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250 Box Challenge

6:03 AM, Wednesday November 18th 2020

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I figured I would learn about consistency, perspective, and some greater understanding of space from working through the 250-box challenge. What I didn’t expect was how much smoother it would also make my hatching, and also drawing cleaner lines in other sketchbook drawings as well. I had another pleasant surprise regarding perspective distortion about halfway through. Starting around box 160 or so, I took some pictures of boxes in my environment, and used those axes as thumbnails for the boxes. I was amazed to see how much distortion occurs with the camera as opposed to naked eye. A little later it was interesting to try to duplicate similar effects in boxes from scratch . . .

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4:39 PM, Wednesday November 18th 2020

Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!

From what I can see your line work is well done and your boxes are coming along well. You do a pretty good job of taking your time and keeping your lines straight and confident looking. You have a wide variety of sizes and orientation to your boxes while keeping them large enough to get the most out of the exercise.

I see that throughout many of your boxes, you purposely tried to keep your sets of lines parallel on the 2D page, drawing them all to an "infinite" vanishing point. As explained in this section, because these boxes are oriented with us looking at the corner of the box, we should be drawing it in 3 point perspective - meaning with 3 concrete vanishing points, each set of lines converging towards a real point in space, even if that point is far off and the convergence is gradual.

I think this diagram will help you understand what I mean better. So, 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 as well.

I would also encourage you to continue working on adding extra line weight to your boxes. 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 taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute it the mark 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 never be used to correct or hide mistakes. You can also read more about this here.

Before moving onto lesson 2 I am going to ask you to draw 20 additional boxes. I will mainly be looking to see if your sets of parallel lines are converging towards their shared vanishing point, as I described above. You will also apply extra line weight to every box. Make sure you visit all of the links I have left you and reread the instructions frequently to be sure you are following the steps correctly. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Next Steps:

20 Additional boxes as described in the critique.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
4:35 AM, Sunday December 20th 2020

Thank you for the in-depth critique. Looking back, I was surprised at how isometric/oblique I did make those first boxes. I’ve tried making these new ones more in three-point perspective. I was surprised to see how much boxes in the real field of vision are distorted by a phone camera.

I look forward to seeing if these are improved.

Here is link for the new upload: http://imgur.com/gallery/33DX4Ve

Thanks again.

7:15 PM, Sunday December 20th 2020

Apart from the first box, which looks a little too close to parallel on all sides, you have shown a good improvement. Your sets of lines are doing a better job of converging towards their shared vanishing points and your extra line weight is blending well with your original marks.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete and you can now move onto lesson 2.

Good luck!

Next Steps:

Continue to lesson 2!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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