Nice work, as always! Your form intersections are showing a well developing understanding of how your forms relate to one another in space, along with confident, mindful linework that is clearly the result of foresthought and planning. You've got a lot of curving intersections with rounded forms, and they're generally working correctly, so I'm pleased with your progress here.
Continuing onto your object constructions, I'm very happy with how willing you are to delve deeply into all of the subdivision necessary to lay out each aspect of your constructions with specificity. Given that this is the first lesson where we really dive into this kind of unforgiving construction - prior to this point, our subject matter has allowed for a lot more approximation and eyeballing. Here, however, students are pushed to subdivide to pin down the specific positioning of their different elements, and often they will try to push back on that. Many of them will subdivide to a point, and then start eyeballing the really small details - I'm pleased to see that throughout this lesson's work, you subdivided for just about everything.
That's not to say there aren't some mistakes here and there, but they're all quite limited and don't really have any bearing on your actual underlying understanding. So for example, your struggles with that stylus was notable in that more limited context, but as a whole it doesn't make me worry that you're not understanding how these forms and structures exist in 3D space.
On the topic of that stylus, from what I can see, the key problem comes down to proportion, and perhaps underestimating how many different cross-sectional ellipses we might want to define along its length. From what I can see, you've got the front section a little too squashed, and your main cross-sectional ellipses are at the tip, at the widest swell, and then way back where that flat surface towards the back of the barrel.
Here I've marked out the major cross-sections that define this structure. The ones in green, you've included - but the ones in red, I think you're missing.
In regards to proportion, you may have analyzed the division of space between all those cross-sections correctly, but the overall length of the box you started with was probably way too short (relative to the pen's thickness), causing it to all get smushed down.
Another very minor issue I caught was that in your pencil sharpener, you ended up filling in some of the side planes (both on the side of the sharpener itself, as well as in the two insets. This constitutes form shading, which should be left out of these drawings. Instead, leave those sides blank, and focus only on the cast shadows themselves. This will also make the cast shadows easier for the viewer to distinguish.
Anyway, as I've mentioned already - as a whole your lesson is giving me a lot of confidence in your abilities, and what you've been learning throughout the course. So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 25 wheel challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 7. I do highly recommend that you try to at least grab a master ellipse template for working on these, as freehanding ellipses beyond this point will get pretty taxing and distracting from the meat of the lessons. Master ellipse templates are more limited (and much cheaper) than full ellipse guide sets, mainly in terms of the size of the ellipses, but they'll be enough to get the job done.
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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