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250 Box Rubric

12:22 AM, Friday February 9th 2024

I'm 40 boxes into my challenge, and so far I'm finding it mildly enjoyable.

Where I'm struggling is improving from page to page. I do the boxes, trace the lines, then look at the colorful rays blasting out of my boxes and try my hardest to figure out what I need to change for the next round, but can't.

I'm not really looking for a specific critique on specific pages (hence why I didn't upload any). What I'd love is some kind of a rubric, something like: "if the lines look like this, consider making these changes".

Has anyone put something like that together? I suppose I could dig through a million 250 box critiques, identify patterns in the lines, and see what the feedback tends to be for each general category of mishap. That sounds like a ton of work, and time that I could be spending drawing 210 more boxes (split, of course, with other drawing I enjoy).

I just wanted to see if this was work anyone had already done. Or work that someone who's being paid to critique might be able to do. It would, at least for my particular brain, be very helpful in figuring out how to adjust from page to page.

Thanks!

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5:29 AM, Friday February 9th 2024

I can only offer the general process I've been running through and issues I've been struggling with. After I finish a page I'm generally asking myself the following questions in no particular order:

1. Are your marks well executed? Did you miss, fall short, or overshoot the points you were aiming for?

Typically I have some mistakes here, but at this point in my journey I'm not too hung up on it; this will improve over time. Just draw confidently and try to draw from the shoulder.

2. Are your marks well planned? Does the box have any strange proportions or misaligned corners/edges?

If anything stands out in this way, something went terribly wrong. At this point, I should be taking enough time to choose the locations and orientations of my corners appropriately. If this is a problem, it's usually because I rushed the process after creating the initial "Y" and didn't mark enough "potential" points when deciding "where am I going to put this corner so that my edges converge and the faces of my box are appropriate sizes?". If the boxes are oddly shaped that tells me I should have spent more time in the planning phase.

3. Are your 3 sets of 4 colored lines converging well? In particular, how much faster do the inner-two colored lines converge compared to the outer two? Do any lines diverge at all?

Usually when I make errors at this stage, what I see is my inner-two lines will either coverge with each-other way too early, or diverge from each-other (and converge with the outer edges) too early. The edges likely won't all converge at the same point, but I don't think that's the goal - we're approximating here. I think the goal is to make it so that the 2 or more points that they do converge to are far enough away from the box that the colored lines don't actually intersect. If this is a consistent problem, it might help to stick with shallower foreshortening.

I've found it helpful to, before drawing any edges, ghost through and beyond them (as if I were drawing where the colored lines would go, without marking the page) and check loosely how accurately each line in the set converges with each other line in the set. This means I'm making 6 comparisons (4 choose 2 = 6) for each colored set:

i. front edge close to me + front edge far from me;

ii. front edge close to me + back edge far from me;

iii. front edge close to me + back edge close to me;

iv. front edge far from me + back edge far from me;

v. front edge far from me + back edge close to me;

vi. back edge far from me + back edge close to me.

Yes this is tedious, but if you're looking for specific areas to improve and your covergences are off, this is a good place to start. Take your time with each comparison. If you planned well enough and are executing your mark as intended, then the lines should converge well enough. Remember, we aren't looking for perfection here, we're just looking to develop and improve our intuitive understanding of 3D space. "Well enough" for our purposes really is good enough.

This is all probably very obvious but hopefully you found something I said useful, if not then I'm sorry for wasing your time lol. Good luck and remember to have fun!

8:10 AM, Sunday February 18th 2024

It's not obvious! This is all very helpful, I think. I'll have to print it out and have it with me for my next round so I can try to think about it while I'm in process. It's so much to think about!

I really appreciate you taking the time to think this through and write it all out.

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