250 Box Challenge
2:52 PM, Tuesday July 4th 2023
Well, this really made me appreciate the 50/50 rule xD
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10:54 PM, Wednesday July 5th 2023
Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
Congratulations on completing the box challenge, it's definitely a lot more work than most people expect. Not only does it help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. Be proud of what you've accomplished and that desire you've shown. That being said I'll try to keep this critique fairly brief so you can get working on the next steps as soon as possible.
Things you did well:
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Your construction lines are looking smooth and confidently drawn when you aren't redrawing them.
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You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening. Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding. I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.
Things you can work on:
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Redrawing is a bad habit to form so I'll ask you to stop doing so in the future. Part of why we work with ink is so we're forced to work with our mistakes. Redrawing doesn't erase them and instead just creates a mess. Mistakes are valuable, learn from them and then do your best to prevent them in the future.
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You tend to draw fairly small, I'd like you to draw larger in the future. Drawing large will help you become more comfortable working from the shoulder and allow you to see any mistakes you've made more clearly.
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They're not a requirement of the challenge but I recommend practicing applying hatching and line
weight in your future work. They're useful tools to learn and the only way to improve is to practice.
There are times when your lines converge in pairs or you attempt to keep your lines a bit too parallel which results in them diverging. This is an example of lines converging in pairs, and this shows the relation between each line in a set and their respective vanishing point. The inner pair of lines will be quite similar unless the box gets quite long and the outer pair can vary a lot depending on the location of the vanishing point. Move it further away and the lines become closer to parallel while moving it closer increases the rate of foreshortening.
The key things we want to remember from this exercise are that our lines should always converge as a set not in pairs, never diverge from the vanishing point and due to perspective they won't be completely parallel.
Overall while you did make a few mistakes your boxes are improving so far and with more mileage you'll continue to become more consistent. I'm hopeful you'll address your line confidence/redrawing in your own time. That being said I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to lesson 2.
Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
4:07 PM, Thursday July 6th 2023
Hi, thanks for the constructive feedback, I will keep it all in mind ????. I do however have a question regarding the point about redrawing. I understand that it's good to commit to every mark and redrawing effects this mindset in a negative way, making it harder to considered each stroke as confidently. But I focused on getting the perspective as close to correct as possible and the only times I corrected the mistakes was when adjusting lines to fit the perspective better. I feared that these marks my arm messed up, would instead look like mistakes my brain did in perspective. I believe the main goal of this exercise was to show my understanding of perspective, not line accuracy.
So should I also leave all manual mistakes in, when practicing perspective focused exercises and drills in the future, or should I prioritize showing my understanding of 3D space, over accuracy? Thanks in advance, wish me luck in lesson 2 ????
5:33 PM, Thursday July 6th 2023
You should indeed leave your mistakes in. Mistakes tell us where we stand to improve, where there may either be misunderstandings of the material, where we need more practice with the mechanics of making those marks, as well as where we may not have given ourselves as much time to prepare and think through the mark prior to executing it. When we correct those mistakes, it can trick our brains into feeling more as though those mistakes did not occur in the first place, and so if if occurred because we didn't necessarily allocate enough time to that task, we'll continue repeating that and making the mistake (and then correcting it) again.
By ensuring that we are not fixing our mistakes, we force ourselves to acknowledge it and consider why it occurred, so we can more meaningfully learn from it.
As to your question about what to prioritize in the future, your focus should be entirely on following the instructions, to the letter, and nothing more than that. We gauge your understanding of the material by judging whether or not you're able to understand how to apply those instructions. This "understanding" we're talking about isn't just about the conscious intellectual understanding of the theory. The understanding of the theory only matters insofar as it gets the student to the point of working on the exercises. From there, it's all about whether or not they can continue applying that exercise as they carry forward, whether we can leave you to continue practicing these exercises in your warmups, confident that you'll apply them correctly so as to continue developing your instincts and subconscious understanding.
So, as long as you're striving to follow and apply those instructions, then you're good. There may still be mistakes, but they'll be called out, revisions will be assigned as necessary, etc. This isn't something you should be trying to avoid - if revisions are required, then avoiding them would be to your detriment. Furthermore, if you start worrying about what to prioritize, what will better demonstrate your understanding, then you're more likely to drift away from those instructions. This relates more to the "min-maxing" I talked about in the Lesson 0 video which discussed how to get the most out of this course.
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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.
On the flipside, they tend to be on the cheaper side of things, so if you're just getting started (beginners tend to have poor pressure control), you're probably going to destroy a few pens - going cheaper in that case is not a bad idea.
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.