250 Box Challenge
10:56 AM, Friday April 10th 2020
Hey!
Initially I just wasn't sure what was happening and with more boxes I slowly got the hang of what to do.
Thank you in advance for the review.
Hope everyone is healthy and safe!
First of all congratulations on completing the box challenge! Both of your lines and convergences improve, good job!
I'll point out a few things so you can keep improving.
-First thing I notice is that your lines have a bit of wobble:
In these exercises, you should always prioritize confidence over accuracy.
A wobbly line will always be worse than a confident line, no matter how off the confident line is.
If you take a look over the ghosted lines notes you'll see the levels of lines:
Level 1: Line is smooth and consistent without any visible wobbling, but doesn't quite pass through A or B, due to not following the right trajectory. It's a straight shot, but misses the mark a bit. Level 2: Line is straight, smooth and consistent without any wobbling and maintains the correct trajectory. It does however either fall short or overshoot one or both points. Level 3: Line is straight, smooth, consistent without any wobbling. It also starts right at one point and ends exactly at the other.
As you can see, wobbly lines aren't mentioned, which means that they would be worse than level 1.
-Second is inner corners, they actually end up being pretty good, but here is a demo to show another method to approach drawing boxes. Instead of completing first the outline of the box, you draw the inner corner before, as it's shown, in the fourth step. This helped me in figuring out the inner corner issue and hopefully it helps to improving.
-This helps because of this. Thinking about the relationships between lines will lead to better boxes. Drawing the boxes in that order will help you think about this when drawing the lines more, which is why it usually leads to better convergences. The method I posted earlier makes you it easier to think about the relationship of some lines, which is why I think it's better than drawing first the outline and lastly the inner corner.
Next Steps:
Congratulations on finishing lesson the box challenge! Your next step is lesson 2 (Though I can see you've already done lesson 2 and lesson 3).
As I marked this as complete, you are now qualified to critique lesson 1 and box challenge submissions.
-Doing critiques is a way of learning and solidifying concepts. I can atest to that after having done hundreds of critiques. There are a lot of concepts that I did not understand, and thanks to critiquing I started understanding them. Which made me learn a lot more through the course.
-Another thing is that as the number of current submissions is super high, if you critique some critiques, those would be less critiques I'd have to critique before reaching your next submissions, so you'd get your critiques faster.
It's totally optional of course, I won't force anyone to give critiques. But me and the other people who are critiquing would be super grateful if you gave it a shot.
Good luck on lesson 2, and keep up the good work!
NOTE: here's a quick guide on critiquing lesson 1 submissions.
There are a few people that feel hesitant to critique because they feel they aren't ready to it so hopefully it'll help you in case you are one of those people.
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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