Heads up - we still have a coupon with NMA, but the one in the video no longer works. You can use the new code DRAWABOX for 25% off your first billing cycle on either the Library or Library+ plans. For the most current coupon/terms, check the banner at the top of the drawabox.com website.
seeing you negotiate the corners with several dots in a row I think is such a morale boost since I always felt like I was failing in some degree. But now I see it's actually normal!
I just finished the first 50 and am genuinely excited for the next 50. This has been so helpful, and I really appreciate the videos alongside the texts on the website. Thank you for all of the hard work you put into this!
The thing about exercises like this is that they benefit greatly from students being hyper intentional with all of the choices they make - that's an important part of any aspect of this course, ensuring that you're acting on clear reasoning (even if that reasoning is incorrect), so that what you learn in the process is gradually allowed to rewire aspects of how your brain engages with these kinds of activities. In essence, throughout this course we take care to think through all our decisions, so that we can push what we learn about drawing down into our subconscious, and so ultimately when we draw outside of the course, we're able to focus on what it is we wish to draw rather than specifically how. If you're letting your brain go on autopilot, you're likely missing out on a lot of that.
@@Uncomfortable I`m not really going on autopilot as much as just grinding something. Constructing lines to roughly intersect at certain point is not really that hard, even somewhat intuitive. Maybe for some people grinding something means going on autopilot and not thinking, but I find it more engaging to have some background noise.
Really looking forward to this, I was always trying to visualize the box in the first 50 but the limitation of using shallow angle lense view with the close vps always ment I'm wrong, this will finally itch that scratch!
im going through the challenge now and wanted to thank you for providing such high quality guides for us to watch. i was wondering if you were planning on also rerecording the lessons after the 250 box challenge? just curious as i've grown very fond of your newer style of videos, though i understand if updating material that's already good is low on your list of priorities.
Yes, we are absolutely working to update the entire course in this manner. It's something we've been working through gradually for a while now, and while it's definitely going quite slowly (since there's a lot that already demands our time in terms of running the community and providing official critique), we plan on chipping away with it bit by bit until the entire course has been overhauled in a similar manner. Of course, the focus here is less on providing new or different information, for the most part, but rather conveying what's already there more clearly and applying any adjustments we've found to be necessary to address pain points that come up in the homework submissions we critique.
I have a different way of constructing these boxes - I place all the corners first and then I connect the lines, this works really well for me as I can go back and change the corner if they didn’t work. However, with the way you drew a box in the video, I realized that this is to help develop an instinct where I can estimate the convergence with the other lines already present on the page, with this in mind, would my approach be faulty? As I only know the points, not the lines themselves, which are supposed to be the information that helps me decide the angle of the other lines
I'd have to take some time to assess the approach more meaningfully to give you a worthwhile answer, but unfortunately due to our limited resources that's not something I can make time to do. It's for that reason, among others, that we recommend students stick to the instructions as they're laid out, because at least then you can guarantee that you're following in the paths of the many others who've successfully completed the challenge and gotten from it what it was designed to provide, rather than striking out on their own and dealing with the uncertainty that might cause.
Thankfully, i have completed the 250-box challenge. I have a couple of questions about it: 1. After submitting my work (not for official critique), how long should I wait for feedback before moving on to lesson 2? 2. A consistent issue i had throughout the challenge was that a set of lines would not converge perfectly, creating effectively 2 vanishing points on one axis. I have heard that i should be thinking about the angles of each line in the set, but I am not really sure what that means. Could you explain it to me in more detail? (If it helps, i find that the issue lessens with more extreme foreshortening)
1. That's up to you - though on our discord chat server ( discord.gg/drawabox ) students have put together an unofficial "critique exchange" program that can help improve the likelihood they'll get useful feedback on their homework, so you may want to look into that. It's operated in the #critique-exchange channel under the Drawabox-Critiques channel category, and how the system works is explained in the pinned message for that channel. 2. That's a very normal issue to run into, and more generally, the challenge as a whole is geared to improve our ability to estimate our convergences. That is, it's not nearly enough to make them perfect (not even mine are perfect), but the exercise, in having us identify those issues via line extensions, we are able to identify them where they're present, and over a larger set of boxes, reveal patterns of issues that are present. As we identify these issues, the solution - which probably will be a little disappointing, as there's no trick to it - is to reflect on how we're approaching things with that knowledge in mind, and adjust that approach accordingly. So for example if you're finding that your lines tend to converge in pairs, then it suggests that you may need to spend more time consciously thinking about all four lines of a given set, and that you're probably focusing more on the two that are closest together instead. So, in order to correct that, we'd be intentionally giving ourselves more time to consider all four edges at a time as we negotiate our corners - which won't fix the issue immediately or completely, but that adjustment will push us in that direction. As for thinking about the angles of each line in the set, if you've got 4 lines that are meant to converge to a single vanishing point, we can think about what kind of angles might be between those lines *at* the vanishing point. Looking at those 4 lines where they meet at the VP, you're going to have two outer lines and two inner lines, with the angle between the two outer lines being much larger, and the angle between the inner lines being much smaller - and therefore closer to parallel. Often times those inner lines are actually quite close to parallel, although this can depend on the orientation and proportions of the box, but it's a useful thing to consider because it can remind us that, "these lines are probably going to be more parallel because the angle when they converge is small", and so we can keep that in mind to avoid over-exaggerating their convergence, which would throw off the result.
