250 Box Challenge

8:07 PM, Saturday March 7th 2020

250 Box Challenge - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/r8t6DyR.jpg

Post with 7 views. 250 Box Challenge

Hi there! Here's my 250 boxes :)

I didn't think about numbering them, I would just put a quantity per a page at the top right corner and then continue to the next page. Unfortunately, it's too late now to number each of the boxes because I don't remember which were first and which were second and so on. Sorry, I had no clue that they needed to be numbered although it would totally make sense. I hope that's ok to submit them like that.

Anyways, thanks in advance for a feedback!!

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4:36 PM, Monday March 9th 2020

Well... I guess we'll work under the assumption that you have them in the correct order there - but yeah, having them numbered (or at least the pages themselves numbered) would have been immensely helpful. Unfortunately now we can only hope that we're not mistaken here, as that may make my critique somewhat less relevant.

All in all, your work has been done fairly well, though a few things that I'd like to mention for you to keep in mind. All in all, the quality of your linework is quite good with strong, confident lines that show no signs of wobbling or hesitation upon their execution. I am noticing a few places where you were in the habit of correcting mistakes - this is something you should generally avoid moving forwards, as it merely draws attention to the places where things went wrong, and in the context of a larger illustration, this would give up control over how you guide the viewer's eye through a composition. Generally speaking, it's not a great habit to maintain, and getting used to leaving mistakes alone is usually far better.

Now, you do show improvement over the course of this set with the consistency of your lines' convergences (in the cases where you do introduce convergence), but what I'm noticing is that you've entirely neglected to include boxes with more dramatic foreshortening - that is, where the vanishing points are closer, and the convergences are much more rapid. The difference between shallow and dramatic foreshortening is explained here. You'll notice that at the end of that section, I mention:

I want you to make sure you practice both of these, perhaps with a bit more of a lean towards the shallower foreshortening.

Both are very important, and help develop your understanding of space. In a number of these boxes, I can see a general focus being upon actually eliminating the convergences altogether - drawing your boxes such that all vanishing points are at infinity, and that the lines themselves when drawn on the 2D page are parallel. This isn't ideal - even when drawing boxes with shallow foreshortening, I still want you to be aware of a far off vanishing point, and maintain a slight convergence in your sets of lines, rather than tossing the main focus of the challenge aside altogether. I'd be more concerned about this if you'd done this for all of your boxes, but it seemed to be a case by case matter.

The key takeaway here is that even if your vanishing point is extremely far away, it's important that you think about it as a tangible point in space, and that you consider the fact that your lines are converging with one another even if just a little bit. Having had a more even spread of boxes with shallow and dramatic foreshortening would have helped retarget this focus for you, so it's unfortunate that you skipped that part of the instructions.

Now, you certainly have completed the challenge, and I am indeed very happy with your overall linework. As such, I'm going to mark this challenge as complete, but I want you to be sure to incorporate this kind of freely rotated box exercise into your regular warmup routine, giving yourself ample opportunity to draw plenty of boxes with varied foreshortening (line extensions included), so as to continue to familiarize yourself with the concept of a vanishing point.

Next Steps:

Go ahead and move onto lesson 2 - but again, incorporate these freely rotated boxes with both shallow and dramatic foreshortening into your regular warmup routine (along with the exercises from lesson 1).

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:22 AM, Tuesday March 10th 2020

Thank you so much! I will practice more with maintaining convergence (shallow and dramatic) in my warmups and try not to correct my mistakes when it went poorly.

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