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8:16 PM, Sunday May 10th 2020
Hey there fdottori, congratulations on finishing 250 boxes! This is no small feat and you should feel proud. I'll be going over your boxes so let's get started.
You have made some excellent progress here. Your sense of form and space has improved as well as your overall line quality. You did a good job keeping your boxes large and varying the orientations and rates of convergences. Your lines and hatching are neat, indicating you took your time which is a goal for our students. Often times students get a little rushy doing tedious things like boxes and drawing is such a mental game we look to make sure students are able to handle these things with patience and composure.
In terms of your convergences, you made a lot of progress the ability to track your parallel lines to the vanishing point consistently but there's still some room for improvement. Uncomfortable has made this infographic to further explain how to look at and think about parallel lines in perspective so give this a read and if you have any questions let me know, but I will touch on the major points here.
It all starts with our mindset in how we look at parallel lines. That is, they are an ensemble all related to one another by the vanishing point. As their VP moves, the angles between the lines change - further away reduces the angles and vice versa. This means that we must account for all parallel lines simultaneously as we draw. Often times, students will draw a box one plane at a time focusing on the lines and making sure all the convergences are good and then moving on to the next plane and working on that plane with no regard to the lines already put down. This is why we often end up with multiple points of convergence instead of one. It takes some time and practice to "step back" and view all the lines simultaneously but once you start to practice it things start to click into place and you won't need to be distracted trying to get lines to go to a back corner or anything else.
So with that, your box challenge is complete. You followed all of the directions and showed major growth throughout. Just because you finished the challenge doesn't mean you should neglect boxes. The next few lessons are very organic heavy so you won't be drawing boxes much so make sure you do them in your warm ups because you don't want to be rusy come lesson 6 and 7. Keep up the good work and we'll see you next time.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
PureRef
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.