So once we get to 100 boxes we draw the final 150 by mixing rapid and slow foreshortening. Is there anyway the course prefers students to mix them? Should we draw 5 of rapid on one sheet and then 5 of slow on the next? Maybe 2 rapid and 3 slow on one page and then 3 rapid and 2 slow on the next?
How you split them up is up to you, but what I would recommend is not overthinking it. Do a few with dramatic convergences, then a few with shallower convergences, and back and forth - it doesn't need to be a perfect split, and moreover it's not a binary choice, but a spectrum of rates of foreshortening. Ultimately what matters is the spirit with which you're approaching the work, which should be to avoid letting your brain fall into autopilot and simply draw the same thing over and over, but rather being conscious and aware of the choices you're making.
As this exercise specifically focuses on convergences and our ability to estimate them consistently, we specifically want to avoid the very specific alignments (where the box is perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight on one or two axes) that force our vanishing points to infinity. So, we always use concrete vanishing points, which is what the simplification of describing them as corner-facing boxes (or as being in three point perspective) ultimately means.
@@pharahway2394 someone was asking that on our discord server the other day. I checked, and it doesn't - it has 3. The TH-cam API doesn't provide that info anymore so the extension people use to see dislikes is probably a lot less reliable than it used to be.
You should be thinking about the angles at which they're converging together, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "visualize". Can you elaborate?
@Uncomfortable yeah sure by "visualize" I mean that I'm trying to image the lines of a box extending past the actual box themselves snd meet towards the vanishing point. Essentially, I'm trying to imagine thr line extensions that are seen when we are doing the extensions part of the page once all the boxes are done
@@JamesGuida-c2y Ahh. So if it's visualize as in, actually see something in your mind's eye, then no, that's not necessary. It's actually not something everyone can do - I myself have a condition known as "aphantasia", which means I basically can't visualize anything in my head. If you're curious about that, I made a video on it for Proko's channel: th-cam.com/video/LWgXSxxEjgs/w-d-xo.html
Every single box. It's an important part of the exercise (and as with anything in this course, never rely on your own judgment of whether or not you're getting things - do your best to follow the instructions, then seek third party feedback). Students should also be doing the line extensions when doing the exercise as part of their warmups, after they've completed the challenge.
There is a lot of valuable general considerations in this video. And at the same time there is no any clear, straightforward guidance of how to proceed. I realize that there is no exact algorithm of doing that. But it would be very helpful just to watch the process of building at least a couple of sample boxes from the beginning to the end when the visual is supplemented by explanation of what and why you are doing this and that. Not the general ideas but very concrete specific reasoning of making this and that decision at each point of the box construction. Some heuristics coming from the author with great experience would be very helpful. And one more thing. By this point we all know how useful ghosting techniques in drawing is. And we all are using it all the time. But your video is just full of dozens and dozens of ghosting movements in all directions at some crazy speed (for ex. 5:12 - 5:47). It doesn't help at all! Just the opposite - it is extremely annoying, irritating and distracting from the subject of this video. It makes your viewers uncomfortable, dear Uncomfortable. :) Other than that thank you very much for your video and I hope it's not the last one on this subject. Actually another video (which is 4 years older) that I accidentally found "Critiques of Homework" has some concrete, constructive guidance and advices for the viewers. . I think that all of those and even some more should be right here!
Heads up - we still have a coupon with NMA, but the one in the video no longer works. You can use the new code DRAWABOX for 25% off your first billing cycle on either the Library or Library+ plans.
For the most current coupon/terms, check the banner at the top of the drawabox.com website.
The 250 box challenge is truly the greatest challenge and I reaped the most benefits after this and lesson 3
Reaped the benefits? You mean you learned to draw better? Jeez who talks like this?
@@brap97 certified hater👆men talk like this so how about you hop off mine and find your own.
@@brap97 Certified hater ☝️ somebody hurt you buddy? 😂
@@brap97Dude, that’s such a normal way for someone to talk.
You're 24 now brap time to grow up.
seeing you negotiate the corners with several dots in a row I think is such a morale boost since I always felt like I was failing in some degree. But now I see it's actually normal!
