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12:13 AM, Thursday February 2nd 2023

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:

  • Your construction lines are looking smooth and confidently drawn.

  • It's good to see that you're taking the time to plan and evenly space your hatching lines. This helps keep your boxes tidy and makes them look more solid.

  • You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening. 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:

  • Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge but I do recommend practicing it in your future attempts. It's an incredibly useful tool but one that people often require a fair bit of mileage before they feel comfortable applying it. The sooner you start to build up that mileage the sooner you'll see better results.

  • 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.

Overall while you did make a few mistakes your boxes are improving so far and with more mileage you'll continue to become more consistent. 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.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:21 AM, Thursday February 2nd 2023

Thank you for the critique.

Ok about the convergence, it was really tricky to guess the right one when the box was long and thick, and often happened that the 2 set converged in almost 2 different points. After a while I understood that you should be more daring with the inclination of the opposite sides, but like you said, I need more and more practice to achieve that right.

One question about the line weight:

I had a lot of problems when my first line was thin, because to add weight I had to superimpose the line over itself, and this often resulted in multiple lines, cause I never nailed in the first try.

Is the superimposition the right way to add weight?

Last question, how can I get the "The Relentless" avatar? I love it!

5:09 PM, Thursday February 2nd 2023

You can use pressure to apply line weight with some pens but the way we recommend it is by drawing another line over the original one like you mentioned. It's expected that your lines won't be super accurate because it's something you likely don't have a ton of experience with but as long as you draw the lines smoothly and confidently you'll continue to build up the muscle memory needed to make them more accurately. The super imposing lines exercise will also help with this so be sure to rotate it into your warmups very now and again.

As for the avatar.

There are two ways to unlock new avatars. The first is by giving other students feedback on their work, which increases your reputation. As your reputation increases, you'll hit points that will unlock a new random avatar. The second is by participating in the promptathon events, which are held at the turn of each season. Each prompt released during the promptathon has its own unique avatar, but you can also choose to do any of the other existing prompts during the event, which will unlock another random avatar. It is all lootboxy though - there's no way to unlock a specific avatar with either of these methods.

Hope that helps and best of luck.

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.
Sakura Pigma Microns

Sakura Pigma Microns

A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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