250 Box Challenge
5:12 AM, Saturday May 21st 2022
Whew, took me a couple months to complete this. Think I still need to do a few extras.
Nice work here!
You understand your vanishing points and the relationships between your lines, your lines are confident and straight, and you drew your boxes at a variety of angles and perspectives.
There are a few concerns I have with the the pages. I notice that on your pages, you have a lot of dots all over the page. It is okay to use dots in order to help you visualize the positions of the lines and to plot your vanishing point. The problem is it makes the page messy and you won't be able to rely on that when you are doing actual drawings in perspective. In the future, instead of making a mark on the page for the vanishing point, use something else to help you mark it, like placing a finger there or the back of your pen with no ink, or just do without it and keep the position in your mind. You also won't be able to rely on this in situations where the vanishing point is completely off the page. It is not a big issue though.
The other thing is some of your thickened outlines look a little bit scratchy. In order to thicken lines, you should only go over twice with your pen, using the ghosting method and drawing confidently like you would with any other lines. Drawing small segments of line to fill it in makes it look scratchy, wobbly and messy.
These criticisms are nitpicky though, you did a great job on this submission!
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2!
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.