250 Box Challenge

4:31 PM, Wednesday January 24th 2024

boxes 1-68 - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/a/cie6Bwo

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

boxes 69-159: https://imgur.com/a/Gbgyta0

boxes 160-250: https://imgur.com/a/1tFkq08

whew! that took a bunch of time but i did it

there are some things i'd like to ask though:

  • did i do the line weight correctly? i was rather confused on how to do it or if i should do it at all

  • i've been using the same 0.5 mm fine-liner for drawabox up to this point and its starting to run out a bit, is it still good to use or should i switch to the 0.45 mm pen? (i've tested it out on box 240)

  • i sometimes got a little annoyed when i missed a line, should i ghost it again or should i just let it be wrong and move on?

thanks in advance for the critique!

3 users agree
7:24 PM, Tuesday February 13th 2024
edited at 9:04 PM, Feb 13th 2024

Hello Jukesir, I’ll be reviewing your 250 Box Challenge today.

First off, congratulations on completing the first hurdle of Drawabox. It’s definitely a long marathon, but the quality of work between the start and end pages really demonstrates overall improvement. I'll answer your questions before we start the critique.

1.Yup looks correctly applied to the silhouette.

2.Its okay if you switch, any fineliner that falls within the 0.4-0.6 range is good to use for the course. Here's more information in Lesson 0 in case you've missed it: https://drawabox.com/lesson/0/4/pens

3.I think some annoyance is par for the course in this program. However, we should never redo a line. If missing lines comes up consistently in exercises, it may be beneficial to slow down and take your time when ghosting.

You seem to remain within the 5-6 box limit at the start of the challenge and stray off to do 10-12 boxes per page. Not a huge problem but in the future it's helpful to get a refresher on instructions to ensure you’re keeping on track: https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/1/assignment

Things you did well:

  • Line quality makes a jump in improvement and maintains confidence.

  • Hatching: during the beginning stages, your lines had a tendency to be wobbly and did not reach both ends of the plane. At the end, some undershoot can be seen sometimes, but you clearly make smooth lines with equal spacing.

  • Clear experimentation of box size, foreshortening, and orientation. This is a positive habit to carry forward and helps progress our spatial reasoning.

Things you can work on:

  • Hatching overall looked good; however, a majority of the time the lines end up floating and don’t reach both sides of the edge. Preferably, we would like to overshoot and sacrifice some accuracy for consistent lines on both ends. Be mindful and perform the same level of execution as you would with any line.

  • Construction lines: although we prefer to have overshot lines (consistency > accuracy), sometimes your lines run past the plotted points by a noticeable margin. Improvement is seen later on, but I would recommend calling back to the ghosted lines exercise and the varying levels of success. You sit around Level 2, so I think it's beneficial to begin aiming towards reaching Level 3 during warmups. https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/14/levels

  • Line weight, you appear to have some cases of repeating lines, so I'll just remind you to add only one extra stroke and never redo lines as stated earlier.

Overall, you seemed to have consistent line and convergence accuracy. I think adding ghosted lines and superimposed lines to your warm-ups more frequently will aid your concerns when applying line weight. Besides that, I’ll mark this down as complete and send you off to Lesson 2. Good luck!

Next Steps:

Lesson 2.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 3 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
edited at 9:04 PM, Feb 13th 2024
5:53 PM, Wednesday February 14th 2024

i just naturally gravitated to more boxes per page since i really dont like the idea of wasting paper, i was trying hard to be efficient with it, but maybe thats not the best mindset for drawabox since paper is not that expensive

you're entirely right with the hatching lines, i did all of them almost as an afterthought not really putting much attention to them, i will work on that in the future lessons

8:17 PM, Wednesday February 14th 2024
edited at 8:18 PM, Feb 14th 2024

Honestly, it’s very logical to use as little paper as possible. However, in the context of this challenge, when too many boxes are drawn, the size of the next box is already predetermined by how much space is on the page. Rather than you deciding how wide or tall a box can be. I don’t think you need to entirely change your mindset per se; I just wanted to point it out so you understand why we want to keep boxes at a certain amount.

I've done the same thing with hatching so no worries there. Keep up the good work in Lesson 2!

edited at 8:18 PM, Feb 14th 2024
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

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).

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.