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1:08 PM, Sunday September 6th 2020
Hello,
congratulations on finishing the first lesson! Today I'll be taking a look at your submission.
lines
Starting off with the superimposed lines exercise, there's one mistake that catches my attention. There seems to be fraying on both ends on these lines, so take the time to line up your pen before committing to your mark. That said, the important thing is that they are confident, which they are.
Moving on to the ghosted lines and planes exercises, the same problem reoccurs. There is a fair amount of lines missing both points, which can be prevented by taking the time to position your pen. There also seems to be some wobbling/wavering in your lines. This may be caused as you hesitate along your mark, or allowing too much wrist movement. So remember to use the shoulder and to take as much time as you need to ghost.
elipses
When it comes to elipses, I think you could've taken a little more time ghosting and trying to keep them within their bounds. However, the priority is to make those elipses confident, which in this case they are. The same applies to the funnels exercise, with the elipses sometimes being too loose or not completely aligned to the minor axis.
Boxes
The plotted perspective exercise looks good - not much to add here.
Looking at these exercises, you seem to be repeating lines a lot. No matter how off a line is, you should never repeat it. Instead, when messing up a line, its best to leave them be and carry on with the exercise. Repeating lines will make your work look messy, and in this case it gives the impression the lines are scratched. I recommend you to keep applying the ghosting method and to draw your lines with confidence.
Besides that, the rough perspective exercise looks decent, and it seems that you have applied the line correction method correctly. Its worth noting that the horizontal lines are parallel to the horizon and the vertical lines perpendicular to it. That said, it seems that you already understand this, but on some cases this tends to be a little off.
The rotated perspective exercise looks decent. However, I'll remind you that you should draw through all of your boxes, as you seem to have missed to draw through the boxes in the corner. Furthermore, next time you do this exercise, do not forget this step. I'd also like to see some boxes rotate a little more and the gaps to be more narrow and consistent.
Moving on to the organic perspective exercise, it is a good start. Some sets off parallel lines seem to be diverging, instead of converging to a vanishing point. Do not worry too much about it though, since students are not expected to (completely) nail this exercise on their first try. There will be plenty of opportunities to practice this in the upcoming 250 box challenge.
Although there are some things to work on, you show a decent understanding of these exercises, so I'll mark it as complete. Next time you include these exercises in you warm-ups, I'd like you to pay attention to the points I gave you above.
If you perhaps are interested in critiquing other people, but are not sure how to, I recommend you to look at Elodin's critique guide for lesson 1.
Good luck and keep on improving!
-Seppio
Next Steps:
Move onto the 250 box challenge.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)
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.