Congratulations on completing the 250 Box Challenge! You did really well on the challenge and I can see you made a lot of progress with your mark making.
When I compare your early boxes with your final pages I can see a lot of improvement in your mark making. Your lines are straighter and more consistent overall. The weight you add to your lines is smoother and blends more seamlessly with the original mark than before. You also do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!
The main thing I would recommend is that you try experimenting with the size and foreshortening. Many of your boxes tend to lean more towards being very square and with shallower foreshortening, as mentioned here.
Finally while your convergences do improve overall I think this diagram will help you further develop that skill as you continue through Drawabox. 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.
Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!
Next Steps:
Continue to lesson 2!
Thanks for the feedback!
For the convergances, do you have any other suggestions on how to visualize the angles? One thing I noticed is that things might be ok for 3 of the 4 lines for a single VP, but I get locked into drawing the 4th line a certain way because other lines in the box are already slightly off. It's the cumulative errors that were talked about in the instructional material for boxes and I'm still not sure what a good technique is on how to visualize that. Does it just come with more practice?
Continued practice will help you the most with this issue. What I recommend is spending more time on the planning phase of your construction. In this video that I made you can see how I am planning and plotting out all of the lines in a given set at the same time and taking the time to adjust them when I can see that they are not going to converge consistently with the other lines.
Even in my example video I don't nail this. But consistent practice will help you cross that gap.
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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