250 Box Challenge
1:14 AM, Thursday January 14th 2021
This was pretty tedious, but I will appreciate the feedback. Thank you!
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9:03 PM, Thursday January 14th 2021
Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!
You did a good job on the challenge overall. Since your boxes are not all numbered I will assume that you uploaded them in order for the purposes of this critique.
I can see you made some good improvement with the quality of your mark making. Your lines steadily become straighter and more confident looking as you progressed through the challenge. You have made good progress with adding extra line weight to your boxes, I can see that your extra line weight is doing a better job of blending more seamlessly with your original marks as you progress. You also start to do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!
I can see some areas where you were not always applying your extra line weight correctly. When you go to add weight to a line it is important that you treat the added weight the same way you would a brand new line. That means taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute your extra line weight, it is done confidently and so that it blends seamlessly with your original mark. This will allow you to create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines that reinforces the illusion of solidity in your boxes/forms. Extra line weight should be applied to the silhouette of your boxes. I recommend that you try adding your extra line weight in no more than 1-2 pases.
Extra line weight should never be used to correct or hide mistakes. You should read more about this here. Something to keep in mind as well, when you are working through Drawabox you should be employing the ghosting method for every mark you make. This includes the hatching that we sometimes use for our boxes.
I see that for some of your boxes, you appear to have purposely tried to keep your sets of lines parallel on the 2D page, drawing them all to an "infinite" vanishing point. As explained in this section, because these boxes are oriented with us looking at the corner of the box, we should be drawing it in 3 point perspective - meaning with 3 concrete vanishing points, each set of lines converging towards a real point in space, even if that point is far off and the convergence is gradual. You can also watch this video I made where I demonstrate how I approach drawing boxes.
To clarify, when I say "sets of parallel lines" or refer to your sets of lines as parallel, I am referring to lines that are parallel in 3d space not parallel on the page. If you remember from lesson one, the core principle of perspective is that when we draw a 3d form on a flat surface those lines that are parallel in 3d will now converge towards a shared vanishing point on the page.
Which means your sets of lines will not appear perfectly parallel on the page. Think about how those lines converge, do not purposely try to keep them parallel on the page.
I also noticed that you drew some of your boxes quite small. Part of the reason for the 5-6 boxes per page rule is so that students have enough room to draw their boxes larger while having room to check their convergences. By drawing your boxes very small you limit your own ability to execute your lines from the shoulder confidently, which affects the quality of your mark making. Drawing bigger also helps engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills, whereas drawing smaller impedes them. This, along with varying your foreshortening and orientations of your boxes will help you get the most out of the exercise.
Finally while your converges do improve overall I think this diagram will help you as well. When you are looking at your sets of lines you want to be focusing only on the lines that share a vanishing point. This does not include lines that share a corner or a plane, only lines that converge towards the same vanishing point. Now when you think of those lines, including those that have not been drawn, you can think about the angles from which they leave the vanishing point. Usually the middle lines have a small angle between them, and this angle will become negligible by the time they reach the box. This can serve as a useful hint.
Before moving onto lesson 2, I am going to have you draw 30 additional boxes.
For these boxes you will do the following:
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Use the ghosting method for every mark you make, including hatching and extra line weight
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Apply extra line weight in a single pass along the silhouette of your boxes
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Draw all of your boxes in 3pt Perspective
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5 boxes per page only
Make sure you visit every link I have left for you and reread the challenge instructions in their entirety before beginning your revisions.
Next Steps:
30 additional boxes as described in the critique.
6:18 PM, Sunday January 17th 2021
Thank you so much for the very thorough critique, Scyllastew! I will continue to reference this, and take additional notes. I also went ahead and did the additional assignment!
[https://imgur.com/gallery/6xYN86Q]
Once again, thank you!
7:06 PM, Sunday January 17th 2021
This is a very good improvement! Your mark making is looking much more confident overall and your boxes are doing a better job of converging consistently towards their shared vanishing points.
I can see that you are still not quite applying that extra line weight correctly all the time. But I also see that there is less hesitation overall in that extra line weight.
Just remember that extra line weight has a specific purpose, which is to reinforce the illusion of solidity in our forms. So it is important that when we apply extra line weight we are mindful of this and following the instructions as they are presented.
Make sure that you reread the instructions whenever you are uncertain. You can find the instructions for applying extra line weight here and there is a link in your original critique as well.
All that being said, you are now ready to move onto lesson 2. I will mark this lesson as complete. Good luck!
Next Steps:
Cotninue to lesson 2!
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