I had to use several Imgur albums, because Imgur would upload a blank page if I uploaded too many images. I hope none of my images got left out since there are a few. I had pens and highlighters run out of ink during the challenge, so there may be inconsistencies.
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:
Your construction lines are looking smooth and confidently drawn.
You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening. 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. Drawing large will help you become more comfortable working from the shoulder and allow you to see any mistakes you've made more clearly.
It's not a requirement of the challenge but I recommend practicing applying hatching in your future work. It's a useful tool to learn and the only way to improve is to practice.
Fairly regularly you're placing your vanishing point between the viewer and your boxes (boxes 219, 220, 22, 237 and 238 are examples of this). This leads to you extending your lines in the wrong direction and your boxes becoming distorted (if the lines are converging and not parallel) because your lines are actually diverging from where the vanishing point would actually be. Remember that your vanishing points are always going to be aligned with your starting Y, you should never have to guess which direction you need to extend your lines. If you aren't sure how to utilize your starting Y to do this I recommend checking how Uncomfortable does so in the video 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.
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.
I'll be asking you to draw 30 more boxes please. Focus on extending your lines consistently in the correct direction.
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.
Next Steps:
30 more boxes please
Hello, I'm a little confused by what you mean by "placing the vanishing point between the viewer and your boxes."
Should all the vanishing points be off the page, to create slow convergence? I'm trying to get all of the lines to meet at one vanishing point, but it's difficult to do with an "invisible" vanishing point that is not on the page, especially for the lines "inside" the box (the ones that are visible with "x-ray vision.")
Hi there! Tofu's moving onto bigger and better things, so I'm taking over his revisions, as well as questions posed to him.
When referring to "placing the vanishing point between the viewer and your boxes", what Tofu meant was that your line extensions were extended towards the viewer on at least one axis, rather than consistently ensuring that they're extending away from the viewer, off into the distance.
Looking at 214 on this page, the purple lines are extending towards the viewer, while the yellow and pink ones are extended away. If you are having trouble identifying which direction you should be extending your lines, you can employ the methodology explained here to determine which direction is correct based on the initial Y used to construct the box.
As to your other question, we want students to be vary their rates of foreshortening throughout the last 150, which is what your additional 30 boxes should follow. This means that you'll be including an even mix of boxes with vanishing points closer to the box (these will more often fall within the bounds of the page, though of course we're still not actually marking where they are), and boxes with vanishing points thrown much farther away.
These each have factors that make them both easier and more difficult than the other. When our vanishing points are positioned closer to the viewer, it's easier to estimate that convergence, but it's also much easier to see when they're off at a glance. When our vanishing points are much further away, it's harder to estimate that convergence, but similarly there's much more leeway for mistakes we might make, and a wider range of results will still look "correct".
Ultimately the issue you're encountering with estimating convergences far off the page is a big part of what this exercise is about. It forces us to focus more on the way in which the lines we're drawing are oriented, and how they behave relative to one another, rather than always focusing on the vanishing point, which may simply not be somewhere you can easily mark it out in the majority of cases. This is explained in more detail in the 250 box challenge overview video (at the beginning of the challenge instructions), specifically in the section titled "All About Judging Convergences" at 4:48. That said, I do recommend that you rewatch the video in its entirety, to refresh your memory on key aspects of the challenge, since I imagine it's been a good while and your recollection of those points may be rusty.
Okay, thank you. I've started the extra boxes, should I include line extensions like during the challenge?
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
On the flipside, they tend to be on the cheaper side of things, so if you're just getting started (beginners tend to have poor pressure control), you're probably going to destroy a few pens - going cheaper in that case is not a bad idea.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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