Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
3:31 PM, Thursday June 11th 2020
I appreciate your time, thanks!
Hi! I’ll be looking through this~
Your superimposed lines look nice. They’re confident, and properly lined up at the start, but you’ll occasionally alter their trajectory- this is incorrect. Theres a little insecurity in your arcing lines, too. Remember that the guideline is only there as a suggestion. It’s perfectly fine to miss it, so long as the resulting line is confident. The ghosted lines/planes look quite smooth, too, though there’s a couple of (minor) things I’d like to mention. The first is that automatic reinforcing is discouraged. This refers to correcting an incorrect line, certainly (and more on that later!), but also to extending a line that stops short- whatever the mistake is, leave it. Second, see if you can use start/end points for the non-diagonal center lines of the planes, too.
The table of ellipses exercise looks great. Your ellipses are smooth, rounded, and of a similar degree/angle in a frame. Do be careful to go around them 2 full times, however- you’ll settle for one and a half, sometimes. The ellipses in planes look equally great, and I’m especially pleased to see that they’re still circular, despite the added difficulty of having to touch all 4 sides if the plane (which, by the way, they do quite successfully!) Finally, solid job on the funnels exercise. There’s the occasional misaligned ellipse, so I’ll recommend spending a tiny bit longer on the ghosting stage, rotating your page as necessary, but, honestly, it’s fairly rare.
The box section looks, for the most part, good. Line quality takes a bit of a hit here, is the first thing I notice. Remember that, despite the magnitude of the task itself, what these exercises really boil down to, that is, your unit of work, is a single line. If it can be confident in the ghosted lines exercise, it can be confident elsewhere, too. The automatic reinforcing issue is particularly serious in this section, too. Again: mistakes are fine. Now, let’s talk specifics. In the rough perspective exercise you’ve been mindful of your parallels/perpendiculars, and, judging by the number of unused points, patient about your convergences, too. They improve nicely throughout the set- well done. The rotated boxes exercise looks great. It’s big, the boxes are snug, and rotate quite comfortably. Some of them (3, by my count) are missing their back lines, by that’s alright. Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks quite nice. Their increase in size is subtle, and believable, and the boxes themselves are quite good, too. Let’s talk about 2 things. Firstly, if you add thickness to a line, do so subtly, and only to the silhouette. Adding it to the inner lines of a box makes said box fall apart- that is, read as a collection of lines, rather than a box. Secondly, be especially mindful of your foreshortening in this exercise. This is easier said than done, however, and I’d not expect you to be comfortable with it yet. Not until this next step, that is!
Of course, I’m talking about the box challenge. Move on to it!
Next Steps:
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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