I just finished the first 50 and am genuinely excited for the next 50. This has been so helpful, and I really appreciate the videos alongside the texts on the website. Thank you for all of the hard work you put into this!
Congrats! And thank you for the kind words.
100 boxes done!!!
Just finished my first fifty!
Finished the Challenge 🙂
@@demiurge9212 great job :D
Idk why people think this challenge is hard. It's very easy and therapeutic. You just zone out while drawing boxes to a podcast every couple of days.
The thing about exercises like this is that they benefit greatly from students being hyper intentional with all of the choices they make - that's an important part of any aspect of this course, ensuring that you're acting on clear reasoning (even if that reasoning is incorrect), so that what you learn in the process is gradually allowed to rewire aspects of how your brain engages with these kinds of activities. In essence, throughout this course we take care to think through all our decisions, so that we can push what we learn about drawing down into our subconscious, and so ultimately when we draw outside of the course, we're able to focus on what it is we wish to draw rather than specifically how.
If you're letting your brain go on autopilot, you're likely missing out on a lot of that.
@@Uncomfortable I`m not really going on autopilot as much as just grinding something. Constructing lines to roughly intersect at certain point is not really that hard, even somewhat intuitive. Maybe for some people grinding something means going on autopilot and not thinking, but I find it more engaging to have some background noise.
I can't believe ive made it this faaar
Halfway through the first 50 it started to get a lot easier and faster
Really looking forward to this, I was always trying to visualize the box in the first 50 but the limitation of using shallow angle lense view with the close vps always ment I'm wrong, this will finally itch that scratch!
Scratch that itch...
I reach 100 boxes already, i will try my best to end this and keep learning
Is it complete yet?
im going through the challenge now and wanted to thank you for providing such high quality guides for us to watch. i was wondering if you were planning on also rerecording the lessons after the 250 box challenge? just curious as i've grown very fond of your newer style of videos, though i understand if updating material that's already good is low on your list of priorities.
Yes, we are absolutely working to update the entire course in this manner. It's something we've been working through gradually for a while now, and while it's definitely going quite slowly (since there's a lot that already demands our time in terms of running the community and providing official critique), we plan on chipping away with it bit by bit until the entire course has been overhauled in a similar manner. Of course, the focus here is less on providing new or different information, for the most part, but rather conveying what's already there more clearly and applying any adjustments we've found to be necessary to address pain points that come up in the homework submissions we critique.
I have a different way of constructing these boxes - I place all the corners first and then I connect the lines, this works really well for me as I can go back and change the corner if they didn’t work. However, with the way you drew a box in the video, I realized that this is to help develop an instinct where I can estimate the convergence with the other lines already present on the page, with this in mind, would my approach be faulty? As I only know the points, not the lines themselves, which are supposed to be the information that helps me decide the angle of the other lines
I'd have to take some time to assess the approach more meaningfully to give you a worthwhile answer, but unfortunately due to our limited resources that's not something I can make time to do.
It's for that reason, among others, that we recommend students stick to the instructions as they're laid out, because at least then you can guarantee that you're following in the paths of the many others who've successfully completed the challenge and gotten from it what it was designed to provide, rather than striking out on their own and dealing with the uncertainty that might cause.
Just 150 more to go now 😊
Thankfully, i have completed the 250-box challenge. I have a couple of questions about it:
1. After submitting my work (not for official critique), how long should I wait for feedback before moving on to lesson 2?
2. A consistent issue i had throughout the challenge was that a set of lines would not converge perfectly, creating effectively 2 vanishing points on one axis. I have heard that i should be thinking about the angles of each line in the set, but I am not really sure what that means. Could you explain it to me in more detail? (If it helps, i find that the issue lessens with more extreme foreshortening)
1. That's up to you - though on our discord chat server ( discord.gg/drawabox ) students have put together an unofficial "critique exchange" program that can help improve the likelihood they'll get useful feedback on their homework, so you may want to look into that. It's operated in the #critique-exchange channel under the Drawabox-Critiques channel category, and how the system works is explained in the pinned message for that channel.
2. That's a very normal issue to run into, and more generally, the challenge as a whole is geared to improve our ability to estimate our convergences. That is, it's not nearly enough to make them perfect (not even mine are perfect), but the exercise, in having us identify those issues via line extensions, we are able to identify them where they're present, and over a larger set of boxes, reveal patterns of issues that are present. As we identify these issues, the solution - which probably will be a little disappointing, as there's no trick to it - is to reflect on how we're approaching things with that knowledge in mind, and adjust that approach accordingly.
So for example if you're finding that your lines tend to converge in pairs, then it suggests that you may need to spend more time consciously thinking about all four lines of a given set, and that you're probably focusing more on the two that are closest together instead. So, in order to correct that, we'd be intentionally giving ourselves more time to consider all four edges at a time as we negotiate our corners - which won't fix the issue immediately or completely, but that adjustment will push us in that direction.
