This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
12:42 PM, Wednesday April 15th 2020
Hey there Kamaro! Looks like you had submitted your lesson 1 with the required number of page and exercises included. Let's dive in and have a peek at your work.
Starting off with your super imposed lines, you are doing a decent job on executing the lines confidently with your shoulders. Upon closer inspection though I noticed some of your lines show some noticeable frayings at the end, which right now isn't a big deal. Just keep practicing them during your warm-ups finding a suitable pace ensuring the lines are grouped up tighter. Excellent work with your ghosted lines, it's clear that you had shown patience when ghosting and executing a confident swift stroke with your shoulder. Your lines also has a nice taper at the end which shows that instead of stopping your line at the end goal you are lifting up your pen which adds visual interest.
Moving onto your ellipses section you had made some good progress overall. Your ellipses in the tables exercise are packed tightly together to leave no room for ambiguity and you have a good variation in size and orientations. Your ellipses in planes are getting a little sloppy with your follow up passes while drawing through so keep practicing to tighten those up, but they are making good contact with the plane edges to make sure they sit snugly in the bounds of the planes with no room to float around. I'm very pleased to see that in your ellipses in planes you generally don't allow the ellipse to get deformed in order to fit in its container. The key here is that, just like with the ghosted lines, the first priority is to ensure that our ellipses are evenly shaped, and actually ellipses, then worrying about whether or not they touch all four edges of the enclosing plane.
Finally, your funnels are pretty well done with most of your ellipses aligning to the minor axis. Where they don't line up, it tends to be towards the outer ends of the funnel, which is quite common, since there's less guidelines/scaffolding for you to work to there.
Next your rough perspective is showing quite a bit of wobbling in your lines again. You've made a clear attempt to keep your horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line, with mixed success. Your estimation of perspective is not too far off for the most part and where it does stray, it tends to do so in predictable ways, such as the boxes further from the vanishing point being less accurate.
Your rotated boxes are off to a good start. You've kept the gaps between your boxes nice and consistent which has limited the amount of guesswork required. There's a good amount of rotation happening here, particularly on the front planes, however on your rear planes, there is not very much rotation present. This and organic perspective are both designed to be beyond a student's current capabilities in order to introduce them to new kinds of spatial problems they might not have otherwise considered.
Finally, you've created some interesting compositions in your organic perspective, with the variation in the size of your boxes and overlapping creating a sense of depth in the scenes. Naturally, there are some issues to iron out with the convergences of your boxes but this is why the 250 box challenge is prepared for you.
With that being said you had done solid work with your lesson 1! And for that I'll mark this lesson as completed.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge. Make sure you keep practicing the ellipses exercises in your warm-ups.
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.