250 Box Challenge
1:52 AM, Thursday May 6th 2021
Here are my 250 boxes, took a lot longer than I was expecting, thank you for reviewing those :)
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11:15 PM, Friday May 7th 2021
Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!
I can see you made some good improvement with the quality of your mark making. Your lines steadily become straighter and more confident looking as you progressed through the challenge. You drew your boxes at a pretty good size and with a variety of orientations and foreshortening. You also start to do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!
While your mark making has improved, I do see that you still hesitate in some areas. This is likely due to prioritizing your accuracy over creating a smooth, confident looking line. 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. If the line is wrong, we leave it and move onto the next step. Accuracy is something that you will improve on as you continue working through Drawabox and practice ghosting.
Now, while it is important that you use the ghosting method of each mark you make while doing Drawabox one thing you can try to help with ending your marks closer to where you want them is lifting the pen off of the page rather than stopping the motion of your arm. You can do this with extra line weight as well. I would also recommend that you read this comment by Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation.
I noticed that you still struggle a bit with applying your extra line weight. 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 employing the ghosting method here as well. You should be taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute your extra line weight, it is done confidently and so that it 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 be applied to the silhouette of your boxes, as shown here. I recommend that you try adding your extra line weight in no more than 1-2 pases so that you can easily identify mistakes in your work. This diagram should help also you better understand how to properly apply your extra line weight.
Something to keep in mind as well, when you are working through Drawabox you should be employing the ghosting method for every mark you make. This includes the hatching that we sometimes use for our boxes.
Finally while your converges do improve overall I think this diagram will help you as well. 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!
6:35 AM, Saturday May 8th 2021
Hi ScyllaStew,
Thank you so much for your critique. I think it is spot on and gives me great answers and action items.
I've been trying to course correct some lines when I notice (too late) that they're going to miss their mark so I end up slowing down the pen and change direction :( I will really try to stop doing that and just commit to the line once the pen is on the paper. Thank you for sharing that Umcomfortable comment about 'hesitation' makes perfect sense.
I've been wondering whether or not line weight and hatching should be done using the same method than the other marks. You just clarified this for me. I was adding lineweight very slowly mostly with my wrist and that's why it comes out wobbly, I was trying to do this to be precise but I agree it breaks the 'solidity' of the boxes. The hatching was done with single lines from the shoulder but I was not ghosting them.
Thank you!
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