Hi, HankArt. This is a very solid submission, but there are a few aspects where I think you could have done better.
Good superimposed lines. You managed to get them well packed together, but sacrificed some smoothness in order to achieve that. If you would have drawn them faster, they would definitely ended up straighter. Your ghosted lines and planes are better in this aspect.
Very good ellipses as well, but, again, don't sacrifice smoothness for accuracy. Right now it's more important to focus on getting smooth lines, as accuracy will naturally come later, if you keep practicing correctly.
Your rough perspective is very well done, as you managed to keep everything aligned with the horizon line. The depth lines are also pretty decent. But one thing I noticed is that you went over the same lines in some occasions. Avoid doing this as it defeats one of the purposes of using ink, which is to plan your lines well. Plot your lines with dots, ghost them and draw with confidence. Not all lines will look good, but embrace the result and, when it's not so good, keep it in mind and do better next time. Don't try to cover your mistakes by drawing over them.
You did an excellent job on the rotated boxes exercise. You have a couple of weirdly shaped boxes, where I think you could have pushed one of the front corners to the back a little bit in order to fix this. Here's what I mean.
Great job as well on the organic perspective. interesting compositions and good perspective. You took a risk on overlapping some boxes and did increased the line weight on some of the ones in front. You could have done this in all the examples, but it's still an optional aspect of this exercise.
Keep up the good work.
Next Steps:
250 boxes challenge.
Thanks for the feedback, Pedro, this was very helpful.
I see what you mean about taking the time to plan out my lines rather than taking a second shot. Often I knew I wasn't following the spirit of the assignments even as I did it. I would get into the groove, and then start correcting lines without thinking about it first. For the 250 Box Challenge I'm going to have to force myself to slow down and be more intentional.
Rotated Boxes was a frustrating challenge, made more-so by the fact that the instructions prohibit making a second attempt. If you look, you'll see that my boxes in the most extreme corners are actually tilted away from the picture plane. I may revisit this after my 250 Boxes, just to see if there's a difference.
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.
