Really like the course you put together, so clear and well structured lessons! Allthough the homework was a lot of work and probably will be more in the future (will start the 250 boxes challenge now) it was really fun to follow along so far. Looking forward to complete the other lessons :)
Welcome to drawabox. Let’s take this one exercise at a time, shall we?
Your superimposed lines look mostly good. They’re smooth, and properly lined up at the start, but not always of a consistent trajectory, and I was a little sad to see you hadn’t tried out any arcing/wavy lines, as per the instructions. The ghosted lines are missing, it seems… The planes look good, however: smooth and straight.
The table of ellipses exercise is great. Your ellipses are smooth, rounded, and properly drawn through. You’ve kept their angles/degrees consistent in a frame, but not tried out as many as we’d like. It’s mostly the same angle, and the same 3 degrees repeating over and over. The ellipses in planes are nicely done. They maintain their prior smoothness/roundness, despite these more complicated frames. They do a good job of fitting within them, too. The funnels, too, look good, but be sure to extend the minor axis all the way, please. And, of course, do this before you draw your ellipses. An ellipse aligned to nothing is of no use to us.
The plotted perspective exercise looks clean – nicely done.
Save for the occasional instance of automatic reinforcing (resist the urge to correct an incorrect line!), the rough perspective exercise is well done. Still, some more planning, especially with those further off points, would improve your convergences by a lot, so consider it.
The rotated boxes exercise looks fantastic. Not all of the boxes rotate as much as they should, but they’re snug, and properly drawn through. Their far planes are solid, and though their depth lines will sometimes diverge, this is something that’s completely normal, now that you’re relying exclusively on neighboring edges to construct them. As you progress through the box challenge, and learn more about what makes a box, feel free to come back to this, and make some of your own decisions regarding them, too.
The organic perspective exercise is really well done, too. The boxes are at risk of being dramatic, but their sheer number, many overlaps, and proper increase in size do a lot to communicate their flow, either way.
Next Steps:
Solid work on this submission. I’m marking it as complete, so head on over to the box challenge.
Thanks a lot for the critique, the things you pointed out are very helpful for my future exercises, especially the 250 box challenge which I'm working on right now.
I actually did the ghosted line exercise, but somehow it didn't upload properly, I've re-uploaded it, so it should be there now with the same link. Either way thanks again for the critique, looking forward to uploading the next exercises :)
(70 Boxes done, 180 to go)
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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