Welcome back! Jumping right into your treasure chest challenge, you're definitely leveraging and demonstrating very strong spatial skills here, so my critique is going to focus on how we can actually think about the design of these objects. What we'll discuss here should help you identify the kinds of detail/information you might want to add to your designs, given their individual requirements and the problems they're meant to solve.

What I'm seeing from your work here actually shows that your design sense is developing nicely as well, but the matter of where and how it's employed - and most importantly why - is what we're going to address, and we'll break it down into a few different subsections:

• Thickness

• Adherence

• Materials

Starting with thickness, you're actually handling this quite well for the most part. It comes down to always forcing ourselves to think about how thick each individual element we add to our designs/constructions are, and generally avoiding making things paper-thin (by neglecting to define their side plane).

Here are some notes I've added to one of your pages to this effect. Note that I'm being pretty nitpicky here - for the most part you've done a good job of defining the thickness of your objects, as I noted above, and the only thing that comes up fairly often is filling in your side planes instead of using your filled areas of solid black for cast shadows exclusively. This however is, while being one of the rules/principles we follow in this course, still only specific to the limitations imposed by working in pen, with solid black/white rather than a range of colours, and thus is not necessarily going to apply when branching out into your own work.

Next, adherence. This mainly addresses how different objects are adhered to one another - basically how they're fastened or stuck to each other. This can be done with glue, nails, rivets, welding, and a ton of other things, but the important point here is to ask yourself questions to figure out. Mainly, what kinds of adhesive technology would the people making this object have access to? Is this made in the modern day, or is this an ancient thing made before the advent of glue? Glue and welding are really the main options for a sort of invisible adhesive (although even welding has its visible traces), so if those aren't options, then you should be considering where you might want to add signs to convey to the viewer how the elements are secured together.

Here's an example.

Now, you definitely have a lot of chests here with clearly defined rivets/nails/etc. but there are plenty of others where they're left out. That isn't inherently wrong, but it does suggest that you may be thinking of them purely from a decorative standpoint, whereas thinking about these things in terms of the purpose they serve in the world itself can really expand your visual vocabulary.

Lastly, materials. This is more about considering what the properties of the materials used in the construction of the object are, and how they stand up to time. Like the question of adherence, this requires an amount of understanding of the context in which the object was produced, in terms of technology. For example, many chests will have that curved lid built out of individual boards secured together with metal bands. It is possible to create a single curved piece of wood instead of using separate slats, but it's not easy to do, and not all cultures would necessarily have had access to that as an option. They also may not choose to do it anyway, because it may be visually pleasing but not as structurally sound (I don't actually know, but these are the kinds of things designers have to think about, and in some cases, even do research into).

Wear and tear also falls under this category - wood rots if it's not well taken care of, it gets nicked and scratched, etc. So think about how long the object's been around, how well it's been cared for, and how sturdy the materials themselves are.

At its core, design is about identifying the problem you're looking to solve, and including the information for the viewer to understand how that problem is being solved. We don't have to draw every single rivet, every scratch, etc. - but we do need to make sure we know where they would be, and include enough of them so the viewer can understand what you're trying to communicate.

With that, I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete. Your constructions are great, and you've done a good job exploring these different designs, and expanding your visual library by working with references. Hopefully my feedback here will help you direct your attention to continue improving your design sense. In addition to it, I'd also recommend that you watch this video.