250 Box Challenge

3:53 PM, Sunday February 28th 2021

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Here are my 250 boxes! It was a long journey and I feel like I learned a lot. I would greatly appreciate feedback! Also, please let me know in case the link doesn't work or something is missing.

Cheers,

Joanna

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9:31 PM, Sunday February 28th 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!

You appear to have crossed out a few boxes 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 would also recommend that you read this comment by Uncomfortable.

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 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. I recommend that you try adding your extra line weight in no more than 1-2 pases. This diagram should help you better understand how to properly apply your extra line weight.

Extra line weight should never be used to correct or hide mistakes. 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.

I did see that you were checking some of your convergences incorrectly.

Checking your convergences is an important step so you should always take your time and make sure you are extending your sets of lines correctly. Noticing and identifying mistakes is a major part of the learning process. Checking your boxes for mistakes is how you know what areas you need to address so that you get the most out of each exercise.

Your line extensions should extend away from the viewer and towards their implied vanishing point. You should do this for all three sets of lines that make up your box. They should never be coming off of the center of the original Y that you use at the beginning of your construction. Be sure to visit the link for more information and for examples that you can use as reference. You can refer to the diagrams in this link if you are ever confused or uncertain.

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.

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!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:10 PM, Tuesday March 9th 2021

Thank you Scylla for the critique! I see more of my mistakes now, and your hints will surely help me improve. Thanks again, I'm excited to start with the next lesson! :)

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