Hi there,

congratulations on finishing the 250-Box-Challenge and thanks for submitting, I'll be reviewing your homework. I hope my feedback helps you.

Your work reveals that you had put a lot of focus, energy and time in completing the challenge, even if it was over a very long period of time. Your work came out beautiful, well done!

I structured this critique as follows:

the praises (what you did well) and where you went off and should keep an eye on in the future. In the end I'll give some general pointers/reminders, so you don't forget them

THE PRAISES ( The job you did well in the challenge)

You always drew through your forms and understand how they sit in 3D. Nicely done

You did a great job checking for your mistakes by checking the boxes convergences by extending the lines always from the viewer. You identified where it went wrong and worked on it.

You are able to construct the boxes of various types with different orientation, proportion and foreshadowing with good amounts of convergences. So hats off for that!

I can say that you are building a sense of confidence and patience in drawing your boxes by plotting down the starting and end points of the lines before executing, so thats good job!

If you are concerned about accuracy, I will advise you to leave it there for some time and prioritize confidence first. After we build some confidence, we can work on some accuracy as well.We prioritize confidence and draw lines from our shoulder without thinking about any accuracy there. Our lines will look solid and more appealing, even though they are in inaccurate. Also don't repeat inaccurate lines and try to correct them. It just wastes time where you don't learn anything.

WHERE IT WENT SLIGHTLY OFF? ( Where you should keep an eye on)

In this part I will just point out where it went slightly off. In the coming part I will explain how to avoid them and how you can improve them. I made this part because it will remind us where we are going wrong and it will thereby make us conscious about our mistakes while drawing those boxes.

Of course you had improved throughout the challenge but there are times where some of the set of lines converges at a faster rates than the others resulting in converging in pairs. this point you can definitely work on, in your warm ups.

According to the rule of perspective, all the parallel lines in the 3D world (real world) will appear to converge to a specific VP (vanishing point) on a 2d page. SSo what we can say is that our parallel lines should always converge as a set and not in pairs. They will never diverge from the VP as this will break the rule of perspective. So next time, instead of drawing parallel lines in the boxes, try to consciously think that the parallel lines in the 3d world of box will always converge to a specific vp. These vps can either be staying inside the page (creating more dramatic/foreshadowed boxes) or outside of it (creating shallow boxes) https://imgur.com/mWLlnYl

It's completely and totally normal to have the back corner line slightly off compared to the rest. You should try and work on those as well. They have significantly improved at end of your work, so nice job!

In this challenge, we are estimating where our lines going to converge to a point. As we are humans, it is almost impossible to perfectly estimate where our lines will going to converge thereby resulting in an error. This error will continue to accumulate as we construct the box freely rotated in space. Finally this accumulated error will be thrown to the back corner. So its pretty normal to have the inner back corner come out pretty off.

I want to take a look at this info here; https://i.imgur.com/8PqQLE0.png

In this image we can know that how each line will behave relating to the position from its neighbouring edges and the VP. If the distance between the internal edges and external edges gets reduce more and more they will eventually become parallel to one and another. Alternatively if the distance between the internal corner and the external grow more and more the internal line will also converge. You can also try and start from the back corner if the box is narrower. https://imgur.com/a/DHlA3Jh

These diagram can be pretty hard to understand at first, so if you don't understand it, don't get frustrated, keep reading it from time to time while practicing regularly and it will click eventually.

When you hatch the face of the box facing towards the viewer, make sure to really take your time doing so and ghosted them thoroughly. Same goes for adding line weight around the silouehette, which I would highly advise you to do in our warmups. I didn't do it in mine back then and I still struggle adding line weight, so I wish I would have started sooner with easier subjects.

As far as I can see, you drew digitally. I was really tempted to do the same thing but I decided to follow the course and do it traditionally with fineliner and I think it really improved my confidence. I was really scared of permanent marks and now it's almost weird to draw digitally because I'm so used to thinking before drawing.

I also noticed you sometimes redrew wrong lines. Don't do that! You don't learn anything by repeating the line, so it wastes time you could have spent learning. Instead just mark the correct ending point and use that one for the rest of your lines.

SOME GENERAL STUFF I WISH SOMEONE HAD REMINDED ME BACK THEN

I would highly advise you to include boxes in your warmups and construct 1-2 boxes daily. After some time you will see how your boxes get better and better.

Remember the 50% rule. This challenge takes a lot of time and effort and you'll burn out/lose motivation if you don't do something for yourself as well.

Take your time with the exercises. You'll learn a lot more if you take your time. DaB in general is a marathon and not a sprint. It really helped me to set my goal to "draw x minutes each day" instead of "draw x boxes a day". The amount of boxes you manage during that time will increase the further you get. It also helped me to do DaB at a specific time slot each day.

Make sure to do 5 reviews for every lesson/challenge you upload and get critique on! I know this sounds like a waste of time, but this entire community is built on this review-exchange system. I hope you learn a lot from my critique and you should give the same chance to others.

I have prewritten texts for every lesson and challenge and just go through every point and look if the person did it right or wrong and change the text accordingly. It only takes me 10 minutes max per critique! And you actually learn a lot, because you refresh the knowledge and don't forget certain aspects and I found that I have an easier time spotting my own mistakes in my warmups. So it doesn't only help this community and enables it to be free of charge, but it also helps you.

We all know this challenge was very intimidating. Constructing 250 boxes arbitrarily rotated in 3D is hard and yet you did a great job by keeping persistent till the end with lots of effort, focus, energy and time, well done! Your submission reveals that you did take time to read through the lesson materials, followed the instructions and executed to your best of your ability.

Feel free to move on to lesson 2 and good luck in your artistic journey.