Before I get into looking at specific chests, I do want to mention some quick points in regards to how your use of fineliner, and in some cases your use of filled black shapes, may have not been the best choice for the task of this challenge:

• Firstly, having the base construction in ballpoint but detail elements in fineliner creates a very stark jump from the thin lines of your base structures to the very rich and heavy darks of the shadows being cast by your textural forms. This can severely impact the readability of what you've drawn because the viewer's eye is not able to unify such drastically different visual elements.

• Secondly, the way in which you approached your drawings was definitely influenced by your simultaneous work on the texture challenge, but these different challenges focus on problems that are in their nature, very different. Where the texture challenge helps us develop skills that can be leveraged most effectively in an illustrative context (especially when it comes to the implication of detail so as not to disrupt the composition of a larger illustration), the treasure chest challenge is very much focused on design - that is, the communication of specific information with clarity. You'll notice that in the demo for this challenge, the detailed chest demo is no less reliant on outlines and construction - that is, explicit markmaking - than the open/closed chests. That is because that approach is vastly better suited to this task.

• Thirdly, in my feedback on your Lesson 7 work, I spent a good bit of that critique discussing how, by focusing your use of solid black shapes for a more limited set of purposes would have helped with the read of your constructions, especially within the medium restrictions imposed by the bulk of this course (which of course do not extend to this challenge). You may want to revisit that, as there are enough cases here where you've used filled areas of solid black for form shading or filling in void spaces that suggests that you may not have really taken it to heart. I think taking those points into consideration would have greatly helped with the clarity of what you've drawn here.

There are definitely cases where the points raised above were less of an issue - for example, the keyboard chest and train chest on this page have a much stronger read than say the cardboard box chest and the crystal ball chest on this page, and a lot of that comes down to the first point of the three, where the former have much more of the construction defined in the fineliner's thicker linework, whereas the latter have more "gaps" (where the ballpoint pen lines simply aren't heavy enough to stand on their own, and therefore get perceived more like open spaces than closed off structural elements).

Anyway! Since this challenge is much more about design, that will be reflected in the concepts my critique focuses upon. My intent with the challenge is to serve as a spring board for me to introduce students to:

• What considerations can drive and influence the overarching choices made for a given design

• How structure serves as an important foundation for detail

• What considerations can help you in deciding the kinds of details that might be included in a design

Starting with the first point, while you've got a ton of extremely unique and different chests across the set - ranging from more traditional containers, to things that at least superficially might not really be immediately understood to serve as a box (a lot of random thing-chests), the pattern I'm seeing here is that you've attacked the problem from a highly aesthetics-first approach. This makes a lot of sense, given that it can be tricky to create 50 different designs for things that, well.. hold stuff... but this approach isn't without its weaknesses.

Approaching design from an aesthetics-first strategy tends to create only one kind of design: a "star". That is, the thing that's meant to catch all of the attention and stand out. But the kinds of projects for which designs are created - whether they're video games, comics, movies, tv shows, etc. have a lot more characters than just the protagonist, and a lot more props than the MacGuffin they're all chasing. It's critical as a designer to be able to create designs that feel rooted in the world in which they exist so as not to distract from the stars, but still help add their own depth and complexity. Every such element is like a detail in the whole, but not every nail in a board needs to be vying for the viewer's attention.

Furthermore, objects designed for the purpose of drawing attention tend to be somewhat superficial, and while they may be very striking in the first moment, they don't tend to stand up to much scrutiny. For example, where 87 and 88 on this page are understated and can fit quietly into a wide variety of environments without being distracting or causing the viewer to wonder why on earth it's there, your beehive chest is not going to be able to avoid the viewer wondering why such a thing would be present. Sure, it may fit into the story in a particular fashion, but most of the time the audience is going to end up wondering "why in the hell would someone make a chest out of a beehive" and the answer if one can even be provided is going to take the story on an unnecessary tangent.

