250 Box Challenge
3:29 PM, Friday November 20th 2020
Been meaning to finish this sooner but had to work on this around my job and travel. Pages 7 and 35 are the only ones out of order which I have included at the end of the posts.
Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!
From what I can see your line work is well done and your boxes are coming along well. When I compare your early boxes to your later ones I can see that you made some good progress with the quality of your mark making. Your lines are steadily looking straighter and more confident overall.
One thing I notice about your boxes is the way you applied your extra line weight. You went a bit too heavy for many of your boxes. I would recommend that you try adding your extra line weight in a single pass in your future warm ups. 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. 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 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.
Before moving onto lesson 2, I am going to have you draw 10 additional boxes. For these boxes you will apply extra line weight to each one in a single pass. Make sure you read the links that I have left you and keep in mind what I have said about prioritizing your accuracy over creating a smooth, confident looking mark. I will also be looking to see if your sets of parallel lines are doing a better job of converging towards their shared vanishing points. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
Next Steps:
10 Additional boxes as described in the critique.
[https://imgur.com/a/mRVn0jn][https://imgur.com/a/mRVn0jn]
Thanks for reviewing!! Much appreciate your time to go over my boxes. Still having a hard time making sure my lines converge to the vanishing point.
Sorry try this link
This is a good improvement. Your lines are looking much straighter and more confident.
One thing before I send you off to lesson 2. Make sure that you are using a variety of foreshortening and orientations when you are practicing your boxes. Many of the boxes you drew for the challenge and your revisions had very shallow foreshortening. Varying your boxes is one of the ways that you will get the most out of your warm ups.
You can read more about this here.
Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!
Next Steps:
Continue to lesson 2!
Michael Hampton is one of my favourite figure drawing teachers, specifically because of how he approaches things from a basis of structure, which as you have probably noted from Drawabox, is a big priority for me. Gesture however is the opposite of structure however - they both exist at opposite ends of a spectrum, where structure promotes solidity and structure (and can on its own result in stiffness and rigidity), gesture focuses on motion and fluidity, which can result in things that are ephemeral, not quite feeling solid and stable.
With structure and spatial reasoning in his very bones, he still provides an excellent exploration of gesture, but in a visual language in something that we here appreciate greatly, and that's not something you can find everywhere.
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