250 Box Challenge
3:28 AM, Tuesday March 3rd 2020
Im ready to move on to lesson 2. Just looking for critiques to take into it.
Excellent work.
Right off the bat it seems you drawing with your wrist more then your shoulder or elbow. Some of your lines appear to be jagged in nature rather than one smooth execution. Think back to the comic with the samurai swinging his sword. It is okay if lines overlap, try to stay loose. Learning this will not come over night. You will have to sketch thousands upon thousands of cubes. So dont get frustrated if it does not come right away.
Your foreshortening is excellent in the latter pages. That can be the hardest part sometimes. Well done on that.
Nit-picky thing try to use just one drawing utensil as you move through the exercises. It looks like you used a sharpie outlining the cubes. Not necessary. Use the same utensil and thicken up the lines. This is good to strengthen your ghosting techniques and add weight to lines.
Next Steps:
Overall, well done. I am marking complete. Move on to Lesson 2! Good luck on your journey. Remember it's a marathon not a sprint. If you find yourself getting frustrated then you are doing it correctly. Working through those frustrations is where you learn the most.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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