Hey there, I'm Meta and I'll be your TA today, so let's get started.
Lines
Starting with your superimposed lines, you're doing a good job of lining your pen up with the starting point and keeping these confident. This confidence carries over into your ghosted lines and planes as well and these exercises are generally well done. There's a tiny bit of arcing present in the ghosted lines, particularly in the longer lines - this is normal and this page offers some advice on how to counteract this.
Ellipses
Next, your tables of ellipses are showing a good amount of confidence for the most part and I'm glad to see that you're drawing through them the requisite 2-3 times, you've also got a good amount of variation in the shapes and sizes of your ellipses. The smaller ellipses are particularly wobbly compared to the others however, so make sure you're not slowing down too much or drawing these with your wrist. Your ellipses in planes are very confident and you're generally getting pretty accurate in hitting the four sides of the plane whilst still prioritising confident markmaking. I would suggest that you limit your drawing through the ellipse 2 times because your pen seems to be particularly dark/heavy. Finally, your funnels are looking good with most of your ellipses generally pretty well aligned to the minor axis.
Boxes
Your rough perspective exercise is looking pretty good - you've done a good job keeping the horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line and you've correctly applied the error checking method. Your line confidence did take a little hit here and I can see little wobbles introducing themselves into your line work, so make sure you're still taking the time to plan and execute confidently. Your rotated boxes are looking good - you're keeping the gaps between the boxes tight and consistent, which has given you good cues about where to place the next one as well as managing a good amount of rotation.
Finally, your organic perspective exercise is looking really cool - you've done a great job varying up the size and shape of your boxes and especially with the overlapping. The boxes themselves are diverging a bit in places however this exercise is simply an introduction to the concepts you'll explore in depth in the 250 box challenge.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge
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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