As for thinking about the angles of each line in the set, if you've got 4 lines that are meant to converge to a single vanishing point, we can think about what kind of angles might be between those lines *at* the vanishing point. Looking at those 4 lines where they meet at the VP, you're going to have two outer lines and two inner lines, with the angle between the two outer lines being much larger, and the angle between the inner lines being much smaller - and therefore closer to parallel. Often times those inner lines are actually quite close to parallel, although this can depend on the orientation and proportions of the box, but it's a useful thing to consider because it can remind us that, "these lines are probably going to be more parallel because the angle when they converge is small", and so we can keep that in mind to avoid over-exaggerating their convergence, which would throw off the result.
@@Uncomfortable thanks for the feedback! Very helpful. Have a nice day
thx you sir
So once we get to 100 boxes we draw the final 150 by mixing rapid and slow foreshortening. Is there anyway the course prefers students to mix them? Should we draw 5 of rapid on one sheet and then 5 of slow on the next? Maybe 2 rapid and 3 slow on one page and then 3 rapid and 2 slow on the next?
How you split them up is up to you, but what I would recommend is not overthinking it. Do a few with dramatic convergences, then a few with shallower convergences, and back and forth - it doesn't need to be a perfect split, and moreover it's not a binary choice, but a spectrum of rates of foreshortening. Ultimately what matters is the spirit with which you're approaching the work, which should be to avoid letting your brain fall into autopilot and simply draw the same thing over and over, but rather being conscious and aware of the choices you're making.
I finished 200 boxes in 2021.50 left and Its 2024.
Why are there only corner faced boxes in this exercise? Wouldn't make more sense if they were also facing a face or an edge
As this exercise specifically focuses on convergences and our ability to estimate them consistently, we specifically want to avoid the very specific alignments (where the box is perpendicular to the viewer's angle of sight on one or two axes) that force our vanishing points to infinity. So, we always use concrete vanishing points, which is what the simplification of describing them as corner-facing boxes (or as being in three point perspective) ultimately means.
why does this video have 1.3k dislikes?
@@pharahway2394 someone was asking that on our discord server the other day. I checked, and it doesn't - it has 3. The TH-cam API doesn't provide that info anymore so the extension people use to see dislikes is probably a lot less reliable than it used to be.
Mint
Question: do we have to visualize our oines converging all the way until our desired vanishig points?
You should be thinking about the angles at which they're converging together, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "visualize". Can you elaborate?
@Uncomfortable yeah sure by "visualize" I mean that I'm trying to image the lines of a box extending past the actual box themselves snd meet towards the vanishing point. Essentially, I'm trying to imagine thr line extensions that are seen when we are doing the extensions part of the page once all the boxes are done
@@JamesGuida-c2y Ahh. So if it's visualize as in, actually see something in your mind's eye, then no, that's not necessary. It's actually not something everyone can do - I myself have a condition known as "aphantasia", which means I basically can't visualize anything in my head. If you're curious about that, I made a video on it for Proko's channel: th-cam.com/video/LWgXSxxEjgs/w-d-xo.html
Do I need to draw the tracer lines for every box? Even if I feel like I’ve got it
Every single box. It's an important part of the exercise (and as with anything in this course, never rely on your own judgment of whether or not you're getting things - do your best to follow the instructions, then seek third party feedback). Students should also be doing the line extensions when doing the exercise as part of their warmups, after they've completed the challenge.
@@Uncomfortable erg lol. I understand. I’m not happy about it but I get it. Thank you senpai.
why is everybody over complicating trapezoids and kites?
There is a lot of valuable general considerations in this video. And at the same time there is no any clear, straightforward guidance of how to proceed. I realize that there is no exact algorithm of doing that. But it would be very helpful just to watch the process of building at least a couple of sample boxes from the beginning to the end when the visual is supplemented by explanation of what and why you are doing this and that. Not the general ideas but very concrete specific reasoning of making this and that decision at each point of the box construction. Some heuristics coming from the author with great experience would be very helpful.
And one more thing. By this point we all know how useful ghosting techniques in drawing is. And we all are using it all the time. But your video is just full of dozens and dozens of ghosting movements in all directions at some crazy speed (for ex. 5:12 - 5:47). It doesn't help at all! Just the opposite - it is extremely annoying, irritating and distracting from the subject of this video. It makes your viewers uncomfortable, dear Uncomfortable. :) Other than that thank you very much for your video and I hope it's not the last one on this subject. Actually another video (which is 4 years older) that I accidentally found "Critiques of Homework" has some concrete, constructive guidance and advices for the viewers. . I think that all of those and even some more should be right here!
🤍
First?