250 Box Challenge
1:51 AM, Wednesday November 25th 2020
Hello again!
I hope these pages are not too chaotic...
Well, thanks in advance!
Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!
You did a pretty good job on the challenge overall. I can see that you put a lot of work into the challenge and the quality of your mark making improves a good bit as you progressed. You have a good variety of sizes and orientation to your boxes. You also do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!
There are a couple things that I noticed about your boxes. One is that you were not always following the limit of 5-6 boxes per page, which made some of the boxes you drew quite small. The reason for this limit is to allow students to draw their boxes at a large size while still leaving room for their line extensions. Drawing bigger also helps engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills, whereas drawing smaller impedes them. Keep this in mind when you are drawing boxes for your warm ups. You should also make sure that you frequently refer back to the instructions while doing any lesson in order to be sure that you are following the steps correctly and getting the most out of each exercise.
I have also noticed that you were not always applying your line weight correctly. When you go to add weight to a line it is important that you treat the added weight the same way you would a brand new line. That means taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute it the mark blends seamlessly with your original mark. This will allow you to create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines that reinforces the illusion of solidity in your boxes/forms. Extra line weight should never be used to correct or hide mistakes. You can also read more about this here.
With that in mind, I did also see a few areas where you were correcting your mistakes. Just remember that the confidence of the stroke is far and away your top priority. Once your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid mistakes has passed, so all you can really do is push through. Hesitation serves no purpose. Mistakes happen, but a smooth, confident mark is still useful even if it's a little off. Accuracy is something that you will improve on as you continue working through Drawabox and practice ghosting. I would also recommend that you read this comment by Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation.
Finally while your converges do improve overall I think this diagram will help you further develop that skill as you continue through Drawabox. So, when you are looking at your sets of lines you want to be focusing only on the lines that share a vanishing point. This does not include lines that share a corner or a plane, only lines that converge towards the same vanishing point. Now when you think of those lines, including those that have not been drawn, you can think about the angles from which they leave the vanishing point. Usually the middle lines have a small angle between them, and this angle will become negligible by the time they reach the box. This can serve as a useful hint.
Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!
Next Steps:
Continue to lesson 2!
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.
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