/a/dU1pFHd

151 to 200 - https://imgur.com/a/anfBSMZ

201 to 250 - https://imgur.com/a/pcb3yB2

Hi there!

Here are my 250 boxes.

From beginning to end, I struggled to come up with angles. I feel like I drew the same angles over and over again...

In term of construction, at the beginning I was doing the 'Y first, then dots, then finish by connecting the dots' technique. But having a 'correct' last corner of the cube was a pain (forcing me to adapt the other corners), and getting that one wrong is really messing up the whole perspective.

Then around box 150 I started to work with only dots until all corners have been identified. Then I was checking (using the side of the pen) the convergence of each line respective to the others (to at least try to avoid divergence), and only then connecting the dots with the ghosted method.

I found that new method more efficient, enjoyable and somewhat more accurate (not sure to understand why, as I almost never modify my first 4 dots, which constitute the initial Y of the first method).

Also, when tracing my convergence lines after the completion of each page, note that I was tracing based on the dots (ideal line as I intended to draw it), and not based on the line itself (as sometimes my ghosted line didn't go where I was hoping it would...)

But overall I found that my ghosted lines became much more accurate and easy to produce by the end of the challenge, which was an added benefit for the whole exercise.

Thanks a lot for helping me with your feedback, you rock!

Take care,

-Larry.

3:41 PM, Sunday May 16th 2021

Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!

I can see you made some good improvement with the quality of your mark making. Your lines steadily become straighter and more confident looking as you progressed through the challenge. You drew your boxes at a pretty good size and with a variety of orientations and foreshortening. You also start to do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!

I would recommend that you try adding extra line weight to your boxes as a permanent step for your future warm ups. When you go to add weight to a line it is important that you treat the added weight the same way you would a brand new line. That means employing the ghosting method here as well. You should be taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute your extra line weight, it is done confidently and so that it blends seamlessly with your original mark. This will allow you to create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines that reinforces the illusion of solidity in your boxes/forms. Extra line weight should be applied to the silhouette of your boxes, as shown here. I recommend that you try adding your extra line weight in no more than 1-2 pases so that you can easily identify mistakes in your work. This diagram should help also you better understand how to properly apply your extra line weight.

Something to keep in mind as well, when you are working through Drawabox you should be employing the ghosting method for every mark you make. This includes the hatching that we sometimes use for our boxes.

Make sure that you are checking all of your convergences for your boxes and do not skip any lines even if they appear to join another mark. You should still check all of your lines individually and never skip any.

Finally, while your converges do improve overall I think this diagram will help you as well. When you are looking at your sets of lines you want to be focusing only on the lines that share a vanishing point. This does not include lines that share a corner or a plane, only lines that converge towards the same vanishing point. Now when you think of those lines, including those that have not been drawn, you can think about the angles from which they leave the vanishing point. Usually the middle lines have a small angle between them, and this angle will become negligible by the time they reach the box. This can serve as a useful hint.

Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!

Next Steps:

Continue to lesson 2!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:58 AM, Monday May 17th 2021

Thanks a lot for this feedback, I'll keep an eye on all this as I continue to progress in the lessons.

Thanks again!

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Framed Ink

Framed Ink

I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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