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2:39 PM, Friday June 9th 2023
Hello, I'm PGcools and I'll review your work.
Congratulations on getting throught the challenge. You have worked well, but there are some major issues I'd like to point out:
I find a lot of mistakes in many of your boxes I'm going to point them all out one by one. It may be a bit overwhelming but you have to know them so you can try to avoid them the next time you draw a box. Go step by step and focus on each until you can draw decent boxes.
First of all, the lines are sometimes a bit wobbly, like in box 41 and 42. I feel there's a general lack of confidence because many of them are also repeated several times. Remember that no matter how off a line may be it must no be repeated. Take more time into thinking each line before executing it and don't forget to use the ghosting method.
Your hatching is also very wrong, here nearly all of the lines are wobbly and they should be parallel, which is not the case. Furthermore, in a lot of boxes you have drawn hatching lines in the inside of the boxes, on one of the sides of the back of the box, like in boxes 78 or 88. This completely breaks the illusion and makes the drawing confusing. Even if hatching was optional, if you decided to do it, you should do it as best as you can, taking your time to execute each stroke and remembering that the hatching hould be done in a side that is facing the viewer.
Now, on to perspective. It's normal to have it wrong as it is the first time you try something like this. Some of the mistakes are parallel lines, like boxes 185 or 244; at their extreme lines that directly diverge, as in boxes 215 or 189 and what I find to be the most serious, some of the boxes are not even drawn in 3 point perspective, like 68, 177 or 180. To solve some of these it can help to draw the "Y" shape correctly, with angles higher than 90º, unlike boxes 163 or 240.
Finally, you are extending the correction lines wrongly, for example in boxes 7, 10 or 82. They must no face the viewer. A way to avoid this is to extend them away the initial "Y" shape. And I would also suggest to try to draw boxes with a higher foreshortening, as you should try both low and high foreshortening.
Overall, I think you really need to reread the page for the 250 boxes challenge and watch the video again. If it helps I'd also recommend to read again the contents in Lesson 1 about boxes and make sure you understand everything, if not you can ask question on the discord server or the community forum. And most importantly, don't forget to include boxes in your warm-ups and keep working on them, taking all the thing I pointed into consideration. Again, don't rush and go slowly, step by step. If you feel overwhelmed remember you can always take breaks.
Next Steps:
Don't lose ambition and move on to Lesson 2.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)
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.