Nice work completing the 100 treasure chest challenge!

Over the course of the homework, you've improved in quite a few different ways, and as a whole I'm quite pleased with your results. Generally when I provide critique on this challenge, I focus primarily on the design aspects of it, since the course as a whole deals enough with construction. By talking about design here, we can look at the choices the student's made in terms of how they're approaching the look and feel of what they've created, and more importantly, what they're thinking about and what kinds of questions they're asking.

All that said, as structure places a part in design as well, and there is at least one point I want to address regarding the more drawaboxy concepts from earlier in the course, this critique is going to go from the more structural and gradually work towards the more design focused.

The first point I wanted to raise has to do with how to approach cases where you might be working with an underdrawing, and having to go back over the linework to create a clean-up pass. As noted here back in Lesson 2 this isn't an approach we generally use in this course, but in this challenge it does make more sense. The reason we don't recommend it is because students tend to fall into a "tracing" mindset - that is, where they have a 2D line in front of them, and they need to follow along it as best as they can, and so they focus entirely on what is two dimensional, and also tend to hesitate more in order to guide their eyes along the path. In other words, it pretty much causes them to throw away all of the principles of markmaking we espouse in this course, and in doing so it actually results in forms that are less solid, due to the tendency for the linework to be more hesitant and wobbly, even if only to very slight degrees.

The solution? Force yourself to use the same markmaking principles, the ghosting method, and all that to ensure that when you execute your mark, you're doing so with confidence and not falling into the temptation of steering your stroke with your eyes. Additionally, keep focusing not on the line in two dimensions, but the three dimensional edge you're trying to represent. It's actually okay in a lot of cases to end up with a line that doesn't perfectly match the underdrawing, as long as you're willing to roll with adjusting your other marks to follow. At the end of the day, the more you try to simply reproduce exactly what you had as perfectly as you can, the more you will fall short of that - whether that's in terms of tracing over an underdrawing, or copying a reference image. If however you use what you've got as a source of information to help you make decisions for what is essentially a new drawing, then that newer drawing will stand more confidently on its own, while benefiting from whatever problem solving was done in the earlier version.

The second point I wanted to discuss is thickness - that is, the thickness of the materials and elements used to construct the object as a whole. This is something you definitely made headway with over the course of the set, especially in the second half, but I wanted to explain why it's important and put it into its own context.

Basically as we start getting into designing our own objects, it's easy to think of the whole object as one cohesive piece, and as such we can end up with cases like box 52 where as shown here. When we neglect to establish the thickness of an edge and leave it to be represented by a line (as opposed to a face) it gives the impression that it is paper thin, which can definitely undermine its solidity. Avoid this unless your intent is to make it look that thin - although as I noted, you did a much better job of this through the second half, which shows that how you're thinking about the objects you're designing, and perhaps what you're paying attention to in any references you may have used, is evolving.

As a side note to this point, when it comes to drawing in ink as we do through much of this course (especially when it comes to drawings that are very strictly black or white with no midtones), I would recommend avoiding filling in side planes (the ones you might create to convey thickness) with solid black, and generally using hatching in most cases. It's not that this is "wrong" by any stretch - it's just a matter of what we find tends to convey the 3D structures you're capturing most effectively, given the tools you're using.

I've found that when you fill a side plane in with solid black, it reads a little less like a three dimensional face, and more like an extension of the lines enclosing it, which can undermine how solidly it reads. Leaving those faces blank (so outlined in black, but not filled in) conveys the thickness better, and allows us to reserve our filled areas of solid black for cast shadows only, helping to make our drawings clearer (by having that visual tool of a filled area of solid black always represent a cast shadow, which itself establishes the relationship in 3D space between the form casting it and the surface receiving it, based the shadow's shape design).

When it comes to the hatching, there are cases where hatching can be useful (for example the vertical hatching along the sides of 88, but not the hatching along the top flat face). These useful cases are where the viewer has reason not to immediately assume a structure is rounded, and to further emphasize that fact (a good example of this is the bluetooth speaker demo from Lesson 6, where I use it to emphasize the fact that the edges are rounded rather than sharp). In a case where the nature of the surface is already fairly obvious - as would be the case for most flat surfaces, as well as primitives like cylinders, cones, spheres, etc. - hatching isn't really needed. You can read more about this here in Lesson 2. Of course, there are cases where earlier in the course we used hatching as a tool to denote a side of a form that was facing the viewer, but this isn't really relevant when drawing actual objects.

The third point I wanted to discuss hinges off this idea of considering the individual components we're using to build up our object. Before we were considering them in terms of thickness, which helps us recognize and solve problems like how two pieces physically meet at a corner (like in chest 93 where you've got the side planks a bit shorter allowing the front plank take up the full width of the chest). But here's another question - how exactly do those planks hold together where they meet at the corner?

There are a lot of ways to answer this question, with the simplest (and the one requiring no actual changes to your drawing) being "glue". But this is where we really start thinking about our design, and more importantly, the people who made it, and the people for whom it was made. Consider this: does the craftsman who made this chest have access to good enough wood glue to create a seamless joint?

Animal based glues have been around for a long time, but that doesn't inherently mean that everyone had access to them, or it could have been seen as very valuable. Societies that may have done less husbandry, or used their animals for other things, or perhaps simply just never developed that technology may have to opt for other solutions. These other solutions include nails, riveting, brackets, and so on. So we have a lot of potential answers that could serve us well, but we have to consider the actual people involved in its creation. We can also consider how expensive this object might have been - if it was an everyday storage bin for a peasant then it probably would have been made with the simplest, most rustic options at hand, whereas something for royalty would no doubt spare more expense towards ensuring everything looks clean and perfect.

This can be expanded into considering what kinds of materials in general are being used, in relationship with the kind of environment that society lives in. A desert-based society may not have a lot of wood to spare, but perhaps they could make use of sandstone, for example. There's also consideration to construction techniques, like warping a single piece of wood to create the curved lid of a chest, versus building it out of separate planks all riveted together with metal bands. Of course, I can go on - there's all kinds of variables at play, and it all comes down to figuring out the people behind the object.

I speak a little more about this way of exploring design through in this video, where I talk about the "What If" method I use for exploring an idea.

Anyway, I'll leave it at that. As a whole I think you've made excellent progress in pushing the envelope on your design skills, but of course there is plenty more room to grow. I hope the advice I've shared here will serve useful as you continue forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.