Hello! Feedback for 250 boxes.
Linework - I can see that your lines are getting more confident and straight as you progress through the challenge; there's a bit of wobbling here and there, but nothing that can't be solved with a bit of warmup beforehand. ;) You may or may not have done this (bit hard to tell from photos), but you can add additional lineweight to the silhouette (outer edges) of the box to give it a bit more sense of volume, and this is also good practice for ghosting/drawing superimposed lines. Hatching on the box faces looks fine too; if I wanted to get nitpicky, I'd say you can treat them as more ghosted lines practice and be sure to draw them from edge to edge. But overall, your linework looks great and this confidence will serve you well in the later lessons.
Box construction - Good work! It's clear from the start that you had a good grasp on how to construct a box with proper 3-d perspective, and that kept it up through the whole challenge. Boxes look great with a lot of variety of sizes and perspectives. All the edges are converging well throughout the challenge - the back corner will always be pesky, so it's not a big deal at this stage since you've got the experience with constructing good boxes.
Congrats on reaching the end of the gauntlet. When you've recovered from this box overload you can draw a few of them now and again during warmups, to keep that spatial understanding and construction fresh in your skills.
Next Steps:
Lesson 2 is next.
Hi Vega,
Thank you so much for taking the time to critique my work, I really appreciate it!
I definitely struggled more with freehanding straight lines and using my shoulder than thinking about the boxes. 10 years of drawing with my wrist is gonna take some time to rectify.
I chickened out of adding line weight for most of the challenge because my super imposed lines are awful. And I realize now that was a big missed oppourtunity to practice them, but I am doing them in my daily warmups to get the practice in.
Thanks again for the feedback and advice!
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.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
