Welcome back to the course, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.

Seeing as how you've completed the box challenge in the past this critique will mostly be centered around your new boxes as they're the ones relevant to your current work ethic, habits, and abilities. People who revisit this challenge sometimes slip into the mindset that since they've completed the challenge beforehand they can simply draw their 50 boxes and move on, this is a very poor decision to make. You've completed this challenge before, you've possibly had critique from it in the past and have had opportunities to learn from it. This means that expectations of your results are higher and if rushed it means you're judged more harshly because you should know better.

I'll be upfront and say that I feel like you've slipped into this mind set and rushed through these boxes, and that they're not up to par with the final boxes of your original submission. While there has been a year long break people don't tend to get worse, just rusty. While this can discourage some people in the beginning 50 boxes is often more than enough to shake any of this rust if they put in their best attempts and space out their boxes over a length of time.

All of that being said I'll be attempting to keep this critique brief so you can get working on to the next step as soon as possible.

• While they start out a bit messy the majority of the lines creating your boxes are looking confident. There is the occasional wobble that occurs but as far as line quality goes this is a good return to form and will improve as you put in the time to shake that rust that's built up.

• Where your line quality dips in quality however is in your hatching lines, you didn't apply them through the majority of your original submission it seems so it's nice to see that you gave the technique another attempt since it's an optional part of the challenge. Currently there's quite a bit of noticeable wobbling and arching in your hatching lines which shows that you may be relying on your wrist or elbow rather than your shoulder and that you may not be drawing confidently. Along with the uneven spacing between each of these lines it gives the impression that they were rushed and needed more time in the ghosting stage. Hatching can be a great tool and can help our boxes appear more solid but it needs to be done with care or else it just creates a mess.

• It doesn't appear like you were trying to apply line weight to your boxes here, it is an optional part of the challenge so it's not something that would typically be held against you but it's always nice to see when students go the extra mile and apply it, especially when doing additional boxes. It's a useful tool just like hatching but one that requires even more mileage before most people feel comfortable applying it so the sooner you start practicing it the sooner you'll see positive results.

• You're drawing large which is something that is great to see. Drawing large helps people grow more comfortable working from their shoulder and allows them to see their mistakes more clearly. People tend to draw small either from lack of confidence in themselves or rushing so the decision to draw large here was a good one.

• Speaking of good decisions you experimented with orientations and mixed up your rates of foreshortening. Many people focus on keeping their lines as parallel as possible when progressing through the challenge the first time so experimenting is always something I recommend.

• A spot where I would like you to experiment with more however is your proportions. The majority of your boxes are fairly similarly shaped and experimenting with longer/thinner/fatter boxes would benefit you by allowing you to see how your lines react in different ways.

• Where it becomes noticeably clear that you rushed through these boxes is your convergences. Often your lines are converging in pairs rather than as a total set (as demonstrated here), or diverge from each other while attempting to keep your lines parallel like on the page with just 2 boxes. At other times you have lines that diverge wildly showing that there wasn't enough time being put in to consider how it should behave in it's set (boxes 41 and 43 are examples of this). Overall there just needed to be a lot more time and care put into all of these attempts to demonstrate not only to me, the person critiquing your work but yourself that you can do better than this because you definitely can and have in the past. If you need a refresher here's an example of how we would want our lines to work together as a set.

• 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.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, while I mentioned that people don't tend to get worse that doesn't mean that their work follows that same rule. If you had taken your time and put in your best effort I have no doubt you could have achieved similar, if not better results to the final boxes in your original submission. Instead I'm fairly certain that you went through this much too quickly and your work suffered for it.

Often when trying to save time we end up taking longer than if we did things properly in the first place and that's what I feel occurred here. Seeing as how this critique is already over double the length of a typical box challenge submission let's wrap things up.

With all that being said I'll be asking you to draw another 50 boxes. Continue to experiment with orientations, and rates of for shortenings but also change up your proportions as well. Try to get your line quality looking consistently confident and take your time planning each line you draw. Remember each line is part of a set, not an individual or part of a pair.

Once you've completed your boxes reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready I'll move you on to the next lesson.

I know you're capable of better than this and look forward to seeing your work.