250 Box Challenge
11:24 AM, Monday August 2nd 2021
All criticism is appreciated. Thank you.
Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
Congratulations on completing the box challenge, it's definitely a lot more work than most people expect. Not only does it help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. Be proud of what you've accomplished and that desire you've shown. That being said I'll try to keep this critique fairly brief so you can get working on the next steps as soon as possible.
Things you've done well:
Your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn.
You're patiently adding hatching lines that are intentionally spaced and thought out rather than rushed.
Good work experimenting with different proportions, orientations and rates of foreshortening. Experimenting is an important habit as it helps us deepen our understanding of new concepts, I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.
Overall your convergences are looking more consistent with fewer distorted boxes being created from diverging lines.
Things you can work on:
It doesn't appear like you experiment much with line weight, while not mandatory it does take a while to become comfortable working with it so I'd suggest trying to build up some mileage with it sooner rather than later.
There are times when your lines converge in pairs or you attempt to keep your lines a bit too parallel which results in them diverging. This is an example of lines converging in pairs, and this shows the relation between each line in a set and their respective vanishing point. The inner pair of lines will be quite similar unless the box gets quite long and the outer pair can vary a lot depending on the location of the vanishing point. Move it further away and the lines become closer to parallel while moving it closer increases the rate of foreshortening.
The key things we want to remember from this exercise are that our lines should always converge as a set not in pairs, never diverge from the vanishing point and due to perspective they won't be completely parallel.
Overall while you did make some mistakes your work is looking pretty solid so far with noticeable improvement and with more mileage you'll continue this trend and become more consistent. I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to lesson 2.
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
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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