Sweet Malvina Reynolds, this is terrible.

So I tried this new approaching in drawing called 'thinking' and in process rediscovered the fact that my analytical skills are worse than I thought.

Being actually grateful for this self-discoveries.

Generally, in this assignment, I really tried to challenge myself on each box, with the biggest fear in mind: drawing the same box all over again as I often I found myself being uncreative about rotation, even with the proposed online tool.

To impose a challenge and variety I tried different construction techniques (not just sticking to the proposed Y-shape approach), tried out aggressive foreshortening vs. plain boring boxes, tackled perspective, used multiple pesky vanishing points as references and so on.

So I ended up with this 250 failures I'm really proud of. Kind of.

A few remarks from my epic journey:

• One really has to find a healthy balance between responsibilities in drawing - perspective, space, vanishing points, superimposing, hatching... I also often caught myself rushing in trying to end the page and go on with my life already. But thats just me failing at life in general.

• Experience showed I was going up and down on box quality instead progressing exponentially. At times I'll deform to the point of it stop being a box, and at other times I thought I actually got it.

• I had to remind myself of the point of exercises: acknowledging objects in 3D space - getting the idea, feeling and develop mentally of intuitive understanding of 3D space as at times drawing those silly things really didn't make sense.

• I discovered I was getting more friendly with boxes when I was actually 'imagining' the user viewpoint. So at the end, I realized the best way to put a box on paper is actually visualizing the box before drawing it and planning the damn thing. Still, this hasn't prevented me to fail miserably, but oh well.

• Foreshortening ended being a problem quite often as it could easily go out of control which usually resulted in lines going straight to the bottomless pits of hell.

• I also realized it's easier to make mistakes with larger boxes, so at one point (I'm guessing No. 113) I started to practice larger ones more.

• Superimposing the edges is something that drove me mad on the constant base more than boxes itself. Creating wobbly lines while building the outer edges was really a discouraging process so I often find myself thinking what am I doing wrong. I ended up searching for the middle ground: it was sort of a battle between cartoony edges and accuracy, slow building vs. fast line drawing.

• Fucking hatching. Just when I thought my box looks all right, I majorly screw it up with hatching. You'll notice variations from time to time in the way I did approached hatching, but that's just me exploring the way to handle the damn thing. Not to mention that special few times when I hatched the wrong page...

• At the end of each page I stopped to study the box lines and the mess I made with colored pencils. But there were a few times I couldn't resist to 'correct' a mistake on the spot, uglifying the box even more. Sorry for that.

So there you go. Pretty much every box I drew is invalid in some aspect, with the great number of those that are just plain wrong (believe, I'm very aware of those). But I guess that's the beauty of the learning process, amirite?

Overall, would I have rather done* 250 anime girls? Yeah, but this too was an interesting experience and I'm sure I got something useful from it, even though I can't specify it directly.

• as in drawing**

** in a non-lewd way