Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!
You did a good job on the challenge overall.
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 have made good progress with adding extra line weight to your boxes, I can see that your extra line weight is doing a better job of blending more seamlessly with your original marks as you progress. You also start to do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!
Before we begin I just want to mention that in the future, when you go to scan your homework submissions, it would be better to scan your homework using the "photo" setting instead of the "drawing" setting. The drawing setting tends to up the contrast on an image and can cause you to lose some of the subtlety in your line work.
While your mark making has improved, 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. You can do this with extra line weight as well. I would also recommend that you read this comment by Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation.
I noticed that you still struggle a bit with applying your extra line weight. 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 your extra line weight, it is done confidently and so that it 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. This diagram should help you better understand how to properly apply your extra line weight.
Extra line weight should never be used to correct or hide mistakes. 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. This includes the hatching that we sometimes use for our boxes.
Some of your boxes were drawn a bit 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. It isn't a problem if your line extensions end up touching other boxes on the page so long as the boxes themselves do not touch or overlap. This should give you enough room to draw your boxes at a larger, more useful size.This, along with varying your foreshortening and orientations of your boxes will help you get the most out of the exercise.
Finally while your converges do improve overall I think this diagram will help you as well. 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.
Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!
Next Steps:
30 additional boxes as described in the critique.
Are these 30 boxes to be posted somewhere, and are you suggesting in general that you should vary your foreshortening and orientations, or that I specifically have failed to do this and should focus on this in my 30 additional boxes? In that case, am I recommended to use the Y shape randomizer to get new orientations?
Furthermore, are convergences to be plotted to a VP mentally or ghosted back? My lines do not converge accurately to a VP because I am only visualizing their destination, and I am already aware of the diagram you have posted, but the accuracy of this has come down to my premature visualization ability and also my mark making which I had made sure to always ghost, despite the results. It also confuses me to focus on only one set of lines, as one set of lines will also determine the convergence toward a second VP in 3PP, due to their varying lengths. This means that when focusing on and drawing one set of lines, you also create the other set of lines and therefore their convergence, so you are forced to think about at least two sets of lines at a time. So could this part of the critique perhaps be clarified if I am misunderstanding it?
I also learned around the middle of the challenge from perspective theory about how VPs that are aligned in a particular manner with respect to each other will have lines that when intersected will produce 90 degree angles in perspective, or in other words, accurate cuboids when you correctly place three VPs with reference to a station point. Is it true that this challenge does not involve the drawing of true cuboids in perspective, but rather distorted shapes with oblique angles between sets of lines? This is because we are only told to focus on convergences, but not where VPs are specifically located with respect to one another and with a defined station point, which in this challenge would have to be plotted as well as it would not be sat in the center like regular drawings. In this case, couldn't this challenge be a hindrance to our perspective understanding if the boxes we believe to be drawing are not really boxes? Or is this yet another misunderstanding?
Thanks again for the critique.
Whoops I typed the wrong thing into your box by mistake. I was handling multiple critiques at once and must have gotten a little turned around. Sorry about that!
So to answer your first question, ghosting is a useful way to get a sense for how your lines are behaving as they move back into space. You don't need to - and often can't - ghost all the way back to your actual vanishing point, but it is a useful way to see how your lines are ultimately going to converge together in the distance, and whether they're converging in a relatively consistent manner.
When figuring that out, it helps to first put down points (as part of the ghosting method) for a set of lines to determine their trajectory, but before actually committing to the lines. That way you can plot the end points for lines from different sets, and then find the "happy medium" before actually executing a mark. I actually demonstrate this here in my "How I Draw Boxes" video, so be sure to give that a watch.
To your last question, we are indeed drawing cuboids - that is, boxes that have faces that are rectangular and not necessarily proportionally square, but I really have to stress how important it is that you not make things more complicated by introducing material from other courses. The point of the exercise is simply to get you used to drawing lines that are parallel in 3D space, and in doing so, to get you used to working in 3D space.
When you take 3D space and project it onto a flat surface (like a piece of paper), you basically have to maintain a consistent set of rules for that entire 'scene'. You can simply assert that any two vanishing points drawn within the scene are set at 90 degrees to one another, but as you add more vanishing points to the scene, they then need to behave consistently to that. When drawing our boxes, each one is existing effectively in its own separate scene, not bundled together like in the organic perspective exercise, and therefore since we are only working with 3 separate vanishing points, each governing a different axis, the relationships between them are for us to assert.
Even if we get especially distorted and extreme with these assertions, all it does is set other variables - like the field of view of the "camera" looking out into the scene - to abnormal values. They're "correct", but not what would normally be used.
The point of the station point based plan (which we do talk about here, as an extra thing to help explain the concept of field of view) is designed to help us place our vanishing points to maintain a specific, "normal" set of variables, so everything else we draw, before introducing anything to the scene, can remain consistent to them. That is generally not how we're worrying about things in this course.
Drawabox doesn't teach perspective in any considerable depth - it teaches spatial reasoning. That is, a more intuitive grasp of how forms relate to one another inside of the world. In order to achieve that, we're only touching on a few basic perspective concepts, and helping students develop an understanding of how to think in 3D space.
Memorizing the steps and tools is certainly useful, and you can certainly get into that outside of the scope of this course - but you should not be mixing them into the material here, as discussed back in Lesson 0.
Because I rambled a bit, I'll just reiterate the short answer: Yeah, they're still cuboid, rectilinear boxes. When a scene is empty, we can put any two points down and say that the set of lines they each govern are set to 90 degrees to the other, and there is nothing else in the scene to contradict that. From there, we simply have to work within that assertion.
The station-point based diagram just lays down those assertions ahead of time. If you haven't drawn a station point for a given scene, then its location will be variable, to be inferred from the assertions you have made. You could ostensibly find the station point for each box (again - they're not floating in the same space, they exist in isolation, so they don't have to all be represented with the same FoV).
Edit: I forgot to mention that the point about foreshortening that was bolded is just something I always want to make sure students remember moving forward. You did fine at it, but it can sometimes be forgotten, so by bolding it I want it to always be in the student's mind. I can understand though that it may have made you think that it was a problem somehow - which it was not.
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Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
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