250 Box Challenge

12:54 PM, Saturday September 30th 2023

250 BOXES - Album on Imgur

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The last 20 boxes were made during "bad hand day", but I've tried my best to make them all from the shoulder. Its also actually my 500 boxes... The first ones I made in the sketchbook are not suitable for submission. I feel like they still somewhere off ._.

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2:33 PM, Monday October 2nd 2023

Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.

Not only does the challenge help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. 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:

= 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:

  • You have some noticeable wobbling occuring in your lines and you're redrawing at times. Remember that line confidence is our top priority and that accuracy will improve as we continue to build up more mileage.

  • 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.

  • Probably the biggest issue with your submission is that you didn't follow the instructions completely. You never extend all 3 sets of your lines instead extending only 1 or 2 of them. This results in you never getting as much as information as you could have to improve your future boxes and not getting as much out of this challenge as you could have.

  • At times you're placing your vanishing point between the viewer and your boxes (boxes 37-40 are examples of this). This leads to you extending your lines in the wrong direction and your boxes becoming distorted because your lines are actually diverging from where the vanishing point would actually be. Here's a guide I wrote that will hopefully help you place your vanishing points and line extensions more consistently. If you need some more examples you can find them here and a simplified guide below.

  • 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.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds off concepts in the previous course material so if you move forward with un-addressed issues you end up just creating further issues on top of them.

Unfortunately as mentioned you didn't get as much out of this challenge as was possible, and you didn't follow the principles of markmaking as closely as you could have. I'll be asking you for an additional 50 boxes, be sure to re-read through the instructions and follow them to the best of your abilities.

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 can do this and look forward to seeing your work.

Next Steps:

50 more boxes please.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
11:46 AM, Friday October 6th 2023

Thank you for critique, your guide was quite helpful, at I feel that my cubes are now are much better< here is an extra 50:

https://imgur.com/a/S4nTYXF

11:44 PM, Friday October 6th 2023

These are looking much more solid. Your lines are looking confident, and you're extending all of your lines properly.

I have no problem moving you on to the next lesson now so I'll be marking your submission complete.

Keep practicing boxes and previous exercises as warmups and best of luck in lesson 2.

Next Steps:

Move on to lesson 2.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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