Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
2:15 PM, Tuesday September 29th 2020
well...i stumbled upon this when i was utterly bored. so i decided to give it a chance.
It looks pretty good overall! There's just a few points that I'll mention.
One thing I noticed about the ellipses in planes exercise is that you seem to be circling many times on some of them. In general, you should keep it to 2, at most 3 loops around a single ellipse. Rather than feel out the proper placement of it while you're drawing, you should be ghosting the ellipse until you feel good about the placement, then draw it. Most of them look fine, so just limit how many times you go around moving forward.
For the funnels exercise, you seem to not be taking into account the minor plane- that's the line cutting the ellipse in half along its shorter edge: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/cf2c3057.jpg
The goal of the funnels exercise was, in part, to draw an ellipse when the minor axis was already defined.
The mistake: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/58039837.jpg
As you can see, the ellipses are not cut equally in half, and they are slanted. The line through the middle should align with the minor axis, and be perpendicular to the major axis.
Besides that, make sure you're increasing the degree of the ellipses as you move outward. It's good practice to make sure you can comfortably work with the degree of the ellipse.
The last thing I noticed was the rough perspective exercise. The goal of the exercise was to estimate the angles of 1 point perspective, then use a ruler to check how close you were. The second step is really important, as it lets you see where you're going wrong so you can correct it. The only other point was that you should double check that all your lines that aren't converging to the vanishing point are either parallel vertically or horizontally. You should place dots to get the placement of the 4 back corners before drawing the line to make sure they are parallel.
Next Steps:
The minor axis is pretty important in Lesson 2, so I'd recommend redoing the funnel exercise. Reread the directions including the "purpose of this exercise" part, and pay close attention to the minor axis line. It's really important to place the center line down the funnel properly, so you can focus on placing the ellipses properly.
Besides that, you should finish the rough perspective exercise by using a different-colored pen/pencil and extending the depth lines to the horizon to see how close you were to the vanishing point. I'd recommend at least one more frame of the rough perspective (though you're free to do a full page) and really make sure your horizontal and vertical lines are parallel. It's expected that your depth lines won't 100% line up with the vanishing point, but the back corners of the box should be relatively accurate in their placement.
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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