250 Box Challenge
6:40 AM, Sunday February 2nd 2020
My 250 boxes ready for critique :)
Hey there, TA Meta here. Good work making it through the 250 box challenge, it's a bit of slog, so let's get into your critique.
The first thing that I noticed when I looked at your submission was a distinct lack of check lines on the majority of your boxes. These check lines are there for your benefit, to see where your estimation of perspective is straying as well as for mine, as it makes it far easier to critique a submission that has them and see the problems that you're having with your boxes and help you to correct them.
That said, you've made a fair amount of progress with your line confidence and your boxes do start off strongly and some of the ones near the end are pretty strong in terms of convergences, though some of your boxes that are mushed together (I'm guessing this is an attempt at subdivided boxes, without the subdivision) are definitely seeing quite a bit of divergence going on. It's clear from some of your boxes that you've developed somewhat of an understanding of how your lines relate to one another, however it's quite inconsistent and I believe you could have strengthened this understanding by consistently applying your check lines. This diagram illustrates the concept of how the angles of your lines relate to one another as they converge towards the vanishing point.
Next Steps:
I'm going to mark this challenge as complete, but I want to emphasise how important it is not to skip over or inconsistently apply the instructions. The lessons are designed with specific goals in mind and you will gain the most from them if you follow them as closely as possible. Keep practicing your boxes in your warm-ups utilising the check lines and thinking about the angles of your lines and feel free to move onto lesson 2, make sure you thoroughly read the instructions before you start each exercise.
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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