Congratulations on completing the 250 Box Challenge!
You did a good job overall. I can see that by the end of the challenge your mark making really improved! Your lines are consistently straighter and more confident looking. You also showed a lot of improvement with adding extra line weight to your boxes. I can see that you varied your boxes too. You have a lot of different sizes and types of foreshortening going on. Lastly, when I compare your early boxes with your final pages I can see that you do a much better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points.
While your added line weight does improve and blend more seamlessly with your previous marks by the end, there is still some room for improvement. 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. You also don't need to add that extra weight to the back corner of your boxes. If you look at this example here, you can see in the accompanying image that the back corner of the box is not meant to have weight added to it for this exercise. In general if you add that extra line weight to the back corner you undo a bit of the work that weight is supposed to do.
Finally, your convergences do show a lot of overall improvement, but I think this diagram will help you further develop that skill as you continue through Drawabox. So, when you are looking at your sets of lines you want to be focusing only on the lines that share a vanishing point. This does not include lines that share a corner or a plane, only lines that converge towards the same vanishing point. Now when you think of those lines, including those that have not been drawn, you can think about the angles from which they leave the vanishing point. Usually the middle lines have a small angle between them, and this angle will become negligible by the time they reach the box. This can serve as a useful hint.
Congrats again and good luck with lesson 2!
Next Steps:
Continue to lesson 2!
Thank you for the critique, it's very helpful!
I did have trouble adding line weight and getting the two lines on top of each other. The second point about the middle lines helps - I was kind of aware of this and just hoping I'd get better at it by the end but I often found one of the 4 lines ended up going off in the wrong direction.
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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