Finally done! Pretty fun to go through and learn. Please excuse the retraces on the ghosting lines and ghosts planes exercises, I accidentally skimmed the paper while I was ghosting. Also please excuse the giant dots on the superimposed lines and ghosting lines (there was an ink splatter accident).
Lines
Starting with your superimposed lines, you're doing a good job lining your pen up with the starting point which is minimising fraying to one end of the line. You are tending to pull your arm back into line with the original guideline rather than confidently accepting the trajectory of your line.
Next, your ghosted lines are hitting the end points pretty well however you do seem to be more focused on this accuracy than confident execution which results in wobbling. This does improve a little bit in your ghosted planes, but make sure you're prioritising confidence over accuracy as accuracy will come with time and practice.
Ellipses
Your tables of ellipses are exhibiting a nice range of different shapes and sizes of ellipses, all packed in there nice and tight. The execution of the ellipses themselves is a bit hit and miss though, as you tend to end up with one end coming out quite pointed. This could indicate you need to ghost more before you execute, you're allowing pivots other than your shoulder to mix in while executing, or that you're slowing down while drawing them... or even some combination of the three. Some of your larger and wider ellipses are actually pretty well executed and it's good to see you drawing through them, so I expect the ellipses with a smaller degree are something you need more practice with.
Next your ellipses in planes are doing a good job of hitting the four sides of the plane however you have again focused too much on accuracy here which has deformed the shape of your ellipses. There's some really good ones here so I suspect you're just overthinking things as you draw your ellipses.
Finally your funnels are showing a fair understanding of aligning ellipses to the minor axis though once again your confidence has suffered here again due to the previously mentioned issues. There are a few that are skewed quite badly, and they also tend to be the ellipses that are less confidently executed.
Boxes
Next your rough perspective is quite well done. You've made a solid effort at keeping your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line, with the exception of a few of the back planes. Your line confidence here is much better than what we saw previously and your estimation of perspective is really not too far off the mark, with the boxes further from the vanishing point tending to stray the most, which is normal at this stage.
The line confidence on your rotated boxes is also bang on point. You kept things together for the first couple of boxes you drew but then things very quickly devolved into guesswork as your lines got further and further from each other. We try to keep the gaps between the boxes nice and tight together because they give us contextual hints about where to place the next box in order to rotate it. That said, this exercise (and the following one) are intended as introductions to certain concepts that we will refine our understanding of as we progress through the box challenge and beyond.
Finally, you've done a pretty good job conveying a sense of depth in each of your organic perspective compositions with the variation in the size of your boxes as they come closer towards the viewer. If you wanted to push this illusion further, you could fill more boxes in at the smallest (furthest) end of the line and begin overlapping boxes as they get larger and closer to the viewer. The boxes themselves have a bit of divergence going on but that's entirely expected at this stage and the reason we assign the 250 box challenge.
I was really happy to see the way your line confidence improved throughout the set however before you move on, I have listed a couple of revisions below.
Next Steps:
One page of tables of ellipses, focusing on getting a smooth, confident ellipse. Experiment with different shapes and sizes.
One page of ellipses in planes, again focus on getting a confident ellipse, keep in mind that you're trying to hit the four sides of the plane but don't focus too much on accuracy.
Here are my two revisions. I tried to focus on my confidence as asked.
This is a good improvement, especially on the ellipses in planes! In the table of ellipses, you're still getting a bit of wobbling and a pointy end on one end of some of your ellipses, so make sure you're not slowing down while drawing your ellipses or as you come to the end of the ellipse, instead trying to lift up your pen in much the same way as you would to avoid overshooting in ghosted lines.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge but make sure you keep practicing your ellipses in your warm-ups.
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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