Hi there,
Congratulations for completing the box challenge, it's definitely a lot more work than most people expect.
The first thing I noticed is that your lines are wobbly and arcing. Your line quality improves overall towards the end of the challenge, but I can still see wobbly lines on the last pages. Prefer confidence over precision when drawing lines. Don't be afraid to put dots on the page to mark the point where the line should end. In addition, always draw from your shoulder, ghost lines until you are confident enough to put ink and commit to them once you start drawing.
What is more, I observed that you rushed through your hatching. Hatching should be tight, consistent and parallel. Each hatching line should be drawn using ghosting method.
You did a great job keeping line convergence consistent and accurate. You could have experimented more with dramatic foreshortening especially in the first half of the challenge. Experimenting is an important part of the learning process and helps us form a more well rounded understanding.
Now, before I have you move on to lesson 2, let’s address the issue with your lines.
Next Steps:
I’d like to see 1 page of the ghosted lines exercise, where your priority lies in the line smoothness and straightness, not accuracy.
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.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
