First time posting any exercise here. I've never drew before, because I always told myself that I couldn't. Recently I felt the need to draw fantastical landscapes but didn't want to suck and have no ideia on what to do, so here I am to suck while knowing why (hopefully). All feedback is much appreciated and I'm just impressed that all this material is free, just wow!
Hello Sam,
Congratulations on taking the first step on learning how to draw! Do trust me when I say that anyone can draw and all it takes is time and effort. I am also a beginner so do please keep that in mind for my critique
Lines
Your lines have a tendency to wobble. From what I can see, every straight line you pen, wobbles. Why is this a mistake you may ask. This is because the first few exercises in Drawabox is to help you develop the confidence in penning your lines. Paired with the ghosting method, we are all learning to think about every line we pen down and to have confident strokes. What I would recommend is to increase the speed in which you draw your lines and not be afraid of undershooting/overshooting those lines. Those skills will come in time as you practise this skill more. Do also draw from the shoulder.
Ellipses
Good job on the ellipses! I can't see any signs of wobbling here and I can see the effort made in trying to touch all 4 corners of the plane in your Ellipses in planes exercise. Do continue to practise on these ellipses to tighten them up. I especially like your Funnels exercise and I think you did a really good job there. One thing I would advise is to make sure you pass over the ellipses twice. I can see some ellipses where you only draw through it one and a half times or even just once.
Boxes
Good job on your rotated boxes! There will only be two things I would advise you. First is to be fine with mistakes and to learn to work with them. I can see multiple lines where you try to cover up the mistakes. Try to avoid this as it will just draw more attention to them. Also, do watch out for the wobbles. The second thing I would advise you to do is to increase the rotation of your boxes, especially the ones at the top (2nd top layer).
For your organic perspective, the first two things I would advise is the same as the above. That is, to be fine with making mistakes and to be wary of wobbling. I would recommend you to increase the number of boxes in each section and to overlap your boxes. Do also experiment on adding (subtle) line weight to the boxes that overlap
Although I am being very terse here, I do hope you are proud of yourself for finishing 16 pages of exercises. I would recommend doing 1 more page of organic perpesctive (to work on the confidence and overlaps). Take care and I do hope you see you at the end!
Best,
Dredd
Next Steps:
1 more page of organic perspectives please
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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