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250 Box Challenge

11:19 PM, Sunday November 1st 2020

Drawabox: 250 box challenge - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/fq34MQO.jpg

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General comments:

  • Page 1: There are a couple things wrong here that I instantly improved on for my next pages: I added line weight to the inner lines (I thought it would look ok but to Comfy's warning, it just makes it look less cohesive, not more). I also drew the boxes isometrically, not with perspective. I challenged myself to change that in the next boxes. I also did some perspective lines in the wrong direction :facepalm:

  • At about box 30, I started actually dotting in vanishing points (if they were on the page). This became a little extreme later on where I would get a second piece of paper to extend the page and draw far away vanishing points, and as I progressed I tried to depend on them less.

  • At about box 91, I started plotting the back (hidden) corner before putting in the final visible corner. This one is actually much easier to guess because it is typically at the center of convergences. Plotting the last corner based on the middle corner's position was made easier, especially for really long boxes.

  • From box 103 onward I started adding in two point perspective boxes for a bit of variety and to learn how they differ from 3 point perspective.

  • I had a couple attempts at pages that rotated boxes:

    • 109-114 didn't really rotate a single box, as they don't feel consistent.

    • 121-126 was the same, not too much improvement.

    • 145-150 was a two point perspective rotation, which also had a similar problem with proportion inconsistency.

    • 157-162 was better with proportions and felt like the same box being rotated, but the rotation amount was pretty small.

    • 219-234 was a vertical rotation, I liked this one the best!

  • I had a couple experimental pages where I kept most of the variables of each box the same and changed one to see what would happen. These were: 133-138 (varied bottom vertex), 193-198 (2-side view with very close vanishing points), 205-210 (adjusting length of front facing edge)

  • For boxes 200-250, the line work may not be as great because I was experimenting with different sitting positions and standing positions to find out what was most optimal for not hurting my back and optimizing drawing from the shoulder.

Learnings:

  • The hidden back vertex is not to be blamed for wonky lines! It is just a symptom of the other 3 (outer) corners being poorly placed. Halfway through, I started plotting the back vertex before the final corner vertex and this really helped me figure out where to place that final vertex to make the box look right.

  • It's ok not to be perfect! I feel like I had a great mentality going through this challenge with "it's fine if this is messed up, there's still 100 boxes to go to fix it!!" This helped me feel more loose and I think that helped make lines straighter.

  • Even if the boxes weren't perfect in terms of vanishing point, some still looked "acceptable". I showed some boxes to my roommate before putting in the vanishing lines, and asked them which boxes looked most "right" and they didn't necessarily always pick the box that had the most perfect vanishing lines. There's definitely an acceptable margin of error, and diminishing gains on perfecting the box.

  • From experimenting with different drawing positions, I found that drawing close to the body and closer to the right side (my dominant hand) allowed for better posture and more range of movement. I had a bad habit of feeling like I need to put my face up close to the paper to see all the detail but that's really not necessary, and I'm working to correct that habit.

Things to improve:

  • Line work has improved overall but is still inconsistent. Going over the lines to increase thickness is especially inconsistent. I need to apply the confidence and swiftness of applying the first line to the second line (going over).

  • The worst boxes seem to be long rectangular prisms with far off vanishing points.

Bonus: In my Lesson 1 critique it was suggested that I go back to the rotated box exercise to see how much my spatial reasoning has improved after this challenge.

Before: https://i.imgur.com/KuaTDUZ.png

After: https://i.imgur.com/tOyNDnH.png

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8:40 PM, Monday November 2nd 2020

Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!

Before we begin I just want to let you know that in general TAs will ignore student self assessment or critique so as not to contaminate our own critique of your work. If you have any questions not answered in your critique, feel free to ask them here.

I also want to mention that in the future, when you go to scan your homework submissions, it would be better to scan your homework using the "photo" setting instead of the "drawing" setting. The drawing setting tends to up the contrast on an image and can cause you to lose some of the subtlety in your line work.

You did a pretty good job on the challenge overall and your boxes are coming along nicely. When I compare your early boxes to your final pages I can see that your mark making has improved a good bit. Your line steadily become straighter and more confident looking. You have a pretty good variety of orientation and foreshortening to your boxes. You also do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!

I can see that you were applying extra line weight to your boxes and you have made a lot of progress with getting your extra line weight to blend more seamlessly with your original marks. There are still a few areas where I can see you hesitating a little. So just make sure that you are using the ghosting method when you add your extra line weight and keep practicing that regularly in your warm ups.

Finally while your converges do improve overall I think this diagram will help you further develop that skill as you continue through Drawabox. So, 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.

Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!

Next Steps:

Continue to lesson 2!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:28 AM, Tuesday November 3rd 2020

Thanks for the review! To be clear regarding "TAs will ignore student self assessment or critique so as not to contaminate our own critique of your work." -- should I stop adding my self assessment or is it ok to add it here? It's mostly for my own benefit to practise being critical but of course I can just jot that down somewhere else instead.

1:23 AM, Tuesday November 3rd 2020

You can continue to add it, just make sure that if you have any questions, that you note them separately so they can be seen easily without having to parse through the whole thing.

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