Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.

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:

  • You're doing a good job of drawing the lines constructing your boxes smoothly and confidently.

  • 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.

  • Excellent work experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening. It's important to experiment when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding of new concepts. This habit will serve you well in the future so I hope you'll continue to build it as you move forward.

Things you can work on:

  • Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge but I do recommend practicing it in your future attempts. It's an incredibly useful tool but one that people often require a fair bit of mileage before they feel comfortable applying it. The sooner you start to build up that mileage the sooner you'll see better results.

  • You tend to draw fairly small, I'd like you to draw larger in the future. Drawing large will help you become more comfortable working from the shoulder and allow you to see any misakes you've made more clearly.

  • At times you're placing your vanishing point between the viewer and your boxes (boxes 113/116/125/136/145 are some examples of this). This leads to you extending your lines in the wrong direction and your boxes becoming distorted because your lines are actually diverging from where the vanishing point would actually be. Here's a guide I wrote that will hopefully help you place your vanishing points and line extensions more consistently. It does appear like you seemed to notice this and correct it by the end of the challenge which is great.

  • 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.

Overall while you did make a few mistakes your boxes are improving so far and with more mileage you'll continue to become more consistent. That being said I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to lesson 2.

Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck