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250 Box Challenge

1:14 AM, Friday May 21st 2021

VV 250 Boxes (Draw-a-Box) - Album on Imgur

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Finally done with the 250 Boxes challenge. For the first 100, I used that line generator by Eric Na on tangy meeting, but the rest I tried to freehand, most with horrid results. For reference, It took about 3 hours a day for 15 days to complete this challenge; I've heard of some students taking only a few days up to a few months, so I'm not sure how well that compares. I had the most difficulty with forshortened boxes. While I'm not aphatasic, I'm close to it. I would conjure a box in my head to draw, but its hazy like a signal coming through some static-y old Braun tube TV. When I tried to rotate the box in my head, it just became a garbed mass of tangled lines that made no sense. Thus, even after drawing all these damn boxes, I STILL cannot create a reliable model in my mind to use, which I thought was the purpose of this exercise.

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2:52 PM, Monday May 24th 2021

To start, I feel like I should explain that anyone who only takes a few days on the box challenge is not likely investing as much time as they need to in each box. As for the whole aphantasia thing, in my experience (having aphantasia myself), those who are able to visualize things in their mind's eye end up having to deal with something of a distraction, rather than an advantage. This exercise is very much not one of drawing from observation - it's about developing your spatial reasoning skills through the repeated solving of a spatial puzzle. As one moves through this course, those who can visualize things in their head ultimately learn to "close" that mind's eye, to rely on a more abstract, generalized understanding of how forms exist in 3D space, and how they relate to one another.

Looking through your set here, to start your linework is generally pretty good. It gets a little shaky here and there, and I can see places where you've attempted to correct mistakes by drawing marks repeatedly (like in 193 and 194 - as a rule, you should simply leave your mistakes alone, rather than trying to correct them as this draws more attention to a blunder which is otherwise an entirely natural part of doing exercises), but for the most part you are drawing with a good deal of confidence and your lines come out straight and smooth for it.

There are however two key problems. The biggest of these comes down to the fact that you seem to be trying to draw your boxes with no actual foreshortening across the vast majority of these. There are a lot of boxes here that, like 231, 221, 236, 191, etc. specifically attempt to avoid any convergences at all. That is fundamentally incorrect.

Back in Lesson 1, we talk about how any set of lines which are parallel to one another in 3D space will generally converge to a shared vanishing point when drawn in 2D (like on a piece of paper, which is flat). The rate of that convergence, and the proximity of that shared vanishing point, depends on a lot of factors, but there's still going to be convergence - whether it is rapid and dramatic, or gradual and shallow.

In Lesson 1, we discuss just one scenario where the vanishing point "goes to infinity", resulting in those lines being parallel on the page, with no actual convergence. This occurs when the set of lines in question runs perpendicular to the angle of sight from which the viewer is seeing them. This is a very specific orientation - for example, if a viewer is standing straight, looking out across a flat ground plane (their angle of sight running parallel to that ground plane), then any box sitting flat on that ground plane will have its horizontal and vertical lines running perpendicular to the angle of sight.

Given that this challenge has us drawing boxes at entirely random angles, we can pretty much assume that we won't end up in the perfect orientation for any of a given box's lines to run perpendicular to the angle of sight. Even if we did, it would only apply to one or two of the sets of lines - never all three. There is no 0 point perspective. There is axonometric/isometric projection, which is what you end up using, but it is actually a fundamentally different set of rules used to represent 3D space on a 2D surface. While it's valid, it serves a different purpose, and unlike "perspective projection" which we're using here, does not strive to capture the world as humans see it.

So, long story short - you need to be thinking about how your lines converge, be it gradually or rapidly, and eliminating that convervence is not an option.

Considering this convergence, and how you orient a given line to more consistently converge with the other lines in its set, is really at the heart of this exercise. As you go to draw a new line, you look at both the lines with whom it should share a vanishing point - both those that already have been drawn, and those that have yet to be drawn, and you consider how your new line needs to be oriented to have them all converge consistently. Thinking about how they all converge at a far-off point, and considering the relative angles between them as explained here will also help you think about when you should be angling a line more sharply, or when it can run more close to parallel to another.

Now, the other issue I noticed does largely relate to this - it's an issue that didn't come up all over, but specifically in this page I can see you filling the faces on the opposite side of the boxes with hatching, and extending some of your lines (like the red lines on box 200) in the wrong direction. It's critical that you remain aware of which side of the box is facing towards the viewer, and which side is facing away.

