250 Box Challenge

3:33 AM, Sunday December 13th 2020

250 Box Challenge - Album on Imgur

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Hi! Submitting my 250 box challenge.

Boxes 1 - 181: worked on traditional 3 point perspective, half with the guide, half without

Boxes 182 - 201: worked on 2 point perspective boxes

Boxes 202-250: worked on rotating a cube in 3D space.

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12:19 AM, Tuesday December 15th 2020

Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!

From what I can see your line work is fairly well done and your boxes are coming along well. I can see you made some good improvement with the quality of your mark making. Your lines steadily become straighter and more confident looking as you progressed through the challenge. You have made good progress with adding extra line weight to your boxes, I can see that your extra line weight is doing a better job of blending more seamlessly with your original marks as you progress. You also do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!

I would like to point out where you mentioned drawing your boxes specifically in 2 point perspective. 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 also noticed that for many of your pages you had more than six boxes on the page. Part of the reason for the 5-6 boxes per page rule is so that students have enough room to draw their boxes larger while having room to check their convergences. Drawing bigger also helps engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills, whereas drawing smaller impedes them. This, along with varying your foreshortening and orientations of your boxes will help you get the most out of the exercise.

While your mark making has improved, I do see some areas where you are still hesitating with your mark making. This is likely due to prioritizing your accuracy over creating a smooth, confident looking line.

Just remember that the confidence of the stroke is far and away your top priority. Once your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid mistakes has passed, so all you can really do is push through. Hesitation serves no purpose. Mistakes happen, but a smooth, confident mark is still useful even if it's a little off. Accuracy is something that you will improve on as you continue working through Drawabox and practice ghosting.

Now, while it is important that you use the ghosting method of each mark you make while doing Drawabox one thing you can try to help with ending your marks closer to where you want them is lifting the pen off of the page rather than stopping the motion of your arm. I would also recommend that you read this comment by Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation.

I can see some areas where you were not always applying your extra line weight correctly. 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, which you should apply only to the silhouette of your boxes. I recommend that you try adding your extra line weight in no more than 1-2 pases to better focus on ghosting your extra line weight properly.

Extra line weight should never be used to correct or hide mistakes. You can also read more about this here. Something to keep in mind as well, when you are working through Drawabox you should be employing the ghosting method for every mark you make. This includes the hatching that we sometimes use for our boxes.

Finally while your converges 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!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:10 PM, Monday December 28th 2020

Thanks so much for the tips!!

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