Hi there, I'll be handling your 250 box challenge critique.
First of all great work completing the challenge, it's a test of willpower for anyone to get through it.
One quick thing I'll make note of for future challenges is that numbering each box or item in a challenge is helpful as a way for people to provide you critique more smoothly. That way we can directly reference box 50 as an example, rather than having to be like "On page 50-55 the top left box." Not a huge issue just something for future reference.
I'm glad to see you showed growth through the challenge. Your line work has improved quite a bit, you stopped redrawing lines frequently which makes things look tidier, you also began experimenting with line weight.
I feel like around box 175 is where you hit your stride and things start to come together more consistently, your convergences improve and you get less cases of diverging lines or lines converging in pairs rather than as a set.
You may find this example helpful, it's something a lot of people start to notice while doing the challenge but having it spelt out can help make the understanding more concrete. It shows how each line relates to the vanishing point, and how by moving the vanishing point further from the box each pair of lines reacts and begins moving closer to parallel. The inner pair of lines will nearly always be the same and reach parallel much sooner than the outer pair which can vary more extremely.
Overall though you've shown a lot of growth in technical ability as well as your understanding of 3D space.
Great work I'll be marking this submission as complete and moving you on to lesson 2.
Next Steps:
Do previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 2.
Thank you very much for the critique and the link! :D
I will continue to do some boxes now and then (and lesson 2 has a lot of boxes in its exercises too anyway :) ) and will also mark everything on the page. If I had done that in the first place it would have also been very easy to rearrange the images in the album on imgur, so I'll definitely keep it in mind from now on.
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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