Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
Congratulations on completing the box challenge, it's definitely a lot more work than most people expect. Not only does it help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. Be proud of what you've accomplished and that desire you've shown. That being said I'll try to keep this critique fairly brief so you can get working on the next steps as soon as possible.
Things you did well:
Your lines are mostly looking smooth and confidently drawn.
You're spacing your hatching lines evenly which shows intention as well as careful planning and helps lead to clean looking work.
Great work experimenting with proportions, orientations and rates of foreshortening. This experimentation will help you develop a better understanding of 3D space and is an important habit to build. I hope you keep experimenting in the future.
Overall your convergences are starting to look more consistent which is a sign your sense of 3D space is coming along.
Things you can work on:
At times it looks like you're trying to apply line weight (which is great if intentional) but it also looks like you're redrawing lines sometimes. Redrawing lines is a bad habit to build, working with our mistakes is important and we can learn a lot from them while redrawing just makes our work look like a mess. If you are applying line weight remember to keep it to only certain key lines, in this case the silhouette of the box and to keep it subtle. You get quite heavy handed at times when you really only need 1 additional line. Like any other line if accuracy is an issue just remember confidence is our priority and accuracy will improve with mileage.
When extending your lines just do so towards your vanishing points, you're doing it in both directions which just makes your work less messier and harder to follow. I don't get the impression you're placing your vanishing points in the incorrect position but just in case you're feeling unsure of how to place them and extend your lines correctly you may want to take a look at this guide I wrote up about how to do so consistently.
There are times when your lines converge in pairs or you attempt to keep your lines a bit too parallel which results in them diverging. This is an example of lines converging in pairs, and this shows the relation between each line in a set and their respective vanishing point. The inner pair of lines will be quite similar unless the box gets quite long and the outer pair can vary a lot depending on the location of the vanishing point. Move it further away and the lines become closer to parallel while moving it closer increases the rate of foreshortening.
The key things we want to remember from this exercise are that our lines should always converge as a set not in pairs, never diverge from the vanishing point and due to perspective they won't be completely parallel.
Overall while you did make a few mistakes your boxes are improving so far and with more mileage you'll continue to become more consistent. That being said I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to lesson 2.
In regards to your question about seeing the ending point of your lines, you don't need too. By applying the ghosting technique you feel where you want your line to end and once you've built up that muscle memory you can draw your line confidently even without needing to see the stopping point. The lines you're not redrawing are looking pretty confident so far, but keep applying the ghosting technique and drawing confidently and you'll see your accuracy will improve as you build up more and more mileage.
Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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