250 Box Challenge
5:47 PM, Thursday April 6th 2023
It's been a wild 4 months for me, but in that I knocked out all of my boxes. Woo!
Greeting, HotSkeleton. I am Doctormein And I'll be critiquing your 250 boxes challenge for you.
I'll be dividing the challenge into 3 Section
Line-related matters. (Such as confidence of execution, Not repeating your lines, Applying proper line weight, etc.) Simply stuffs that you've learned from lesson 1 ghosting exercise.
Boxes-related matters. (For example, Extending line in the wrong direction, similarity of the boxes, Drawing through form, etc.) These are usually mentioned in the 250 Boxes challenge page. itself.
Finally, Convergence-related matters. (This section will consist of, Convergence, Divergence, Double Vanishing point, Back corner issue, etc.) The main meat of the exercise.
Let's get started. Before we get into the critique, I would like to suggest you to take a clear picture of your exercises.
This will make it easier for future critic to review and notify you of any mistake in the exercise themselves.
P.S : I'll be putting here just in case, but I am not sure if those are line weight or correction lines. in box #209 I can see that you drew 2 line, Which I assumed to be line weight, but upon closer inspection I can see that it seems more like correction line instead of line weight. If my assumption were to be true, please refrain from repeating any lines further in the future. We want students to think before committing to a mark and for every line to reflect that. Beside, It makes things messy and harder to critique since we're drawing with pen here instead of pencil.
These are the only 2 point I will mention for this section. If you're curious about other things that fits into this category but I didn't mention is because you've done well in those area. If you're curious about other points, feel free to leave me a message and I'll reply as soon as I possibly can.
For this section so far, I believe you've done well! You didn't extend the line in the wrong direction, you're drawing through your form properly, and you're also trying to play around with foreshortening and boxes length in all three dimension too. I believe I don't have much to say here.
P.S. : You might want to check out This link, Which is about Distortion and perhaps check out the whole additional information on boxes. I don't have much to critique here, but this might help with some of your drastically foreshortened boxes. (#229 For example.)
I am happy to say that you've clearly made significant progress since your first few boxes to your last few one. Your convergence has become more consistent. And when that happens, the back corner issue tends to slowly becomes less prevalent as time goes on too. However! there's still something to critique on, and I'll be mentioning them now.
(Notice : These critique are mainly focused on the last 50 boxes to ensure that my critique is up-to-date to what the current state of the student is.)
Early convergence is still a little present in your drawing here. Such as in boxes #204, #203 (Back corner), #202 (Back corner), and #231. Most of your early convergence tends to come from the silhouette line (Box #213 green line is a clear example of this) and back corner So If you could fix those two it would be brilliant.
You also seem to have tendencies to make thing a little too shallow or in other word, parallel. (Examples are #214 Green line, #220 Red line (Back corner and the initial Y for this one) #235 Blue line (Back corner, Initial Y)
I believe you were probably doing this challenge when the website hasn't updated yet, so no big deal.
But always remember, Lines for boxes will always be converging to some vanishing point. It is nearly impossible for it to be parallel even if the line are really, really close to each other. (Such as initial Y and back corner.)
P.S : Since you're on discord, I believe you might have gotten the idea of "parallel line" from this image perhaps? https://discord.com/channels/365036548820959242/365180330103013388/892934908232732695 Although the picture is kind of close to what we want, the wording is probably not up-to-date here.
Practical section : 1. You can try to ghost the line out to see roughly where the vanishing point is and try to ghost the other line to correspond to that vanishing point. Of course, we won't be putting down the vanishing point but ghosting is fine for this occasion.
2. Since your tendencies is to draw a line that converge a little too fast, you could try to just put a point of where your "Expected line" would be and then put down another one where it converge less quickly than your intial line. This uses the same technique as "Arcing line" In lesson 1. (It is arcing? then just arc your line a little bit toward the other direction. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/10/arc)
3. As for your parallel line section, I believe you can probably fix it by just thinking about it consciously for a while and then your brain will probably do that task for you. Just put what I mentioned into practice!
Next Steps:
Lesson 2
Although There's something to nitpick here and there, I believe that the tendencies for the mistake I've mentioned will go away with practice. If possible, Please put those point I've mentioned into practice and don't forget to put 250 boxes challenge into your daily warm-up pool.
As for now, I believe you're ready for Lesson 2. Godspeed!
This recommendation is really just for those of you who've reached lesson 6 and onwards.
I haven't found the actual brand you buy to matter much, so you may want to shop around. This one is a "master" template, which will give you a broad range of ellipse degrees and sizes (this one ranges between 0.25 inches and 1.5 inches), and is a good place to start. You may end up finding that this range limits the kinds of ellipses you draw, forcing you to work within those bounds, but it may still be worth it as full sets of ellipse guides can run you quite a bit more, simply due to the sizes and degrees that need to be covered.
No matter which brand of ellipse guide you decide to pick up, make sure they have little markings for the minor axes.
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