10:53 PM, Sunday July 3rd 2022
Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
Not only does the challenge help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. 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.
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You're doing a good job of experimenting with orientations, and proportions. 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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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.
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Early in the challenge there were times that you were placing your vanishing point between the viewer and your boxes. This leads to you extending your lines in the wrong direction and your boxes becoming distorted because your lines are actually diverging from where the vanishing point would actually be. Here's a guide I wrote that will hopefully help you place your vanishing points and line extensions more consistently. If you need some examples of it occurring you can look at boxes 1, 2, 4, and 6 in your submission as well as the examples here.
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Something you need to work on and was encouraged in the challenge instructions is experimenting with rates of foreshortening. Outside of a few outliers nearly all of your vanishing points are extremely close to your boxes and on the page, this leads to your lines converging quite dramatically. While these boxes are technically correct this doesn't really benefit your understanding as much as experimenting would and it creates a smaller window of error. Push your vanishing points further away so that your lines have to become closer to parallel and so that you think about their placement more.
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There are times when your lines converge in pairs rather than as a set. 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.
I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you end up just creating further issues on top of them.
I believe you may have tackled this challenge a bit too hastily seeing as how it was submitted 18 days after your lesson 1 submission, it's quite common for this challenge to take a month with each box taking between 5-10 minutes each.
I'll be asking you to draw 50 more boxes please. Focus on experimenting with different rates of foreshortening, do your best to extend your lines in the correct direction as well. This is also a good opportunity to try applying hatching and line weight as well.
Once you've completed your boxes reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready I'll move you on to the next lesson.
Also one last thing, I noticed you'd left the reason field blank while submitting during the promptathon, you may have missed it. Can you please provide the reason for submitting during the promptathon so we can get a better sense of how well our messaging is working?
I know you can do this and look forward to seeing your work.
Next Steps:
50 more boxes please.