Hey there, I'm Meta and I'll be your TA today, so let's get started.
Lines
Starting with your superimposed lines, you're doing a great job lining your pen up with the starting point and executing your lines confidently for the most part - there are some wobbles here and there where you're bringing your arm back in towards the guideline instead of trusting the motion.
Your ghosted lines and planes are looking confident for the most part though you have a tendency to wobble at the beginning or end of a line as if slowing down towards the end. This tip about lifting your pen off as soon as you hit the end point may help with this.
Ellipses
Onto your tables of ellipses and these are off to a good start. You've selected a good variety of shapes and sizes of ellipses to practice, and you've kept them squeezed up tight against each other. Your linework on the first page is rather loose but tightens up as you progress through the second page, though there are some wobbles here and there, so make sure you're still aiming for confident linework.
Next your ellipses in planes are looking good, you've made clear attempts to hit the four sides of the plane while remaining confident and not over-focusing on accuracy. Again, your ellipses are a little loose here and I think prioritising mileage with these in your warmups is paramount to getting some level of control over them - try playing with the speed at which you execute them.
Finally, your funnels are definitely headed in the right direction with line confidence, though I can see you're struggling with aligning the ellipses to the minor axis here. I think this probably relates to the previous point about control.
Boxes
A quick note on your plotted perspective - you may have noticed some of the back lines of your boxes are not completely vertical - this can happen when there's slight inaccuracies in the lines used to plot the front of the box not going back to the exact vanishing point drawn. Something to keep in mind, as you will encounter this again.
Onto your rough perspective and you've made fairly successful efforts to keep the horizontals parallel and verticals perpendicular to the horizon line (except that one box on the second page?). You've correctly applied the line extensions and your perspective lands in a pretty normal margin of error. That said, your line confidence definitely takes a dip here and whilst this is far from uncommon, make sure you're taking the time to plan and execute each of your lines with confidence - treating each line as a single unit of work to make up the box is an approach that worked for me while going through the course.
Your rotated boxes aren't complete. Whilst we don't expect students to exhibit mastery (at any level) of this exercise, we do ask them to take one full attempt at the exercise before moving on. As such, you will be asked to submit a completed rotated boxes exercise before I mark this lesson as complete.
Finally, you're starting to good amount of variation in the size and rotation of your boxes in the organic perspective exercise, though if you wanted to push it further, you could push the scale between the smallest and largest boxes as well as trying to overlap the ones closest to the viewer. The boxes themselves are diverging quite a bit in places and your linework is a little shaky, however like the previous exercise, this one is simply an introduction to the concepts you'll explore in depth in the 250 box challenge.
Next Steps:
Please submit 1 page of rotated boxes. Take your time planning and confidently executing each and every line.
I hope this is alright.
Hey, thanks for submitting this. :) It's a good attempt - you've kept the gaps between the boxes tight and consistent, which has given you good cues about where to place the next one, at least on the front planes. There's a level of hesitancy in your linework as a result of focusing hard on hitting the endpoint, so don't forget that whilst we're carefully planning things out, we're executing confidently. Accuracy will improve with time and practice.
As to the boxes themselves, you didn't manage to capture the full range of rotation, tending to follow the vanishing point of the box you previously put down, though naturally as mentioned before, we don't ask or expect any level of mastery from students at this point and the 250 box challenge is your opportunity to address both your boxes and your line confidence.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 box challenge.
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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