250 Box Challenge
7:44 PM, Sunday October 10th 2021
Ignore my earlier post I forgot to actually select it as homework submission
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6:22 PM, Wednesday December 29th 2021
Congratulations on finishing the 250 boxes challenge, Retsamoomeht! It was an arduous task, but you pushed through and came out victorious in the end. I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and for your effort, today I'll be looking over your work, without further ado, let's get into it.
What you've done well
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You started off extending your lines in the wrong direction, but very quickly you fixed this and started extending them correctly.
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Your lines are looking smooth and confidently drawn. You're making good use of the ghosting method.
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You've got a nice variation of box sizes and proportions.
What to improve upon
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You didn't add lineweight around the silhouette of your boxes. While it is optional, it's great practice for superimposed lines, which become very important for Lesson 3 onwards, so it's good to get as much practice as you can as early as possible.
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Your hatching is haphazardly done throughout the entire challenge. This is very common as students become impatient once they finish their page and wish to simply move on. However, you've drawn 250 boxes, what is taking a minute more to make sure it's nice and clean? Not only will ghosting your hatching lines and making sure that they're nice and tidy build patience and discipline, it's great extra practice.
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You struggle a lot with your inner corners and diverging lines, as well as lines converging in pairs instead of in a set of 4. This is another common mistake that students face. Here is a video by Scyllastew, it outlines a useful method of using dots to estimate the convergences before committing to a line, which helps create a less distorted box. And here is a diagram showing the relation between each line in a set, as you can see, the inner lines will be very similar unless the box is long, while the outer lines can vary a lot depending on the vanishing point.
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Similar looking boxes, while it seems you attempted a variety of box sizes and shapes, you still stuck mostly with shallow perspective when you could have used some of your boxes to attempt more dramatic foreshortening.
Final Thoughts
Overall, you committed a few mistakes, but throughout the entirety of the challenge your boxes have improved, and I have no doubt that if you continue practicing them during your warm ups you'll improve even further.
I'll be marking this lesson as complete, feel free to move on to Lesson 2.
Next Steps:
Don't forget to keep practicing these exercises during your warm ups!
Move on to Lesson 2.
7:15 PM, Saturday January 1st 2022
Putting aside the fact I almost hit report instead of reply by accident-
Thanks for taking the time to look at all those boxes! I'll make sure to at least do some superimposed during my warmups, as to compensate for having not done that.
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Staedtler Pigment Liners
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).