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8:22 PM, Thursday February 4th 2021

Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!

You did a good job on the challenge overall.

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 have made good progress with adding extra line weight to your boxes, I can see that your extra line weight is doing a better job of blending more seamlessly with your original marks as you progress. 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!

I did see that for a few of your boxes, you drew them quite small. Part of the reason for the 5-6 boxes per page rule is so that students have enough room to draw their boxes larger while having room to check their convergences. By drawing your boxes very small you limit your own ability to execute your lines from the shoulder confidently, which affects the quality of your mark making. Drawing bigger also helps engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills, whereas drawing smaller impedes them. It isn't a problem if your line extensions end up touching other boxes on the page so long as the boxes themselves do not touch or overlap. This should give you enough room to draw your boxes at a larger, more useful size.This, along with varying your foreshortening and orientations of your boxes will help you get the most out of the exercise.

For some of your boxes, you appear to have purposely tried to keep your sets of lines parallel on the 2D page, drawing them all to an "infinite" vanishing point. As explained in this section, because these boxes are oriented with us looking at the corner of the box, you should be drawing your boxes in 3 point perspective - meaning with 3 concrete vanishing points, each set of lines converging towards a real point in space, even if that point is far off and the convergence is gradual. At no point in the instructions does it state that you should draw your boxes without any foreshortening. All of the boxes you draw will have some foreshortening even if the convergence is very gradual. The circumstances in which vanishing points go to “infinite” as discussed in lesson 1 are only in specific orientations that run parallel to the viewer. In this exercise we are working with completely random rotations and so those cases are exceedingly rare. You can also watch this video I made where I demonstrate how I approach drawing boxes.

To clarify, when I say "sets of parallel lines" or refer to your sets of lines as parallel, I am referring to lines that are parallel in 3d space not parallel on the page. If you remember from lesson one, the core principle of perspective is that when we draw a 3d form on a flat surface those lines that are parallel in 3d will now converge towards a shared vanishing point on the page.

Which means your sets of lines will not appear perfectly parallel on the page. Think about how those lines converge, do not purposely try to keep them parallel on the page.

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.

Before moving onto lesson 2, I am going to have you draw 20 additional boxes.

For these boxes you will do the following:

  • Use the ghosting method for every mark you make, including hatching and extra line weight

  • Apply extra line weight in a single pass along the entire silhouette of your boxes

  • Draw all of your boxes in 3pt Perspective

  • 5 boxes per page maximum

  • Check all of your convergences as per the instructions

I will mainly be looking at your boxes to make sure your sets of lines are not being kept purposefully parallel. Make sure you visit every link I have left for you and reread the challenge instructions in their entirety before beginning your revisions.

Next Steps:

20 additional boxes as described in the critique.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:27 PM, Sunday February 7th 2021
edited at 4:45 PM, Feb 7th 2021

https://imgur.com/gallery/YmNYYRW

Hi and many thanks for our critique.

I did the additional 20 boxes and three more to make up for nr.256, 269 and 270.

edited at 4:45 PM, Feb 7th 2021
6:24 PM, Sunday February 7th 2021

It looks like you did a good job here. I can see that you are following all the steps and your sets of lines are doing a better job of converging towards their shared vanishing points!

You appear to have crossed out a box you made and replaced them. For future reference, while working through Drawabox we do not cross out or attempt to cover up our mistakes. Mistakes happen. It is important to recognize when a mistake is made and why. Then, we move onto the next step. You should not start over or redo work unless a TA or Uncomfortable has told you to in an official critique.

I will go ahead and mark this lesson as complete and you can now move onto lesson 2!

Next Steps:

Continue to lesson 2!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:38 PM, Sunday February 7th 2021

I understand you. Thanks again.

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