Pls no more boxes and cylinders sobb :')
All I can say is I'm glad this challenge is over.. Drawing more boxes was painful hahaha
Not really sure if I improved from start to end, but I think I understand how cylinders work better now! This was so difficult
As a whole, you've done a pretty good job. There's definitely things you should continue to work on as you move forwards, but as a whole you've followed the steps of the exercise well, you've included variation in your rates of foreshortening, and you've generally demonstrated a good grasp of the concepts.
What I usually look out for in the first part of the challenge are two things:
Alignment to the minor axis. Here you're doing a good job of checking your alignment after the fact, but I definitely think you need to take a bit longer in ghosting through the ellipse you intend to draw before executing it, considering how that ellipse is going to line up, because you still seem to be off pretty consistently. If you find yourself being off by the same amount each time, maybe try adjusting the rotation of the page to compensate - if your brain simply wants to draw ellipses in a particular orientation, making adjustments to external factors (that is, other than what your arm is actually doing) can help rewire the relationship between what your brain wants to produce, and what your arm ends up producing.
Understanding of how the shift in degree and shift in scale from one end of a cylinder to the other relate to one another, and how they convey overall foreshortening of the form. It's a bit of a mouthful compared to the last one, but basically you're demonstrating that you understand how the more foreshortening you intend to apply to a form, the more the far end will get smaller (that's the obvious one we generally understand at this point) - and more importantly, the more the degree will shift wider to match. I keep a look out for students who apply these shifts inconsistently (a more significant degree shift and a more minor scale shift). You're showing a good grasp of those relationships, and avoid visual contradictions in your foreshortening.
Moving onto the cylinders in boxes, for the most part you applied the line extensions and ellipses quite effectively. The main point of this exercise is more about the boxes than the cylinders - by using the cylinders as part of the line extension strategy, we're able to not only test our boxes for consistent convergences, but also work towards improving our estimation of their proportions. When the ellipse's line extensions line up to those of the box's own edges, we know the ellipse represents a circle, and therefore the plane enclosing it represents a square.
Long story short, you've done a good job of developing your intuitive ability to draw boxes with a pair of faces which are proportionally square - something that'll become quite useful as we get into lesson 6.
All in all, your work is coming along well - but keep working on those minor axis alignments. I'll go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 6.
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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