Hi Uncomfortable,
I completed the 100 Treasure Chest Challenge.
If my website is working correctly, you should be able to click on a photo to activate the 'Lightbox' view, then cycle through the rest of the photos using the left/right arrows.
Please let me know what you think.
Best,
JB
Your website is indeed working correctly - although while it's a bit late for me to be mentioning this, light boxes aren't super conducive to critiquing a large homework submission. The reason we recommend the use of imgur is largely because it allows us to jump around more fluidly throughout the set, while seeing all of the pages in full, at a decent resolution. Having to click through in order slows things down somewhat.
Anyway, onto your critique. It has been a while since I've seen a student tackle the chest challenge prior to actually completing Lesson 7. It's certainly allowed (given that the prerequisite here is Lesson 6), and there isn't really anything wrong with it - it's just a little unique. This challenge is where we take a lot of the things that we've learned, and allow students to put it into practice to explore more design-focused problems.
Looking at your basic chest constructions first, I did notice off the bat a few cases where your initial box structure was off by a fair bit. Number 17 for instance stood out in this regard, but I didn't want to base my whole judgment on such an early one, so I jumped ahead and caught 93 being quite a bit off as well, as shown here (the blue line is how that top edge ought to have been drawn, in order to converge more consistently with the others. This immediately led me to assume that there was a trend where you perhaps weren't putting as much thought into that initial bounding box - but fortunately, a little further inspection suggested that I was premature in that. There aren't many major issues of this nature throughout your set, I just happened to pick up on the most obvious. That said, remember that if you have the choice between giving yourself more time early on, and more time later for details, always choose the former. The choices we make early on influence everything, whereas the things we build up towards the end tend to be more specific with far less overall impact.
Stepping through the rest of these constructions, throughout many of them I'm quite pleased with what I'm seeing. In these, you're paying a lot of attention to building up appropriate precision for all of your marks and decisions, and are making good use of the techniques presented in Lesson 6. That said, there are still quite a few where you're visibly more rushed, and not necessarily giving yourself the time you require. With number 19 for instance, the initial bounding box (it's not as extreme as the ones I pointed out before, but as shown here you've got some issues for the lines going up and to the left, as well as the top two edges going to the right). You've also put a lot less time into determining the specific positioning of your elements, and even ended up putting a lot of your work more sketchily and haphazardly (like the ornamental brackets, the rings and handle on the side, as well as the hatching - which was actually used to capture form shading by filling in the side planes of some of the structures, which as explained here is not something we should be using in our drawings throughout this course). As a whole this is definitely one that did not receive the full benefit of your time and attention. As a result, elements were not placed symmetrically (as shown here for the brackets. The design along the front also didn't appear to receive as much consideration as some of your others.
Ultimately however, I am nitpicking - this is one lazy case, amongst many others that were considerably better. They have their own elements of sloppiness (you're obviously not taking as much care with every mark as you could), but given the focus of this exercise also being heavily rooted in design, sometimes we have to loosen up in order to explore the components we're playing with more fully - when I iterate over designs, I myself throw aside all of the tight construction (although my underlying spatial reasoning skills pick up the slack in order to make the objects continue to feel solid and three dimensional)
One last thing I did appreciate quite a bit across your constructions/designs was the attention you paid to the thickness of things. Looking at the same, admittedly rushed, design, you still insisted on establishing both the front face and side planes of the ribbing along the lid, and the hinges as well. Even the piece holding the ring handle on the top left has a side plane. Many students forget about this, and it can really make all the difference between a drawing that feels believable, tangible, and solid, and one that may be well constructed in all other aspects, but simply doesn't feel believable.
So! As a whole you're doing a good job, and you've done well in exploring the specific elements presented in this challenge. I'll go ahead and mark it as complete.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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