I actually mentioned this when I stumbled upon your youtube channel, and saw that you'd started on Lesson 2 without having submitted your work for the 250 box challenge. Near the end of my comment on one of your videos, I said:

One last thing - I noticed that you finished the 250 box challenge a good 7 days ago, but you haven't yet submitted it for a critique. I strongly recommend that you do - you're paying for it after all, and it'll allow you to catch any persistent mistakes that you may not be catching yourself (like continually drawing over your mistakes, for example) before moving onto lesson 2 in earnest.

I suppose I didn't call out that it was necessary to submit it for critique in order to submit your lesson 2 work, though this isn't stated for any of the other lessons either. For future reference, when the critique you receive for a previous lesson points you onto a next step (be it a lesson or a challenge), it is mandatory to complete it and get feedback on it through official channels. Also, if you have any questions at all, you can feel free to contact me directly through patreon or at support@drawabox.com.

Now, due to the way this website system works, you will have to submit your Lesson 2 work separately, but after I finish reviewing your box challenge work here, I will backdate your homework submission to February 29th, which is when you uploaded the video of you completing the challenge. That should allow you to post your work this coming Saturday instead of having to wait two full weeks from today.

With that, let's start on the critique.

So overall, there are a few things that definitely stand out throughout the challenge. Early on, you actually demonstrate a great deal of patience and care in the execution of your lines. You clearly apply the ghosting method patiently and conscientiously, and you're extremely thorough with applying your line extensions. As you progress through the set however, you start to get... impatient.

Your linework gets a little more haphazard, you fall more into the habit of drawing back over mistakes to correct them (something that was identified as an issue back in lesson 1), and your clear focus becomes getting the challenge done rather than getting something of value out of it.

Now, this waxes and wanes - sometimes (probably after approaching it fresh on the following day) you go back to drawing concisely and patiently, but likely as the day progresses you start to lose interest, and your good habits fall by the wayside. You also start to doodle more along the sides as your focus drifts. This is ultimately why we stress the importance of splitting up your time between drawing for the sake of drawing (where we can get out our nervous energy, our desire to explore and experiment) and settling down to follow the instructions of the given exercise to the letter. This also means not grinding away until a task is done, but rather ensuring that the time we put towards it is the time where we are most focused. It means the tasks themselves will take longer to complete (because instead of spending 3, 4, 5 hours a day you might just spend a couple hours on the Drawabox lesson and then spend the rest of the time actually drawing the things that bring you joy - your dog, for example.

This will allow you to focus the time you do spend on the exercises more effectively. You'll be more inclined to approach them patiently, applying the instructions, and avoiding slipping back into bad habits. The way we learn is all about the contexts in which we think of ourselves as training. We can employ all kinds of bad habits while just drawing for the hell of it, and not have it really impact us that negatively - but if we allow those habits to bleed into the time we actually draw with the purpose of learning and improving our skills, then those will be more solidly ingrained.

Having seen your videos, I know that you're extremely serious about this, and that you also have past experience with learning from other resources, and with other methodologies. I also know that you've expressed two somewhat opposing views - that on one hand you approach drawing in a certain way because it is "just the way you are", alongside working your ass off to do things in a more structured, conscientious manner despite that. A lot of students get caught up in phrases like "perfectionist" because they see it as a character trait - something that will be there with them until the end of time. It's this second part that is much more valuable however - it shows that you, at least to an extent, understand that things like perfectionism are a condition from which you and many, many other people, suffer. Perfectionism comes from fear, from an entanglement between the things we draw and how we value ourselves. It is something that most people experience to varying degrees, and that is all the more prevalent among those who bother to look for courses and lessons to help them improve. It is also something we can absolutely overcome.

Now I'm getting way off the rails here, but the key point is this: you've already demonstrated that you have it in you to approach these tasks patiently, with care, applying all of the correct steps, plodding purposefully along the path of improvement and growth. You've also shown a propensity for falling back on old ways of thinking, of wanting desperately to rely on your instincts to get you through when your brain gets too tired to keep up that patience the whole way through. This is entirely normal, but it's important to remember that what we're doing here is training your instincts. If you let yourself fall back on them here and now, then you'll fall back on very little of substance, and they won't hold you up. Instincts are developed through repetition with clearly planned intent. So, when you find yourself slipping back to those instincts, stop. Take a step back, give yourself a break and let yourself do something else - be it drawing other things for enjoyment, or just putting the pen down and doing something unrelated for a while. You can come back later - either later in the day, or the next day, fresh and ready to go back to doing the exercise exactly as the instructions state.

Now, stepping back to the actual work you've done for this challenge, there are a few more specific pieces of critique I want to offer:

• When drawing a box, and more specifically drawing one line as part of a box, students will often try and figure out which other lines in that box they need to think about, what they need to keep in mind as they draw this next mark. Often they'll think about the lines that share a corner, or the lines that share a plane, and try to build out from there. Both of these are incorrect - instead, remember that the box is made up of three sets of four parallel lines. Whenever drawing a line, you must think about the other lines the one you're drawing run parallel to. Anything else is a distraction - your primary focus should always be about how your new line is going to be oriented in order to converge towards the same vanishing point as the other three (even if not all of those other three have been drawn thus far, think about all three anyway).

• To the point above, it's really easy to get overly focused on the back corner, because that's where we tend to see things going wrong. This is simply because it's usually the last corner we draw, and so all the inconsistencies from estimating throughout the construction process have been accumulating, and this is where they actually show up. This back corner is just a symptom. Treating the symptom by focusing on that back corner won't solve the problem. Instead, you treat the cause, which is the sets of parallel lines not quite converging consistently to their shared vanishing points.

• Furthermore, as shown here, while you're thinking about how those lines converge to their VP, think about the angles between them as they leave it. You'll often find that the middle two lines will actually have a pretty small angle between them - combine this with the vanishing point being quite far away and you can end up with lines that run virtually parallel to one another because they're so close together. There are little freebies like this that we can find to help make our lives easier when estimating our convergences.

• A common problem we'll see when applying the line extensions is where our lines converge in pairs, rather than all four converging to the same shared point. This is just another example of where we're thinking of lines that share a plane instead of thinking of all four at the same time.

• How we lay out our pages is important. If we do so in a cluttered, overlapping, haphazard fashion, then we encourage our brain to think in a cluttered fashion. If we lay them out more evenly, with just a few boxes per page and plenty of space between to do our line extensions, we can encourage ourselves to be more patient and conscientious. To help provide more resources for students, I've been having my girlfriend upload videos of her doing the exercises. She used the 250 box challenge as a backdrop for doing pen reviews, so you can see in any of those pen review videos how her pages were laid out. This matter of layout applies across the board, to future lessons as well. Drawing big will also help you engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills, as well as encouraging you to use your whole arm when drawing, whereas drawing smaller in a more cramped space will have the opposite effect.

Overall, I do think you're moving in the right direction, but you need to slow yourself down. You're not in a race, and the more you space out your time and allow yourself to complete the tasks when you are in your best frame of mind, the more effective the lessons and exercises will be in rewiring how you think and perceive these kinds of things.

I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. I'll go ahead and backdate this submission as promised to February 29th, so you'll be able to submit your Lesson 2 work on Saturday. In the mean time, I recommend you go back over the Lesson 2 work you'll be submitting and think about how the critique I've mentioned here relates. If you feel there are sections you may have rushed through, then you have the next few days to perhaps take another swing to ensure that what you're sending me is done with patience and care. It definitely doesn't have to be perfect, but it's important that you take the time to apply the instructions as they're written, as free from distraction and rushing as you can manage.