Such things certainly can exist, but they have to be spurred by the story in order to keep things on track. If the story is constantly dragged this way and that by every new prop that is revealed, your story will get lost in the chaos.

Instead, things tend to come together much more smoothly when the thing that drives a design is purpose - that is, what purpose a given object is meant to serve in the context of a larger narrative. It may seem overly simplistic, but there's a lot that can emerge from simple things, but we'll get to that when we get to the third point, where we discuss what considerations can help you decide on the kinds of details that your design might include.

Before we get to that, let's take a moment to consider how structure itself can serve as an important foundation for detail.

Overall I think you've actually done a very good job with this aspect, in a few different ways:

• In the vast majority of your designs, you've paid a lot of attention to the individual components and how they build up in 3D space. A common area that students forget to consider when they're creating design is that every piece you add will take up space. Every element has thickness, and when we forget this we can easily end up with a design that doesn't really hold up on a physical level. There were a few places where this did occur in your designs, as we see here, although more frequently in cases where you did consider some aspect of thickness but ended up conveying it more as line weight rather than an actual structural side plane as we see here, but overall I think you had much more consideration towards the thickness of brackets and supports and belts and such than most students who've submitted work for this challenge.

• To a lesser degree you put more thought than most into how things are held together, in particular with things like these brackets on your jewelry box and these hinges on your clam chest.

Basically design tends to be driven very much by questions, and the most basic structural questions of "how is this object held together" and "how does this object open" are some of the most important considerations one can have, especially the latter point. While we can certainly magic things away with superglue towards the first point, when it comes to how things physically move around - especially if an object is being designed for the purposes of being created as a 3D model, or a physical object, these are problems that must be solved.

And furthermore even while superglue can be an answer, in many cases it only works because the viewer is unlikely to pay close attention - but it is in answering these questions and solving these problems that an object's design can get a lot of the subtle details that make it feel real - bolts and rivets, brackets, buckles, etc. which if included won't be noticed consciously by a viewer, but will instead come together with similar elements on other props to make the scene as a whole feel real and vibrant.

In comparison, more overt aesthetic elements like the fact that your chest looks like a ship are more like a flash in the pan - they're interesting for a moment, but soon after they become more of a distraction unless specifically required by the story.

Lastly, we come to other kinds of considerations that can help us to identify details we can include in a design, but instead of being pragmatic, structural elements, these have to do with the very world in which an object exists. As I have already mentioned to an extent, everything we design - whether it's a character, a vehicle, a prop, an environment - that thing exists in a world, and it is the world that dictates what kinds of elements can be included. From the very materials with which we have to work, to the technologies by which those materials can be combined and used, to what is in ready supply (and therefore likely to be cheap), and what is limited and cheap (and therefore expensive), asking ourselves questions about the world in which our design exists is a critical part of the process.

Taking it further still, we can ask ourselves questions about whose hands have made the object, and for whom it was made. Do they have considerable wealth to bring to bear in its creation, or does every expense need to be put towards basic function? And to that end, we circle back to considering the purpose for which an item was created. Is it an everyday commodity, something touched and handled regularly, or something meant to last for ages - untouched, but still subject to rot and decay?

Questions are at the heart of design, because it is by asking ourselves questions about the things we design, the people that use them, and the worlds in which they exist, that we can help narrow our focus towards particular materials, technologies, all of which manifest as the details included in the final design. Where an aesthetics-first approach really only has the question of "what's going to look coolest" driving the process - a very open-ended and singular question that doesn't really lead to more lines of inquiry, it is by looking at the seemingly plain and simple questions, the little things that can snowball into a million more that help you narrow things down. Of course, design is also very much an iterative process - and so you may still come up with dozens of designs to solve a single problem, but it is in defining that problem that we work towards the most successful solution.

Anyway! I've been writing here for about two hours now, so I'll leave it at that and mark this challenge as complete. Hopefully some of what I've explained here will help guide you in a useful direction, but do be sure to revisit the feedback I shared in regards to your Lesson 7 submission, so that it can be applied in your drawings going forward.