Where should line extensions be placed?

3:46 AM, Saturday August 7th 2021

Fairly simple, in lesson one's "Rough Perspective" assignment and later the 250 box challenge, there is a step in them where you're supposed to use a straight edge to extend your lines in order to check your accuracy; is this line supposed to placed where your actual markings/lines are or where your intended/plotted points are? Both options have their advantages as I see it but I'm unsure which one is better and should to be focused on.

1 users agree
5:53 AM, Saturday August 7th 2021

The exercises require you to extend the lines that you have drawn. This is better then drawing the lines as they should have been.

You have multiple lines per vanishing point so this is better because you have an overall view rather than checking individual lines.

If you drew the lines as they should have been then you have to go back and look at all your box lines individually to see how far off you were. Additionally the box line may be really short thus potentially minimising your error rather than emphasising like extending your own lines would.

Also, on the 250 box lesson your VP will often be off the paper so you won;t have a VP to draw lines too. Therefore you are only actually checking how well your lines converge not how close they are to the VP. This is easier to see by extending your lines.

What you are trying to do is understand how good your estimating is ( and how you have gone wrong ) and extending your own lines highlights your errors better.

All IMO.

3:10 AM, Monday August 9th 2021

I'm a little confused in what you mean, so I'll clarify that I'm asking if when checking where the extension lines (the "using a ruler" part of the assignments) are supposed to center on: the plotted points or the drawn line that (ideally, but is not always, and can be considerably off) would connect those two points.

10:47 AM, Monday August 9th 2021

"Once you're done a whole page, grab a pen of a different colour, or a pencil, or something you can visibly separate from the rest of your work. Using a ruler, take all of your depth lines (those that are meant to converge towards the vanishing point) and extend them to where they intersect with the horizon.

We are not plotting these red lines back to the VP - just to the horizon line. This will show us a concrete idea of how far off we were."

If this is the part you mean it states that you are to extend the depth lines you have drawn back to the horizon. My answer was based on this and emphasising that you need to extend the line you have drawn not the line you wish you had. This applies to 250 boxes too but even more so. It's the lines you have drawn that matters, not the intended one.

The thing that perhaps threw me off was the "considerably off" aspect. I was thinking in terms of missing the vanishing point where that is the accuracy we are trying to improve and it is easy to be considerably off on it.

If much of your ghosting/point to point line drawing is considerably off I would address that first as a separate issue with more ghosting and line drawing practice. If it is just the odd line here or there I would just accept it is what it is and extend it anyway.

Sorry for the confusion.

1 users agree
12:31 PM, Monday August 9th 2021
edited at 12:37 PM, Aug 9th 2021

Put the straight edge along the lines of the box you drew and draw that line - wherever that line takes you. If there are three sets of 4 lines, each perfectly leading you to three distinct points, congratulations, you are a robot.

For the 250 box challenge you are not supposed to pick vanishing ponts before hand and try to draw to them. Instead, you are meant to develop an intuition about the direction all the edges are converging.

Go to other people's submitted box challenges and look at how they did it.

Here: https://drawabox.com/community/homework/RWRIQI46/1

Or, review the written material and rewatch the video here:

https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes

edited at 12:37 PM, Aug 9th 2021
12:35 PM, Monday August 9th 2021

Agree and much more succinctly put than I managed.

4:28 AM, Wednesday August 11th 2021

For the 250 box challenge you are not supposed to pick vanishing ponts before hand and try to draw to them. Instead, you are meant to develop an intuition about the direction all the edges are converging.

I'm fairly new still to the challenge and have been mentally placing a vanishing point to try and keep the lines on track towards; I'll try to keep this in mind going forward.

I looked at about nine of the submissions and was still not sure about the answer to my question afterwards; but I then read the material a few times and I guess the term extending used to explain the self-check is the closest there is to an answer, so it seems I'll extend through the lines instead of their plots.

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2:38 PM, Saturday August 7th 2021

Hi! If I'm reading your question correctly, the situation that you're having is that you put down points to draw a line as part of step 1 of the ghosting method, but upon actually making the mark, you weren't very accurate and therefore the line did not reach the endpoint you put down. The question is then, should you extend the line connecting the two points you put down, or the line that you actually ended up drawing.

In my opinion (so, not an official answer), I think that extending the intended points is better, since knowing where to put those points accurately is what you are trying to train when training your intuitive understanding of perspective. Trying to fix line accuracy as well by extending the actual lines you've drawn is too much to work on at once, so it probably makes training your sense of perspective less effective.

3:12 AM, Monday August 9th 2021

Yeah, that's what I thought as well, it's just a little confusing since the examples surrounding line extensions are all perfect-case scenarios. I'll work on extending the intended lines for the work and maybe place a little more time into training my final lines in the warmup exercises to hopefully alleviate the issue as I continue.

0 users agree
5:45 PM, Sunday August 15th 2021

Extend through the plotted points.

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There seems to be a bunch of conflicting opinions here, so I'll reason mine briefly.

The point of the exercise is to be able to estimate convergence without actually drawing the lines all the way. And to correct yourself if you're estimating the lines at too far (i.e. going beyond vp) or narrow of an angle (i.e. falling short of vp)

Whether you are able to nail the lines exactly the way you want to (i.e. through the points you plot) is an entirely different problem - and there's a different exercise for that. Extending the lines you didn't even intend to be the way they are, seems quite pointless to me.

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tldr; the point is to be able to estimate convergence better, whether you can draw it with accuracy is a different matter entirely.

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