I progressed as much as I could with a little feedback along the way. I'm having a lot of struggles with identifying Vanishing Points and estimated where they might be in relation to other lines which I think has caused some of my organic perspective lines to be too long or too short when I estimated incorrectly while drawing the initial line.
Hi toku, good job on completing lesson 1. I'll be going over your work today so let's get started.
Your line work exercises are showing a good start. The super imposed lines are swift and utilizing the shoulder with little to no wobbles from course correcting your pen. Your ghosted lines are also nice and confident but you are overshooting quite a bit. What I like to do is lift the pen at the end of the line instead of stopping my arm as it feels more natural and gives the lines a nice taper. I will take this time to point out that we like to ask our students to post images in order, not only does it make the critique process easier, it's also easier to see how a student is progressing throughout the lesson =)
Moving on to your ellipses, I see you are trying to really follow the directions. You are drawing through as instructed and now it's just a matter of getting those concentric passes to tighten up. You are indeed drawing very confidently which is great and your ellipses themselves are shaped well for the most part - no flat areas or points, indicating a good use of the shoulder. Your accuracy will continue to improve with practice but this is a good start. With your ellipses in planes you could have made your ellipses come in contact with the center of the sides of the planes to better secure your ellipse in space instead of it floating arbitrarily. With your ellipses in funnels you are doing well keeping your minor axes aligned to the funnel axis and hitting the sides of the funnels to keep them packed in.
Moving on to your rough perspective boxes your lines continue to be quite sharp and confident. Your horizontals are parallel to the horizon and verticals perpendicular resulting in correct orientation of your boxes. Your converging lines are on the right track as indicated by your correctly applied extension lines and the accuracy will improve in time with more practice. I don't have much more to say about this exercise as you successfully hit all the major beats here, good job.
Ok, moving on to your rotated boxes. The first thing I notice is you did a pretty good job rotating your boxes. You could have pushed it further but it shows that you are at least beginning to understand the system. If you find yourself struggling to push the rotation further give this gif a watch and study how the motion of the vanishing points drives the rotation of the boxes. Another thing you could have done to help yourself would have been to draw larger as larger drawings gives your brain more room to reason through these spatial puzzles and you have a lot of space left on the paper here. Finally, you are doing a good job keeping your boxes packed tightly to better leverage adjacent lines to serve as perspective guides. Good job overall here though. You completed the exercise and were exposed to new types of spatial puzzles which is all we expect for students, so mission accomplished.
Finally, let's look at your organic perspective. The most striking thing about all your compositions is hwo you are unafraid of putting bold, very large forms in the foreground and this is great. It sets the scale and gives the viewer's eye a place to enter the frame. Your forms overlap and scale down to show them receding into the background which further sells the illusion of 3d form. You are being mindful of trying to get your lines to converge so your perspective sense is off to a good start. Even the frames with very few boxes (which I often chastise students for as it is usually feeling like a cop out to not draw so much) are done with purpose and still a mindfulness to each box and they just work. Overall, really good job on this exercise.
Next Steps:
I will now be marking your lesson as complete and moving you on to the 250 box challenge. Make sure to utilize the resources available and do not neglect drawing things other than boxes so you don't burn out. Keep up the good work.
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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