2 users agree
5:03 PM, Saturday August 13th 2022

Hello there, I'll try to give you some review of your 250 Box Challenge.

What you did well:

  • Most of your boxes look believable and it appears that you understand the basic concepts of perspective

  • You hatched planes that are on the front

  • Your lines appear to be fairly straight, good job!

  • You did not redraw lines that went wrong

Things you can work on:

-Many of your boxes have parallel lines and sometime even diverging lines (https://imgur.com/mWLlnYl). Try to make them converge closer, so pick vanishing points that are on the page itself, that makes the boxes more foreshortened and therefore also easier to ghost your lines towards that point. I did not see a lot of extreme foreshortening, so it might be helpful to at least try to experiment and see what happens as you move the VPs closer to the boxes.

  • In most of your boxes one of the lines from the initial Y is perfectly vertical, so try to get some more variance in the orientation of the Y to make more interesting boxes (the process remains the same)

  • You should take more time doing tidy hatchings, your lines should always start at the edge of one plane and ideally not fall short of the plane. Your hatching lines are falling short on both ends, as if floating somewhere inside the plane. Start at one edge and pull through the plane so it touches the other edge. Don't be afraid to overshoot, as that is still better then undershooting

  • It seems you picked the planes which you hatched randomly, that's totally fine, but some boxes are harder to read than others because of that. I always advice to hatch in the plane that covers the inner corner (that is also the biggest most of the time, although not always, depending in the shape of the box) so there is no confusion which plane is in front of the other

  • You could advance your correction lines a bit further so it get's more clear if and where they actually converge. As mentioned before, some of your boxes have parallel ones or even diverging ones, at least it looks like that, it's hard to tell if there is convergence if it only converges slightly and the correction lines are short.

Overall I can see improvement in your boxes as you did this challenge and your boxes appear believable.

Next Steps:

Next up is lesson 2, have fun and don't give up (it's a though one) as it is sure worth it!

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
5:30 PM, Saturday August 13th 2022

Thank you very much for your comments and advice!

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.