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.
When hatching you're taking the time to space each line evenly which shows that care and thought is being put into each line. This helps your boxes appear solid and tidy rather than rushed.
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.
Again, thank you so much Tofu! In the midst of hectic college applications, I've been patiently waiting for this critique.
Actually in a way, I'm still a bit confused. I do understand that lines should converge in a set, not pairs, but a thin box like this that is far from the vanishing point: isn't in inevitable that these lines will converge into pairs? Like the lines at the top?`https://imgur.com/a/1PI7GUA"
It's more likely to occur as a mistake in thinner boxes yes, but if the box was perfect they'd all be converging as a set still. Our goal isn't perfection since we're freehanding these but keeping in mind that they should all converge as a set can help you produce the best results you can.
Remember that ever set of lines ultimately works together as well, any mistake you make will add up and be noticeable elsewhere.
Hope this helped.
Okay and yes, thanks for the reply.
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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