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8:28 AM, Monday April 29th 2024
Hey there, I'm Meta and I'll be your TA today, so let's get started.
Lines
Starting with your superimposed lines, you're doing a great job lining your pen up with the starting point and, for the most part, executing your lines confidently. There are a few places here and there that I can see signs of hesitation but these seem to iron themselves out in the ghosted lines and planes which are looking fairly confident - though I will note your pen does seem a little worn out by this point - so you might need a new one soon. It's not uncommon for students to destroy fineliners early on in their journey before learning to properly modulate their pressure.
Ellipses
Onto your tables of ellipses and these are off to a great start. Your linework is confident for the most part, you've selected a good variety of shapes and sizes of ellipses to practice, and you've kept them squeezed up tight against each other.
Next you've made good efforts in hitting the four sides of the plane with your ellipses while remaining confident and not over-focusing on accuracy. Throughout your ellipse exercises in general, in fact, your line confidence is really good and it's great to see you're drawing through all your ellipses 2-3 times.
Finally, you've done a good job getting your ellipses aligned with the minor axis on your funnels - there's a few skewed off here and there but it's overall well done and it's awesome to see some variation in the shape (degree) of your ellipses as well.
Boxes
A quick note on your plotted perspective - you may have noticed some of the back lines of your boxes are not vertical - this can happen when there's slight inaccuracies in the lines used to plot the front of the box not going back to the exact vanishing point drawn. Something to keep in mind, as you will encounter this again.
Onto your rough perspective and you've made fairly successful efforts to keep the horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line. You've correctly applied the line extensions and your perspective lands in a pretty normal margin of error. I will note that your line confidence takes a bit of a hit here, which is not uncommon and I see it picks up in the last couple of exercises. That said, make sure you're not going back over your lines without a clear purpose and planning - such as to add line weight.
Your rotated boxes are off to a good start - you're keeping the gaps between the boxes tight and consistent, which has given you good cues about where to place the next one. You've actually managed a fair amount of rotation on your boxes, which is commendable given the exercise is only intended as an introduction to concepts you will explore further throughout the course.
Finally, you're getting a good amount of variation in the size and rotation of your boxes in the organic perspective exercise which is creating a sense of depth in each frame. It's pretty cool to see you experiment with drawing the same box in multiple orientations/scales - this is a great way to get a firmer grasp on how these things exist in 3D space. As noted in the rough perspective section - you've gone over lines a fair bit here with a less confident stroke, so make sure you're taking the time to plan and execute each of your lines carefully and confidently.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.
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.