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5:42 AM, Thursday April 16th 2020
Hey there, Nick! So, congrats on making it through the whole challenge! That's nothing to sneeze at and I'll start out by saying I see a good deal of improvement over the course of the set. However, I have a few reservations concerning the challenge as a whole.
Ok, so I do have a small concern starting out - your boxes are completely crowded on each page and I'm worried that this may have hindered your learning a little bit. The reason you want to give them some space is so your brain can process the correction lines and see where you might improve - when they're crowded like that, it's a lot of information to process and you're likely to miss details.
From the start, your mark-making is a great deal sloppier than what we expect to see. Your lines don't hit their end points, the hatch-marks are rushed, and you've neglected to add in superimposed lines for line weight, which overall makes the illusion of 3D form fairly weak. Additionally, it tells me that you rushed through this challenge. :(
It's important to ask yourself why you chose to do this - there is no time limit on completing the challenge and while I will admit it is a pain in the ass, that is the point of it. It's meant to test patience and consistency. Likewise, we're not looking for a Completed Challenge, we're looking for improvement and mindful learning. By rushing through it, you've deprived yourself primarily, which we genuinely hate to see, so it's important that we warn you against it.
Of course, that isn't to say you haven't learned anything from it! I can clearly see that your convergences get quite good. You have fewer stray or diverging lines towards the end which is telling me that your sense of 3D is improving quickly. Likewise, your line work improves as well, simply by virtue of mileage. So, you're moving in the right direction, but it is slower than it would've been if you'd taken your time.
So, for your convergences please take a look at these notes - we link them at the end of every challenge as a matter of course, but I'd like you to apply them to a resubmission of 25 additional boxes. They go over the angle of each line as they approach the box and how keeping an eye on this relationship could improve your convergences. Also, considering each line in relation to the lines with which it shares a vanishing point rather than the lines with which it shares a plane or a corner could do the same.
Next Steps:
Please resubmit 25 additional boxes, taking your time. Keep in mind that the point of the challenge is teaching patience and consistency in the face of a grind. Rushing through won't help, and might even hurt in the long run! By applying a more patient mode of thinking, you can really get the most out of your mileage. Good luck!
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.