Congratulations for completing the 250 Box Challenge!
You did a good job on the challenge overall.
I can see you made some good improvement with the quality of your mark making. Your lines steadily become straighter and more confident looking as you progressed through the challenge. You drew your boxes at a pretty good size and with a variety of orientations and foreshortening. You also start to do a better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points!
While your mark making has improved, I do see some areas where you are still hesitating with your mark making. This is likely due to prioritizing your accuracy over creating a smooth, confident looking line. Just remember that the confidence of the stroke is far and away your top priority. Once your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid mistakes has passed, so all you can really do is push through. Hesitation serves no purpose. Mistakes happen, but a smooth, confident mark is still useful even if it's a little off. Accuracy is something that you will improve on as you continue working through Drawabox and practice ghosting.
Now, while it is important that you use the ghosting method of each mark you make while doing Drawabox one thing you can try to help with ending your marks closer to where you want them is lifting the pen off of the page rather than stopping the motion of your arm. I would also recommend that you read this comment by Uncomfortable, where he talks more about hesitation.
I would also recommend that you try adding extra line weight to your boxes as an added step for your future warm ups. When you go to add weight to a line it is important that you treat the added weight the same way you would a brand new line. That means taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute it the mark blends seamlessly with your original mark. This will allow you to create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines that reinforces the illusion of solidity in your boxes/forms, which you should apply only to the silhouette of your boxes. I recommend that you try adding your extra line weight in no more than 1-2 pases to better focus on ghosting your extra line weight properly.
Extra line weight should never be used to correct or hide mistakes. You can also read more about this here. Something to keep in mind as well, when you are working through Drawabox you should be employing the ghosting method for every mark you make. This includes the hatching that we sometimes use for our boxes.
Finally while your converges do improve overall I think this diagram will help you further develop that skill as you continue through Drawabox. So, when you are looking at your sets of lines you want to be focusing only on the lines that share a vanishing point. This does not include lines that share a corner or a plane, only lines that converge towards the same vanishing point. Now when you think of those lines, including those that have not been drawn, you can think about the angles from which they leave the vanishing point. Usually the middle lines have a small angle between them, and this angle will become negligible by the time they reach the box. This can serve as a useful hint.
Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!
Next Steps:
Continue to lesson 2!
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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