Does anyone know what "mixing the elbow and shoulder pivots" looks like? The faq says that you shouldn't do it but then it's barely explained what that kind of motion is supposed to look like.
Think of it this way. You're drawing from your elbow, and you realize halfway through your stroke that you can't actually physically bend your elbow any more, but your stroke needs to keep going. So you end up engaging your shoulder to make it the rest of the way.
This is a problem because this kind of "change to the recipe" (the recipe being the ratio of how much you're moving from each pivot) results in a sudden change to the trajectory of your stroke, which messes with their fluidity and flow. This is why we focus so heavily on having students draw any smoothly flowing lines from their shoulder the whole way through. Students also have the hardest time getting comfortable with that pivot, so using it even where the elbow may suffice helps make it easier in the long run.
Aren't there situations where you naturally mix pivots at the start of the motion? Like what if you're right-handed and you draw a long horizontal line that starts near the left side of your body and moves right. Can't that motion start with a little bit of elbow movement to get your arm into a better position to sort of "push" the pen with your shoulder for the rest of the movement? And if you're drawing a long line from right to left with your shoulder, won't you're elbow eventually get to a point to where it'll hit the side of your body, forcing you to pivot from it? And the same thing can happen with lines that move from top to bottom.
This feels like something that's difficult to communicate with only words. Is there any chance you could post a video explaining this in more depth?
I do have a video in lesson 1's page on this topic, and it is on my list of videos to redo so I'll try and address it more at that time. It's not going to be coming up in the next few weeks though as I'll need time to recover from all the work that has gone into the community platform.
That said, there is one important thing your question overlooks, though that may be understandable if you haven't gotten too far into lesson 1's exercises just yet: we always rotate the page in order to give ourselves as comfortable an angle of approach as we can. That is, that's what we do in the context of these lessons, in order to build up the general understanding of how the arm works, and how best to use it. Outside of Drawabox, you apply that understanding, but you aren't bound to any such rules.
So then in general is it possible to make a stroke that starts with the elbow and then switches to the shoulder in a fluid, flowing motion, or is it universally always better to try and use only the shoulder? It feels like it'd be a useful skill to have, especially if you want to hit lines at weird angles on a surface that you can't rotate. Also, if you want to draw a large cirlce in front of you, it feels like you can either have your arm hanging at your side and make the motion by using both elbow movement and shoulder movement, or else you have to have your arm out in front of you and bend your elbow at a 90 degree angle, which lets you draw the circle without moving your elbow too much but it feels really exaggerated.
I think I just want to be able to draw without worrying about whether I'm using too much elbow movement or whatever. It seems like it'd be stressful to have to keep track of something like that constantly.
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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