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.
It's nice to see that you're taking the time to plan each of your hatching lines and space them evenly. This helps keep your boxes looking tidy rather than looking like they were rushed on to the page.
You're doing a good job of experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening (you do this less as you progress through the challenge, likely a sign of your burnout). Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding. I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.
Things you can work on:
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 mistakes you've made more clearly.
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.
While I've noted a few things you can work on in the critique above, you've completed quite the daunting challenge. In the future if you feel like you're starting to burnout it's likely a good time to stop for the day, be sure to spend time following the 50% rule from lesson 0 as well. Keep experimenting and I'd recommend looking through lesson 0, 1, and the box challenge instructions and videos again as they've likely been updated since you last looked (the box challenge was revamped a couple months ago as an example). It may help reinforce/clarify any concepts introduced in the material which will only help you going forward.
That being said I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to lesson 2.
Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
Thank you for the feedback. Upon reflection, I realized that when I was drawing the boxes, I was primarily considering potential locations for the vanishing point without committing to a specific placement in my mind. Consequently, the lines in my drawings generally follow the same direction but do not all converge towards a single point, as you explained. You can see an example of this in the image here: [https://imgur.com/a/UhnxT9Q]. In this image, I made a conscious effort to select a specific vanishing point for each side of the box.
Regarding the 50% rule, I don't meticulously track the time I spend studying versus playing, but I do ensure that if I dedicate time to studying, I also allocate time for play, and vice versa. Additionally, I have already watched updated tutorials on drawing boxes, feeling the need for further guidance.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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