Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
5:41 AM, Wednesday July 27th 2022
Please critique!
Hi, good job completing the lesson 1.
I can see your lines are improving nicely with every attempts and you have done well with superimposed lines.
However, I noticed some of lines with wobbles in the middle. While it is alright to start with wobbles and fraying near the end of the line, you must pay attention to those, as when you eventually draw with wobbling lines it will get frustrating.
You might need to work on superimposed lines with confidence for a while until you can draw lines with almost no wobbles and fraying in the middle. I believe you will eventually produce consistent straight lines with confidence and it will help you a lot the future (doesn't mean it will be free of wobbles and fraying, but close enough).
Moving into ellipses, I can see you're doing really well although some of them can get really uneven and loose. You might need to take some time to develop your muscle memory on doing those ellipses, which you can do by doing warm-ups before doing subsequent Drawabox lessons. I'd also recommend having more patience with planning your shapes with ghosting, every single of them. Otherwise, your ellipses are well done.
We'll continue with rough perspective assignment. At this part, you need to make sure to draw boxes with confidence. That's what the line exercise for. I can see you're struggling with boxes furthest from the VP, as your lines often overshoot the VP. You might need to work more on such situation. Otherwise, you've done well in this part.
Next into rotating boxes, I can see you have some difficulties with boxes further rotating into each corners, since they don't look they're rotating properly in perspective. However, it's still a great start from what I saw, as most people will have harder time with this exercise. Once again, it's well done.
The last one, organic perspective. Here, I'll recommend you to work on your rough perspective by taking your time doing 250 boxes challenge in the next one. Although some tight boxes has decent perspective, you can see bigger boxes going wild without really converging into a single VP. Anyway, take your time with perspective exercise. Knowing a good perspective is helpful, but doing it intuitively is much better.
Overall, you're doing really good with your first exercise.
Next Steps:
You might need to work more on your line confidence. Make sure to do line and ellipse exercise for warmups, or whenever you have a piece of paper and a pen with you. Keep in mind of this and you will be ready to move on to the 250 Boxes Challenge.
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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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