250 Box Challenge
8:39 AM, Tuesday August 1st 2023
:)
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11:53 PM, Tuesday August 1st 2023
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:
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Your construction lines are looking smooth and confidently drawn.
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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:
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They're not a requirement of the challenge but I recommend practicing applying hatching and line weight in your future work. They're useful tools to learn and the only way to improve is to practice.
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At times you're placing your vanishing point between the viewer and your boxes (boxes 168, 170 and 249 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.
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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 20 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:
20 more boxes please.
8:48 AM, Monday August 7th 2023
Hello, Tofu,
Thanks for your review. You can find it here the 20 boxes: https://imgur.com/a/smehddB .
Please, feel free to request more if this is still not in the desired state.
One thing I want to comment, and I need your guidance on, is the way I drew them this time. For these extra 20, I tried to focus on the vanishing points better. What I did is I traced some ghosted lines until the point, and then worked my way out to create the box.
Previously, on the other 250, I just tried to "imagine" where the point would be and then did the lines. I was trying to practice my spatial thinking with it.
If you compare the results, however, the new 20 are much better - specially the last 5. But it felt like cheating. As I traced to the VPs using the ghosted lines. Is that OK?
7:19 PM, Monday August 7th 2023
These are looking solid and are all extended correctly, good work.
Ghosting like that is fine, you can't always do it if your vanishing points are really far away of course, but as long as you're not explicitly drawing the points you're still having to think about all your lines interact with each other.
I'll be marking your submission complete and move you on to the next lesson.
Keep practicing boxes and previous exercises as warmups and best of luck in lesson 2.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
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