I used colored pens for the analysis lines but my scanning app doesn't scan in color for some reason. I'm currently backpacking through Mexico, so more often than not a lot of mark making issues I have are from uneven surfaces or being in a loud environment and getting distracted.
Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
Before I get started, I wanted to address what you mentioned about working on uneven surfaces, getting distracted, and so forth. When it comes to the official critique, we ask students to do whatever they can to do the work to the best of their current ability, as this helps keep us from committing time to issues that simply arose because of the situation in which you did the work. After all, we can only rely on the work itself to tell us where you're struggling, and where you're not. This is important, as it allows us to provide the service at a subsidized rate, and when students work against that, it increases our costs by causing the feedback to take more time.
I have consulted with Uncomfortable and will be moving forward with the critique, but going forward you may consider continuing with Drawabox when you are back from your trip, so you can adhere more closely to the requirements of the official critique program.
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:
When hatching you're taking the time to space each line evenly which shows that care and thought is being put into each line. This helps your boxes appear solid and tidy rather than rushed.
You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening in your final 150 boxes. Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding. I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.
Things you can work on:
You have some noticeable wobbling occuring in your lines. Remember that line confidence is our top priority and that accuracy will improve as we continue to build up more mileage. Your surfaces may play a large factor in this as well, but I can only judge what is front of me unfortunately.
In your second section of boxes and any boxes you try to push your vanishing points further away from you tend to push your lines too parallel to the point that they diverge. Remember that while we want our lines to be closer to parallel, there will always be vanishing points, they should always converge consistently towards them even if that convergence is very gradual.
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.
While I've noted a few things you can work on in the critique above, you've completed quite the daunting challenge. If you can address your diverging sets of lines and your line quality these will look pretty solid, I'm hopeful that most of this is caused by circumstances on your trip but they shouldn't be issues that show up in your homework that you're putting your best effort into.
That being said I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to lesson 2.
Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
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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