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

It seems you have a lot of comments and questions, I'll be addressing them after the critique so please be patient until then.

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 did well:'

• Good work drawing your construction lines confidently, this keeps your lines smooth and prevents wobbling.

• When hatching you're taking the time to space each line evenly which shows that care and thought is being put into each line. This helps your boxes appear solid and tidy rather than rushed.

• Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge so it's nice to see you tried applying it at least a little bit. Most people need to build up some mileage before they feel comfortable applying it so I always recommend starting early. The sooner you feel comfortable the sooner you see better results.

• You're doing a good job of starting to experiment with orientations, and proportions. Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding. I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.

Things you can work on:

• I'd like you to keep experimenting with rates of foreshortening. At times you end up trying to keep your lines parallel rather than having a clear vanishing point in mind.

• There are cases where you don't extend all 3 sets of your lines which shows a lack of patience and feels like you're trying to complete the challenge faster rather than to the best of your abilities. Boxes 146-150 are examples of this.

• At times (boxes 18, 27, 61, 73, 87, 143 are some of the examples) you're placing your vanishing point between the viewer and your boxes. This leads to you extending your lines in the wrong direction and your boxes becoming distorted because your lines are actually diverging from where the vanishing point would actually be. Here's a guide I wrote that will hopefully help you place your vanishing points and line extensions more consistently. If you'd like some more examples of lines extended in the wrong direction take a look here

• 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 a few mistakes your boxes are improving so far and with more mileage you'll continue to become more consistent. That being said I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to lesson 2.

Now let's tackle some of your comments and questions.

• Everyone starts the course at different skill levels and with different amounts of experience. That being said it's normal for boxes in this challenge to take 10 minutes each or longer to complete. You should be spending as long as reasonably necessary to produce your best work possible (You can spend an hour drawing one box but it doesn't mean it will necessarily be better than 10-20 minutes). This is relevant for all course work, take your time and try your best. When it comes to "How do I get faster?" the answer is simple, you build up more mileage. As you do something more the more comfortable you'll get, the more muscle memory you'll build and the faster you'll naturally become.

• Experimentation is a good habit to build as I stressed in my critique, sometimes things don't work out but you can learn from the mistakes you've made along the way. You mention box 30 being an attempt at experimenting and it's not necessarily incorrect it's just at a very extreme perspective. You would see something like this when attempting to stylize something, using certain camera lenses or if you were trying to convey the scale of something (if you were standing in front of a large building as an example). It would feel less distorted if it was just drawn in 2 point perspective.

• I will quickly point out that you found this exercise got repetitive early on and that's understandable. It's not a fun exercise nor is it meant to be. While people can learn by just doing whatever they want and drawing for fun it tends to be slow. Intentional and focused practice tends to lead to much faster improvement and isn't always as fun as we'd like (and it's why we stress that you should spend half your time drawing for fun). Music is a notable comparison, a lot of the time early on people just have to practice chords and scales to build up muscle memory, most people wouldn't claim that it's a fun exercise but it is one that helps people improve their understanding a lot more than just trying to play random pieces of music. As a final note, part of the reason we encourage people try to hatch and add line weight is that it gives you something else to focus on and improve along with your boxes to help see improvement in multiple areas. Not choosing to do so means you're doing a smaller variety of things so it feels more repetitive.

• "What am I trying to achieve by drawing all of these boxes?" The answer is you're trying to develop a better understanding of 3D space as well as improve your line quality and basic understanding of perspective. You did achieve improvement but there is clearly still room to improve more based on the fact that you were still extending lines in the wrong direction, not thinking of your vanishing points at times, creating boxes with diverging lines etc.

• The urge to finish all of your boxes in one go isn't necessarily grinding, it's just impatience. Say you have 100 boxes left, if you were to spend the average time to make sure they're all good quality (10 minutes each) that's 1000 minutes which is roughly 17 hours. While possible to do in a day, it's not healthy, it's impossible to maintain focus for that long without your work suffering and you risk burn out which can take months to recover from. Even disregarding all of that it takes time for the brain to absorb and adjust to new information and skills which is why typically if you take 2 people and 1 of them practices something for 3.5 hours 1 day a week, and the other person practices for 30 minutes a day the person who practices everyday will see much more consistent improvement than the person who practiced once a week. As for the definition of grinding it's basically when a person does the same thing over and over because they feel it's not "perfect". While there is a time and a place to repeat a process or exercise there has to be intention behind it and rather than the fear of it not being good enough.

• "What do I do with 50 pages of boxes?" Keep them somewhere if you can. At some point everyone feels like they haven't improved, having physical evidence that you can look at from the start of your journey can help fight off that negativity. People tend to forget how bad they actually were when they started something. Or if you really don't want them around then just recycle them, they aren't pretty pictures or works of art they're an exercise to help you improve.

• Not feeling like you procrastinated is good, hopefully you can keep that momentum just don't put all of your focus on improving or you risk burn out as mentioned earlier.

• If you can't focus on the lessons for a bit try to spend at least a bit of time drawing for yourself and for fun, if you can practice your warm ups before doing so to prevent yourself from getting rusty.

• Finally your "ESSENTIAL" question, isn't really essential at all to be brutally honest with you. Uncomfortable does use Lazy Nezumi from what I can recall, but that's not related to this course or your homework.

Alright, I think that covers everything. Going forward I'd like to ask you to please refrain from non-essential commentary and questions in the future. A lot of the questions and commentary boiled down to asking why you had to do something and the blunt answer is because you want to improve, and we ask that you trust us when we say that following the instructions will help you see improvement. It's in no way a slight against you nor is it personal, ultimately it's just the fact that addressing all of it was twice as long as your critique and took much longer than two critiques would take. In order to keep things flowing smoothly please limit your submission to your work and questions related to your understanding of the course material. If you don't understand something we have no issues helping clarify concepts or issues, we're here to help you learn after all.

Hopefully that addresses and questions you had as well as explained the reasoning for why things the way they are. Apologies if the bluntness at the end was upsetting at all, as I said it's just a matter of keeping things running smoothly as possible and not personal.

I hope you'll continue practicing previous exercises and boxes in your warm ups. Good luck with your college assignments and lesson 2.