Hi Senator Platypus,
your submission looks great, your improvement is visible.
Your understanding of 3D space is good and will definitely improve in the 250 Box Challenge.
Next Steps:
Your mark making skill is what you should focus most on in the future because it's a really important aspect you will improve at.
Your lines tend to curve quite a bit sometimes.
It's not that easy to explain exactly how to improve at it since it's something you'll learn by focusing on everything you do motorically when doing each stroke.
Try to think about these questions when drawing:
Am I drawing from my shoulder instead of my wrist? / is my wrist really "locked"/not moving?
Am I rotating the page correctly for each stroke?
Am I holding the pen too tightly? / Is my body too tensed up/stiff? (Holding the pen rather lightly and being relaxed physically and mentally is recommended, though it's hard to force yourself to be relaxed)
How should it feel when the tip of the pen slides across the page, how much should I press it down?
Is my wrist resting on the page when drawing for additional stability? Is it obstructing the stroke by creating too much drag?
Would my Strokes improve if I didn't rest my wrist when drawing?
I could go on and on, these are questions that helped me.
You'll have to observe yourself when drawing and constantly try out different techniques/subtleties in order to improve.
Mentally you should accept to fail, only then can you draw in a relaxed state and draw decisive, confident strokes.
I hope I didn't confuse you too much, have fun
Sebastian
Thanks so much Sebastian, I was not expecting such a thorough feedback, and so fast too! I will definitely put to use your advice. I'm always careful about drawing with my shoulder, although I don't think it feels natural to me yet (especially with smaller strokes); I'll try to not rest my wrist, but I did try it already once or twice, and it felt really unnatural ^^' Thanks again, I'll move on to the 250 boxes challenge then!
No worries and please don't misunderstand:
I didn't mean to say that not resting your wrist at all is best but I think that it's something worth trying out.
Because if you could get used to it you wouldn't have to deal with the difficulty of dragging your wrist too much.
I myself rest my wrist for support too.
If you're careful to not create too much drag you're fine in my opinion.
One more tip for the 250 Box Challenge:
Most of the time it's no fun so I'd recommend to not get into too much of a grind.
It'll feel like a chore.
Maybe decide on filling 2 pages a day like I did (6 Boxes per sheet).
Have fun, bye
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When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
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