I did the 250 boxes challenge but my line work has become way worse than i first started.

Hi, i just ended 250 boxes from the course "drawabox", i thought i could talk about it here since it has been well known. When i first started my lines were more straight using the ghosting method that was taught me by the site; but when i do them at the end of the challenge my hand slightly changes rotation and it makes me do weird S lines or more often than not I trace multiple lines as correction for my wrong assestments of perspective.

I completed the challenge myself; it's very common to get tired or burned out at the end and phone it in, rather than progressing in a linear fashion. Are you getting feedback / logging your challenge on the website?

Alternately, DAB may just not be a good fit for you. A lot of people praise it and swear it's the only way to improve, but it's only effective for certain experiences and learning styles; I found that it wasn't very helpful for me, personally.

Sounds very much like you became increasingly tense and insecure during practice, so you started to overcorrect your fine motor control. It would be probably extremely helpful if you found a way to relax, but I have no effing clue what method of relaxation would work for you.

That you aren't perfect at the end of the challenge is normal. Until the end I occassionally started boxes, where the perspective lines converging just led to rather strange forms, that I couldn't "pop" into 3-D cubes in my mind, and the multiple lines necessary to even find all 3 vanishing points and make all lines exactly and perfectly converge in one of them was also quite dependent on my own daily form.

The thing is, if you want to obsessively perfectly see how all the lines meet in a single point, then you kind of need to put all 3 vanishing points on the same paper as the box, and ideally even close to it, which just produces an extremely unnatural perspective, as if you would be looking at the box through a strange lense.

If you go through the world and just observe box-shaped objects like buildings or furniture or packaging and just draw them from the perspective that you see them, you will usually have at least one or even two of the vanishing points quite far away from the object, and the corresponding lines almost parallel, with no easy way to check whether you hit the vanishing point "perfectly". Also, with such long lines it is just a consequence of geometry that even the slightest mismatch in gradient will have a large impact on the distance to the point where it meets another line, so, even if you used a very very huge paper to draw them all, you probably wouldn't achieve all 4 lines intersecting at the exact same point with far away vanishing points, but more often 2 or 3 separate intersections with a small bit of distance between them.

Off course I also chased the endorphine kick to always perfectly hit that mark, and started to try backwards engineering the box out of lines that started from the vanishing points, and then realized, that I had a hard time imagining a regular old box in the intersection of all of the 12 lines I had started such.

To preserve my sanity, upon realizing that, I decided that this just doesn't matter so much. I am practising drawing to achieve a certain visual effect, not to wind myself up over BS. I draw the boxes starting from my visual memory of boxes, that I have actually seen somewhere. If and when a vanishing point happens to be close to the box, then I want the intersection to be quite clean, because otherwise the construction would look sloppy even to a casual observer. If a vanishing point is so far away from the box, that I would need extensive technical gear to exactly check it, then I don't give a darn, and am content if the lines look parallel-ish or somewhat evenly converging on a glance. Because no one looking at my drawings will use a laser pointer to check all my angles and vanishing points.

I had done 5 boxes a day for 50 days, and for me it felt OK, that my results were mostly good enough. I promised myself to keep up a daily habit of this exercise, and then didn't. Occassionally I come back to the practice and realize, that my results still aren't perfect, just good enough for my needs, but that revisiting the practice every now and then is a good idea.

You say the shading practice had good results for you, but now you become twitchy when you try to pinpoint a box. My advice, maybe repeat the shading practice a few times to refresh memory, and resign yourself to only being able to draw boxes that are good enough for casual observers. You drew the 250 boxes, you finished the challenge, you know a lot more about boxes now then you did when you started, including that they are tricky little beasts which look so innocent and easy to draw, but can be demanding if you want to draw them really, really, really perfectly. If you enjoy drawing boxes do it more, but from the sound of it you are currently somewhat done with it, so maybe take a break with them and focus on drawing other things for a while.

In future if you draw a picture which includes one or more box-shaped objects or parts, and you somehow get the feeling like something looks wonky and sloppy and off, you now have a tool and an idea where to start applying corrections to clean up the result. Achievement unlocked: "Basic knowledge of 3 point perspective" Congrats.

• Aunt Herbert edited this post on August 19, 2024 6:47pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on August 19, 2024 6:57pm.
• Aunt Herbert edited this post on August 20, 2024 7:59am.