250 Boxes Purpose
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/11a91st/250_boxes_purpose/
2023-02-23 21:18
OkGroup1346
I dont quite understand what exactly the point of the challenge is. Is it to be able to visualize the box before drawing, and then drawing what I visualized? Because Im not sure if I did it correctly. After drawing the y, I just drew the other lines to wherever I felt the vanishing point was. Im 8 away from being finished. So I have a few questions, just answer which ever you feel comfortable answering:
Is the way I did it still useful?
If not, will it be a detriment to the rest of the course, or will later lessons and challenges make up for imperfections on this one?
Uncomfortable
2023-02-24 17:53
The purpose of the box challenge is to help students develop their underlying, instinctual understanding of how the things they draw on the flat page, and the manner in which they're drawn, impact what they're meant to represent in 3D space. More specifically, the box challenge focuses on the idea that the edges that are parallel to one another in three dimensions converge towards a shared vanishing point when drawn in 2D. Basically the box challenge has us repeatedly focus on those convergences, so as to build up our ability to gauge how lines should be angled such that they converge with other lines in a given set.
In the grand scheme of things, 250 boxes isn't that much, so it's not intended to achieve any particular amount of growth/improvement in this area - just to push students forward and to ensure that they've had a significant exposure to this idea of focusing on convergences.
What you described, drawing the Y and then estimating where to place your other lines, is entirely appropriate, as long as you were focusing on having those lines converge consistently, and as long as you were applying the line extensions from the instruction to then check where those convergences were off so you could adjust your approach in the next page.
As a side note, nothing in Drawabox is meant to train students to visualize the things they intend to draw. The reason for that being that I myself have aphantasia - which is an inability to visualize things in one's head. In my experience however this is not a disability, but rather helps clear away any of the unnecessary distractions many students might face, especially when they're able to already see what they wish to draw, but simply can't reproduce it on the page. This has the potential of creating the expectation that they are supposed to be able to, when in fact just like the rest of us, they still have to go through the work of developing their technical drawing skills, their observational skills, and their visual libraries.
If you're at all interested in aphantasia, I do have a video here which I made for Proko's youtube channel a couple years ago.
OkGroup1346
2023-02-24 18:23
Ok, thank you for this. Pretty much cleared up all my insecurities I had with the challenge