250 Box Challenge

7:29 AM, Saturday March 27th 2021

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Man this was grueling. However, I definitely noticed a huge improvement in not just the quality of the boxes, but my intuitive understanding of perspective. Especially near the end, I found I was able to more accurately estimate where each set of parallel lines should converge without having to plot back towards a vanishing point. I still need a lot more practice, but I think I have made significant strides over the past 2 weeks.

At around box 160, I came up with a new method to draw the box that helped with consistency. I started with the Y, then I would add in 2 corners, making sure they converged with eachother properly. Then I would put in the back corner and then the final corner. This would result in 2 Ys corresponding to the original front corner and the back corner. Finally, I would connect the end points of the Ys in either clockwise or anticlockwise ordering. I also felt that this helped me better understand how the box existed in 3-D space than the suggested method.

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8:11 PM, Saturday March 27th 2021

Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!

The method you used to construct your boxes sounds interesting. I will pass it along to Comfy so he can test it out, thank you for sharing!

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 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 would recommend that you try adding extra line weight to your boxes as a permanent step for your future warm ups. 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 so that you can easily identify mistakes in your work. This diagram should help also you better understand how to properly apply your extra line weight.

Some of your boxes were drawn a bit small. 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:

Continue to lesson 2!

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
9:01 PM, Saturday March 27th 2021

Thanks!

Some of those bad lines are actually me repeating the stroke because the ink didn't flow out of my pen properly, or I accidentally touched the paper while ghosting. That being said, I'll be keeping all of your suggestions in mind, and I'll be sure to put them into practice as I work through lesson 2.

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