Hello peeps,
I wanna start giving reviews but how do I give more constructive criticism than "good work" for cubes than look pretty well made. What do you evaluate when looking at another's cubes? I focus on cubes because its what I'm into right now, but more general tips are also welcomed.
Cheers,
Data.
A few things. First is to check out the exercise pages and the common mistakes section. Most mistakes are written there, and they are done a lot on the submissions, so only with using those you can provide good feedback.
And second one is to check other people's critique, the teaching asistants if you can, as their work is reviewed by uncomfortable, you can trust they give quality reviews. Some of the TAs are svendogee, meta, qzhans, nihlex or sluggydragon.
Here's meta's page for example, you can check her reviews there: https://drawabox.com/community/sketchbook/meta
There are common mistakes outlined in the lessons that students usually run into. There's always the nuance of how exactly the mistake is made and looking for patterns and pointing them out could be of help to the person you're giving critique to. Perhaps they tend to have the further edges of the box wider than the closer ones, or perhaps the conversion of the furtherest edge is not being aligned with te closest one. If there's a pattern, there's a good chance that the student does not see the issue.
One more thing that is good to emphasize is progress over result - we want people to follow the outline of the exercise as it will build their skill over time. So if they might sound discouraged in the submission, remind them that progress is being made.
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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