I completed Lesson 1/250 box challenge and half of lesson 2. Left for 6 months, should I restart from lesson 1 or do x amount of exercises from lesson 1 or draw x amount of boxes etc?
It really depends, since 6 months for one student can be different from 6 months for another student. One student might still be drawing in the interim, the other might not, or one student might have decided to keep up with their warmups here and there even if they didn't push forwards through the course. And of course, some students retain information better than others.
That said, I would probably recommend that you start over at Lesson 1 (well really at Lesson 0 to ensure that you're fresh on how the course is meant to be used and applied), to give yourself a nice clean starting point, but when it comes to the box challenge, just do something like 50 of them on your own. Generally when students have to redo the box challenge (for example if they're switching from community to official critique), we only require them to do an additional 50 boxes and to submit them together with their original set. In your case, you've received the completion for it, so you don't technically have to submit them. Getting another 50 done now however will refresh your memory. Just be sure to go through the lesson material/instructions before doing so, as you will have forgotten things.
I'm not Uncomfy so I can't truly say This is what you do" so if he responds listen to him however personally I feel you may need to ask yourself if you still remember the material you had previously learned. You should also get back into the hobby of doing the exercises
Why not compromise and double your warmup time doing lesson 1 + box work for your warmups for a few weeks? But also move forward. I don't really get starting completely over. If I put down piano for 6 months then come back, I don't go back to the very first lesson book, and I wouldn't even if I were a relative beginner. The rust works its way out very quickly. Of course I am not an artist and I am a total noob, so maybe I am overstepping with this opinion.
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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