250 Box Challenge
6:44 PM, Thursday February 24th 2022
Wow...
I did all of them, and in fact, I think I miscounted and ended up with two pages more than 250.
That being said, at the start I had planned to do 3 pages a day for 5 days a week. This goes to show what I know about boxes. I soon found out that each box would take about 10 minutes each if I wanted to plan, ghost, and execute correctly- or at least correctly enough. Being 6 boxes per page for most of them, it was about 1 hour per page. If I wanted to apply the 50/50 rules, I realized that three hours of boxes and 3 hours of "fun draw" was not going to be feasible to say the least.
That being said, I was able to figure out a few things along the way- these are a few of the highlights:
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Ghosting:: That ghosting 10 times seems to be my preference. I tried about 5 times, then 8 times, but found that 10 was a nice number. I found that my drawing surface matter
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Drawing Surface: It matters. There were times that drawing smooth lines were hindered by my desktop surface. Once I slid a piece of paper under my hand and paper, my lines became better. Whenever I forgot, my lines would become more wobbly.
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Time of Day: I first started drawing boxes in the afternoon, but soon found that I did not have enough energy to accomplish the task and do the 50/50 rule. I switched it to my morning activity and I found that I could concentrate better and could have straighter lines.
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Dots: I found were a very important feature. I started learning out to use them to measure my lines to the invisible vanishing point, especially when I began to place some of them off the page.
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Proportion: Although not always apparent, I started discovering how to make those boxes more and more consistently proportionate, and in turn how to get that back dot better placed. I started looking at the relationship between my initial "Y" lines, how long they were when compared to another that will run along the same face. This way I could us these comparisons as a sort of ratio when drawing and aligning the other lines that will make up the rest of the face.
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Alignment Check: I stopped committing to drawing the offshoot lines from the "Y" until I used all the information around to make sure that the other visible corners were properly aligned. The first vanishing point gave me two corners of my box. All I had to do was compare it to those two corner dots and the corresponding "Y" parts. From here, if those were aligned correctly (or at least almost so) then the dot in the back became easier to approach. From there I simply found a dot that correctly corresponded to one of the imaginary VP's, then when I compared it to a second VP I had target a probably corner location for that dot. The third VP would triangulate and tell me if my VP is correct or not. If not, it means that one of my lines or out of alignment...sometimes too late afterh having committed to a line.
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50/50 Rule: I had not done this at the start due to my untenable 3 hours stints. When I reduced it to only one hour, and about the same for sketch time, I saw its value. It helped keep one motivated and sane in an otherwise unforgiving and tedious task from an even crueler taskmaster (cruel in the students perspective, as hard things always seem to a student, but likely necessary in the long run)
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Line Weight: I started figuring out how to make my line weight thicker or thinner, based upon how much of the the required ink tool, and its metallic edge interacted with the paper. Almost as light as I can get with a ballpoint, although not as readily.
I started adding blue and red ink lines at the end only for differentiating between the different boxes. It made their lines much easier to see. It also made finding mistakes easier to see.
There was a point where I had to decide: Boxes or no Boxes? Obviously you can tell what the answer came out to be.
I also found that as I kept pushing forward I was getting worse at drawing boxes rather than better. Perhaps it was my incompetence catching up to me? But I remember another art teacher telling his students: It is common that you will find yourself getting worse before you get better. When you learn a new skill, or have to re-learn one in order to get out of a bad habit, this often happens. But once you form that new skill, most end up exceeding their previous plateau built upon bad habits.
Perhaps this is so?
