250 Box Challenge
12:42 PM, Friday October 7th 2022
Hello, im reboot, age 12. Thanks for the critique!(if you are writing one ofc)
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4:49 PM, Tuesday October 25th 2022
Hello Reboot! Happy bleated birthday.
Well done getting through all 250 boxes, it’s a lot of work, and you showed a great deal of improvement as you worked through the challenge.
Starting with your mark making, your lines generally look smooth and confident with only occasional signs of wobbliness or hesitation, good work. I can see you were carefully planning your construction lines with dots and using the ghosting method effectively.
It’s great that you chose to hatch one of the front faces of your boxes. The hatching on some of your earlier boxes shows “fraying at both ends” (see the super imposed lines exercise in lesson 1 for an explanation) but this got much neater as you progressed, well done. Just remember to treat hatching lines as an opportunity to practice ghosted lines and do them as carefully as your construction lines.
It looks like you started adding line weight to the silhouette of your boxes part way through the challenge. Line weight is optional, but good practice for your super imposed lines, so I’m happy that you gave it a shot. Your additional line weight looks smooth and confident too, but keep it subtle. Normally 1 or 2 extra passes would be enough, I can see some places where you’ve gone over a line 4 or more times and it’s not necessary.
I can see a few places where you redrew a line to correct it (eg. 177,179,180) Resist the temptation to redraw lines, as it has the potential to make your work look messy and confusing, as well as highlighting attention to where you feel you made a mistake. If a line is a bit off just leave it as if it were correct and move on. If a line has missed the second dot you can run your extension line through your planning dots when you come back to check your convergences.
Moving on to your box constructions, it looks like you’ve extended your lines correctly (away from the viewer) to check your convergences throughout most the challenge (Sometimes some of the extensions done in graphite aren’t showing up in your photos, but I’m pretty sure you did them) There’s a few you may have missed, such as 55,56,57,58,59,60 Make sure you remember to extend all sets of lines for this exercise, it’s an important step in checking for errors, which will help you to improve further. When you practice this exercise in warm ups it may help you to draw fewer boxes per page and make your extensions a bit longer.
Your perspective estimations (convergences) improved dramatically as you worked through the challenge. There are still some cases where your lines converge in pairs instead of all 4 to a single point (which is what we’re aiming for) but you got soooo much better, you did really well!
I can see that you practised both dramatic and shallow foreshortening, as well as varying the proportions and orientations of your boxes, well done.
Early in the challenge you drew a few boxes with distortion, although I think I can see in your notes that you realised that you need to keep all the angles in your initial Y at least 90 degrees to prevent that from happening, so well done for figuring that out.
Okay, I think that about covers it. You’re showing a good understanding of the exercise, and it looks like you learned a lot. I think you should feel free to move on to lesson 2. Congratulations!
Next Steps:
Feel free to move on to Lesson 2.
10:56 AM, Wednesday October 26th 2022
Thank you so much for the critique! I will certainly work the areas you have pointed out!
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