Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!
From what I can see your line work is fairly well done and your boxes are coming along well. 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 also start to do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!
While your lines are much more clean and confident looking, I do see that you still hesitate in some areas. This is likely due to prioritizing your accuracy over creating a smooth, confident looking line.
Just remember that the confidence of the stroke is far and away your top priority. Once your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid mistakes has passed, so all you can really do is push through. Hesitation serves no purpose. Mistakes happen, but a smooth, confident mark is still useful even if it's a little off. If the line is wrong, we leave it and move onto the next step. Accuracy is something that you will improve on as you continue working through Drawabox and practice ghosting.
Now, while it is important that you use the ghosting method of each mark you make while doing Drawabox one thing you can try to help with ending your marks closer to where you want them is lifting the pen off of the page rather than stopping the motion of your arm. I would also recommend that you read this comment by Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation.
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 it the mark 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.
I also noticed that you drew many 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.
I think this diagram will help you as well. 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.
Before moving onto lesson 2, I am going to have you draw 25 additional boxes.
For these boxes you will do the following:
Draw your boxes at a larger size. Page 9 is a good reference for the minimum size you should aim for.
Apply one pass of extra line weight to the silhouette of every box
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:
25 additional boxes as described in the critique.
Hi Scyllastew!
Thank you very much for your detailed critique. I had actually completed this a month ago, but didn't realize i needed to submit it before completing lesson 2, which I've also done. (I guess I have to wait two weeks to submit the lesson 2? Or is there a way for you to toggle that?)
So, it was good to revisit the boxes - even if I cringed at the idea of doing more.
I had done the original boxes progressively smaller as I was trying to see the actual vanishing points.
For the additional boxes you assigned me I have done them larger, as you instructed.
Here is a link to the work:
All my best wishes for you to have a happy new year.
Dave (BoxFoxSox)
This is a very good improvement! Your lines are looking straighter and more confident. Your boxes are drawn at a good size and your sets of lines are doing a better job of converging towards their shared vanishing points. Your extra line weight is looking more confident as well.
One thing to keep in mind about this exercise is that you are not trying to find the exact vanishing points of your boxes. With this exercise, you are forced to content with freely rotating boxes in 3D space without any real grounding of how to deal with them. This way you are must rely more and more on educated guesses and intuition as opposed to strictly measuring and plotting exact vanishing points.
To answer your question about your lesson 2 submission, you will have to wait the standard two week period the same as all the other students. This rule keeps TAs from being overwhelmed by submissions. Just remember not to move onto the next lesson until after you have received offical feedback from a TA. You can always practice your lesson homework as warms ups to keep your skills sharp while you wait.
I am going to mark this lesson as complete. Good luck!
Next Steps:
Continue to lesson 2!
This is a remarkable little pen. Technically speaking, any brush pen of reasonable quality will do, but I'm especially fond of this one. It's incredibly difficult to draw with (especially at first) due to how much your stroke varies based on how much pressure you apply, and how you use it - but at the same time despite this frustration, it's also incredibly fun.
Moreover, due to the challenge of its use, it teaches you a lot about the nuances of one's stroke. These are the kinds of skills that one can carry over to standard felt tip pens, as well as to digital media. Really great for doodling and just enjoying yourself.
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