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

Not only does the challenge help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. 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:

• You're doing a good job of experimenting 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:

• You tend to draw fairly small, I'd like you to draw larger in the future ( we do recommend 5-6 large boxes in the instructions as well). Drawing large will help you become more comfortable working from the shoulder and allow you to see any mistakes you've made more clearly.

• You're not following the principles of markmaking introduced in lesson 1. You're relying on making multiple marks quickly rather than taking the time to ghost your lines and then draw them in a single smooth confident mark. This results in work that isn't as tidy as it could be.

• When hatching you want to have both ends of the lines touching an edge of the form they're being drawn on rather than being left floating. Usually when left floating like this it's caused by people hesitating while worrying about accuracy. Remember to take your time to space each line with the ghosting method, and then draw them confidently just like any other line, accuracy will improve with more mileage.

• Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge but I do recommend practicing it in your future attempts (if you are attempting to apply it it gets lost because you're redrawing lines). It's an incredibly useful tool but one that people often require a fair bit of mileage before they feel comfortable applying it. The sooner you start to build up that mileage the sooner you'll see better results.

• At times you're placing your vanishing point between the viewer and your boxes (boxes 70, 89, and 162 are examples of this). 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 need some more examples you can find them here and a simplified guide below.

• I'd like you to experiment with rates of foreshortening more. Currently you tend to keep your lines close to parallel and push your vanishing points far from your boxes. Try bringing your points in closer so that your lines have to converge more dramatically. Remember that experimentation is important.

• 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.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you end up just creating further issues on top of them.

While it's great that you wanted to experiment it kind of came at the cost of not following the instructions as closely as you could have.

I'll be asking you to draw 40 more boxes, focus on extending your lines in the correct direction, following the principles of markmaking, and experimenting with different rates of foreshortening. For the first 20 I'd like you to draw all 3 of your vanishing points explicitly on the page after you've drawn your initial Y shape, this will force you to work with vanishing points closer to your box. For the latter 20 you can go back to the original method which should hopefully be easier an easier task after the first 20.

Once you've completed your boxes reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready I'll move you on to the next lesson.

I know you can do this and look forward to seeing your work.