Resubmitting lesson 1 for official critique. Finished it about 3 weeks ago and now I am around 150 boxes in 250 boxes challange. Hope it's not too bad and that I don't have to redo all the boxes I already did. Thanks for checking it out.
Congratulations on completing lesson 1!
I can see you made a lot of progress and that you did a good job on your homework overall. Starting with your super imposed lines I can see you did a pretty good job of pushing through your lines with confidence. With your ghosted lines I see some hesitation and arcing in some of your lines. Likely because you were prioritizing your accuracy over creating a smooth, confident looking line. Just remember that the confidence of the stroke is far and away your top priority. Accuracy is something that you will improve on as you continue working through Drawabox and practice ghosting. While it is important that you use the ghosting method of each mark you make while doing Drawabox one thing you can try to help with ending your marks closer to where you want them is lifting the pen off of the page rather than stopping the motion of your arm. You do a better job of keeping your lines more straight and confident looking in your planes. I can see that you took your time constructing your planes. Good job!
For your ellipses in planes I can see that you did a pretty good job of drawing through your ellipses correctly. Your ellipses are also places fairly neatly and I can see you put a good bit of effort into trying to get them to neatly fill the space. There are a few areas where I can see you struggled with your ellipses. Just be sure that you are always using the ghosting method to plan and prepare, before executing confidently. With your ellipses in planes we see much of the same, with your ellipses looking a bit more confident and having a nice round shape. Lastly for this section we have your funnels. Your funnels look pretty good and I don't see too much tilting along the minor axis. If you ever notice your ellipses tilting you should rotate the page until they line up correctly.
With your rough perspective homework I can see you put in a good deal of care with where you placed your boxes. Your horizontal lines do a good job of staying parallel with the horizon and your vertical lines are fairly perpendicular. I do notice that your mark making quality goes down a bit though. Keep in mind as you progress through Drawabox and begin to construct more complex forms that it is important to put in the time and focus required to execute each line correctly and to apply the ghosting method to every step of the process, as explained here. You should also frequently refer back to the instructions to ensure you are doing everything correctly and to the best of your current ability.
The rotated boxes exercise is a challenging and complex assignment. I can see you put a lot of effort into your first attempt and you did a good job! Your construction is much better and your lines are straighter and more confidently looking. You also have a good amount of rotation in your boxes along the major axes and you kept your gaps narrow and consistent. You did a really good job here and you can really see how much you have grown already. I do notice that you struggled a little bit with adding additional weight to some of your lines. When you go to add weight to a line it is important that you treat the added weight the same way you would a brand new line. That means taking your time to plan and ghost through your mark so that when you go to execute it the mark blends seamlessly with your previous mark. This will allow you to build and create more subtle and clean looking weight to your lines.
Finally with your organic perspective boxes I can see some room for improvement with getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points. That is something you will work on more in the next steps.
Good luck with the 250 Box Challenge!
Next Steps:
Continue to the 250 Box Challenge!
Thanks for the critique, I will try to keep it in mind and try to work on my weak points more.
Thanks for the walkthrough of each lesson and exercise as well, it helps when you can see how to approach each task.
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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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