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8:22 PM, Saturday October 3rd 2020

Congratulations on completing the 250 Box Challenge!

You did pretty well on the challenge overall and I can see you made some good improvement to your mark making by the end of the challenge. Your lines steadily become straighter and more confident looking overall. You have a good variety of foreshortening to your boxes and I can see that you put in a good effort with adding extra line weight to your boxes. You also do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!

One thing that stands out to me about your boxes is their size. Many of your boxes are drawn quite small. One of the reasons that we have the 5-6 boxes per page limit is to allow students room to draw their boxes at a decent size. Drawing bigger helps engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills, whereas drawing smaller impedes them. So keep that in mind going forward.

Another thing that stands out to me is your line weight. While you did make some good progress, there is still some room for improvement. I can see that you tend to hesitate more when you are adding that extra line weight. Likely because you are prioritizing your accuracy over creating a smooth, confident line. 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 it the mark blends seamlessly with your previous mark. This will allow you to build and create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines. This is something that you will improve with consistent practice so just make sure that you keep this step in your warm ups.

You should also not try to change, correct, or hide any of the marks you make while working through Drawabox. Once your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid mistakes has passed, so all you can really do is push through. Hesitation serves no purpose. Mistakes happen, but a smooth, confident mark is still useful even if it's a little off.

Finally while your convergences do improve overall I think this diagram will help you further develop that skill as you continue through Drawabox. So, 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.

I am going to assign you 10 additional boxes before having you move on. What I will be looking at is the size of your boxes, less hesitation in your mark making and I want you to try applying your extra line weight in a single pass.

Congrats again and good luck!

Next Steps:

10 additional boxes as described above.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
4:35 PM, Sunday October 4th 2020

Thank you, Scyllastew, for the thorough critique, especially for the comment about line weight. I'll try to keep it in mind going forward.

Here are the ten additional boxes: https://imgur.com/a/D8sMWGj

8:22 PM, Sunday October 4th 2020

These boxes are a much better size and I can see that you have much less hesitation showing in your lines here. While there were some areas where I can see you did multiple passes with your extra line weight, I will go ahead and pass you onto the next lesson.

Just remember that you are should not try to correct or hide any mistakes you make while working through Drawabox. As I said before, "Mistakes happen, but a smooth, confident mark is still useful even if it's a little off."

Good luck with lesson 2!

Next Steps:

Continue to lesson 2!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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