Congratulations on finishing the box challenge! By the end of the challenge your boxes end up pretty good and solid in every way, so I don't have much to comment. Lines end up being pretty accurate and confidence, your guesses for convergence are pretty accurate as well, only having some minor issues with the inner corner, and you've done a good variety of boxes through the challenge.
One minor thing I think I see is that the lineweight you add to the silhouette has a tiny amount of wobble at times, even if it's pretty accurate and confident overall. Just a reminder that you should be always prioritizing confidence over accuracy; a confident line missing the line you're adding weight to is preferable than a wobbly one that doesn't miss it. But like I said they're pretty good overall, so nothing super important.
Another thing is that to improve the minor line convergence issues you are having you can start thinking about the relationship between complete sets of lines, instead of thinking only in pairs. By doing this you'll be able to make more accurate guesses, and your convergences will improve. This is explained here, so give it a look.
Other thing that might help as well is experimenting with the order and method you use for drawing boxes, one that helped me to improve the inner corner issues to me was this one), so give it a try if you haven't yet.
In general like I said, pretty solid job on the boxes, so I recommend you to look into the advanced exercises so you can keep challening yourself. Good luck with lesson 2!
Next Steps:
Congratulations on finishing lesson the box challenge! Your next step is lesson 2
As I marked this as complete, you are now qualified to critique lesson 1 and box challenge submissions.
-Doing critiques is a way of learning and solidifying concepts. I can atest to that after having done hundreds of critiques. There are a lot of concepts that I did not understand, and thanks to critiquing I started understanding them. Which made me learn a lot more through the course.
-Another thing is that as the number of current submissions is super high, if you critique some critiques, those would be less critiques I'd have to critique before reaching your next submissions, so you'd get your critiques faster. Uncomfortable also implemented a system that makes your submissions appear higher in the queue if you do critiques, so that would improve your chances even more.
It's totally optional of course, I won't force anyone to give critiques. But me and the other people who are critiquing would be super grateful if you gave it a shot.
Good luck on lesson 2, and keep up the good work!
NOTE: here's a quick guide on critiquing lesson 1 submissions.
and here's another on critiquing box challenge submissions.
There are a few people that feel hesitant to critique because they feel they aren't ready to it so hopefully it'll help you in case you are one of those people.
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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