250 Box Challenge

11:48 AM, Thursday December 3rd 2020

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I think I did OK in this one. You can clearly see when I have a bad day, but that's not an excuse.

The first hundred looked fine, I can see improvement but somewhere there I started to be dependent from the 'Y' tangent tool (which I shouldn't honestly). That created my boxes worse and impatient looking, having something as a reference or a starting point really helps.

But, before I knew it I drew the boxes in a similiar angle and rotation for a few times to compromise in the end, if you look closely. I don't think that's good.

If I have to be specific I struggle making the last dot converge (the line that needs speculation most), in the end I managed to fix that considerably.

Your critics would be greatly appreciated, to be frank I think I should still do more after this as I wasn't able to uphold the quality consistently.

2 users agree
1:47 PM, Thursday December 10th 2020

Well, looks like this was an adventure of discovery of boxes.

First of all, and I think this is very important. You very thoroughly yet with surprising consistent hashing crossed out and attempted to negate some boxes which you tought of as some sort of 'bad'. I think this is a very short sighted thing to do. As shown in one of the comics here, you need to accept and learn from the mistakes. The most horrid box that you may be embarrassed about is the one you need to accept and take your time analyzing what happened and what went wrong. Crossing it out means that you do not want it to exist, or that it does not show what you can actually do and an attempt to hide it and potentially not learn from it. Now it might be anything from sneezing and the line going wonky or a cat jumping on you or just simply having an awful day and it just not working out, but you still need to think about it and accept it. Even if it is such a wild and seemingly not relevant to the task at hand, you can learn to adjust something so that the next time you sit down and perform the task you are in a better position to handle outside events. If the reason however is simply that you moved incorrectly a few times in a row, than you absolutely need to try and learn how to prevent to accumulate mistakes.

Now, that was longer than I anticipated, but with that out of the way, it is actually a pretty good attempt at the exercise.

Your hashing is pretty great, nice and neat. It improved throughout the exercise and was acceptable to begin with.

Good variation on the boxes drawn, both shapes and rotations are really good. Much better than what I did.

You did ok on contouring the edges, they do not overlap perfectly, but the intention is there. In case you were not doing it this way, I found that knowing which of the lines are going to be the edges ahead of time and when drawing them going over it at the same time helped me, but my precision is not very good to begin with.

You did quite a few mistakes on the orientation of the lines extended towards the vanishing point in the beginning. Unfortunately, because of imgur not doing you any favors and the order of the pages being inconsistent, this is difficult to track, but you learned and it is good later in the exercise. Please pay attention in the future where you started and where things should go.

At the end the lines are also mostly converging so you can see you improved and you looked at all the previous attempts and kept little notes on where things went wrong. Good job.

While I do not know what size you are working with the boxes appear a little small and this makes the exercise more difficult because you have less room for error and you do not get to move and train your shoulder enough. You might have the tendency without realizing to move to elbow or even using the wrist. I discovered many times that I probably did not even use my shoulder after finishing a day of drawing. Consider doing some larger ones for comparison of difficulty.

Pretty good job overall. I would appreciate if you could critique my attempt as well.

Next Steps:

Try to not hide any attempts that you are not happy with and keep them as a reference to learn from and look back to and see the improvement in time.

Consider playing more with sizes of boxes and comparing them when doing warm ups.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
9:08 PM, Sunday December 13th 2020

To start off, thanks for the extensive critique Optimuserik.

Your first and longest point is very much so valid I admit. It's a bad habit that suddenly happened in the heat of passion, but I agree with clumsily accumulating mistakes. That's a bad habit in the long run too.

Some of what you said here are something that I thought about already but didn't think of its importance until you pressed and elaborated them.

I reason most with the little boxes that you pointed out. I was trying to do 5 boxes each A4 paper in a uniform pattern so it looks neat, but yeah it does limit my shoulder range. I think I moved it quite a lot, but maybe I should try wider area too.

And sorry for the unorganised imgur pictures, I swear I had named the files orderly before uploading. I probably missed some specific method on uploading them correctly.

I will do more exercises and try to keep in mind of what you pressed here. Thanks! It was overally a solid critique, you hit a lot of points - nothing stands out as bad, it was well structured.

I will look into your attempt too, again thanks for the critique!

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