View Full Submission View Parent Comment
0 users agree
7:03 AM, Saturday May 9th 2020

Hi there Torben, I'll be handling your 250 box challenge critique.

First of all good news I can tell you have improved over the course of the challenge.

Your convergences have become more consistent and you end up with diverging lines less often. Your line work has also improved and things are looking tidier and more confident.

I do have a couple concerns though, while completing 250 boxes you didn't experiment much with varying shapes and foreshortening. You had more variety in the beginning and as the challenge went on it decreased, remember that building a strong understanding requires experimenting and creating multiple examples only benefits yourself.

So while you've shown improvement I can't confidently judge whether you understand working in 3D space, or just understand how to rotate the few boxes you've created.

With that being said I can't confidently move you on to lesson 2 just yet. I'd like you to draw 20 more boxes, experiment with shapes and foreshortening, have some with the vanishing point closer and see how the box reacts, try drawing thinner or wider boxes that aren't as cube like and see if you can keep your convergences consistent whether the vanishing point is near, or further away where lines get closer to parallel.

Remember we don't expect perfection, and you have shown improvement in ability already. I know being told to draw more boxes can be discouraging to people as the challenge is already hard on one's willpower, but showing not only the person critiquing your work but yourself that you understand the concepts being taught here is important.

After you draw your 20 additional boxes, add them to your imgur album, or create a new one and reply to this post with a link and I'll take a look. From there we can either move you on or address any weaknesses you may still have.

Next Steps:

Draw and submit 20 more boxes with more variety in terms of foreshortening and shape.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
10:06 AM, Sunday May 10th 2020

Thankyou for your critique. I still struggle sometimes with the lines that I draw through but I can feel that I gained a lot more confidence from that challenge. Here is the link for my other 20 boxes: https://imgur.com/a/58vzRve

7:20 PM, Sunday May 10th 2020

Great work, I'm glad to see your understanding of 3D space has improved overall and your improved confidence is very noticeable.

When doing boxes as a warm up in the future make sure you include some variety like you did in these last 20 attempts to get comfortable with foreshortening.

You may find this example helpful. It shows how lines in a set behave with their relative vanishing point, and how the further away the vanishing point is the closer to parallel the lines become. The 2 inner lines will nearly always be the same, but the outer 2 can vary quite a bit.

I can comfortably move you on to Lesson 2 now.

Good luck!

Next Steps:

Keep doing previous exercises as warm ups.

Move on to lesson 2.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.

Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.

These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.

We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.

Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.