While the first issue I pointed out is a pretty significant one that will have to be addressed before you can move on, I'm actually pretty confident in the fact that once it's sorted out (and it was definitely a case of you taking the wrong turn, thinking you could simplify certain aspects of these constructions in ways that you really couldn't), you'll be handling these box constructions fairly well. So, I'm going to assign a fairly minimal set of revisions for you to demonstrate your understanding below.

Next Steps:

Please submit 15 additional boxes. Take care to vary their rates of foreshortening more, working with both shallow and dramatic foreshortening, but do not in any situation eliminate foreshortening altogether.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
11:42 PM, Wednesday June 16th 2021

https://imgur.com/a/QWcO5p9

A critique from the big box boss himself, nice! I made the revisions as you suggested, but I think these are actually worse than before. I don't get it; I re-read the article and watched the videos again 3x as well as your feedback, but as I went to draw the boxes, everything was just a jumble of confused lines. They overlapped, phased in and out of 3D, and I couldn't remember every step. Whenever I draw, it's like this, but worse if I'm trying to do a completed, color painting. I work slowly because It's like I have to remember 500+ things all at once. Motion, perspective, line weight, line confidence, light direction, shading, etc. For these, I was trying to remember where the convergence points were for each line, but when I went to draw them intersecting, it was like I forgot where the other point was and they all ended up completely off. None of this spatial reasoning stuff comes naturally to me like it used to, which just makes everything even more vexing.

1:39 PM, Thursday June 17th 2021

The approach we use here largely seeks to address the issue you're describing - the fact that you have to keep all of these things straight in your mind simultaneously. But it only works if you're conscious of what it's trying to do. When we are faced with a ton of things to worry about, we have two options - we either panic and shutdown, drawing lines based on instinct (based on your explanation, that is likely what you end up doing, at least to an extent), or we can make the choice of focusing on one thing at a time.

It all comes down to the ghosting method, which is broken down into three distinct stages. The planning phase is where we determine the specific nature of the line we want to draw. So for example, when drawing the edge of a box, we need to be thinking about what job this edge is meant to accomplish.

Well, we know that all the edges of a box can be grouped into 3 sets, with all 4 of the edges of a given set running parallel to one another in 3D space. We also know that when those 3D edges are drawn as lines on a flat page, because they're parallel in 3D space, they now have to converge towards a shared vanishing point when drawn in 2D.

So, when we put down the points for our lines, that's what we have to consider - we look at all the lines of a given set - both those that have been drawn and cannot change, as well as those that haven't yet been drawn and can still rotate and reorient freely in our minds. Our job is singular - place the end point of the line such that it points towards the same vanishing point as all the other lines of that set.

You may also choose to do this first stage (planning) for a bunch of lines, putting a few points down to kind of figure out how they're all going to work together, before you draw any further lines. You can see this kind of approach at play in ScyllaStew's 'How I Draw Boxes' video. Note how she's tackling one problem at a time.

Once you've got points between which to draw your lines, from there it's a matter of moving onto the preparation phase, where we ghost through the motion, and the execution phase where we simply make a mark with a confident, persistent pace, free from distraction. There's only one thing we worry about here in this last phase - executing a confident stroke. Accuracy and control is handled during the preparation phase, and the actual perspective itself is handled during the planning phase. All of these major considerations are broken up, for you to contend with one at a time. If it's been a while, you may want to reread the notes on this concept in the Lesson 1 ghosted lines exercise - although for what it's worth, your linework is fairly confident, which at least shows that you are separating out that particular focus.

As a whole, I can see that there are a number of cases where you're thinking more about how you're to have your lines converge together, although there are yet others where you're keeping some sets of lines so parallel that you actually end up having them diverge (like the green lines in 253 and 264). This is infrequent enough that I'm not to worried - but I cannot stress enough how important it is to be always thinking about all four lines simultaneously, and how they need to be oriented to converge together.

It's completely normal to end up with cases where the lines converge inconsistently, but diverging is generally a sign that one hasn't been thinking of all four lines together.

Anyway, I am going to mark this challenge as complete. Your results, though far from perfect, are moving in the right direction, and I think the key thing for you to keep in mind is the idea of how the process can be broken down into separate steps, where one problem is addressed at a time.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 2.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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