I'm still early in the course (starting Lesson 2), and one question on my mind is how artists finish their work when drawing through their forms?
Do they use pencils and erase? Trace their work for the final results? Get good at visualizing the drawn through forms without drawing them?
Every single drawing we do in this course is an exercise, rather than something destined to be a "finished" piece. Each drawing serves just to help us develop our underlying grasp of how to work in 3D space, how to think in 3D space, and how to manipulate our forms within that space. Nothing you make in this course is meant to go beyond that, and I'd even go as far as to say that if you were to attempt to go beyond that, you'd be distracting yourself from those core exercises.
What that means is that our intent here is to develop your internal spatial reasoning skills, helping you to develop your ability to work without the construction lines. Every form you draw through helps to rewire your brain to perceive that page as being a window into a 3D space, rather than just a surface on which you're drawing your lines.
That doesn't mean people don't still use construction, or don't draw through their forms. I do it frequently when I need to solve particularly tricky spatial problems, or when I want to focus on laying down structure. In that case, it really depends on the medium I'm using. I mostly work digitally, so I'll often just paint right on top of my sketch, or produce cleaner linework on a separate layer (not exactly tracing, because I'd still be focusing on executing smooth, confident strokes rather than obsessing over matching those lines perfectly - but close enough). If I were working in pencil, I'd be strategic with the use of an eraser, or incorporate the construction lines into my use of tone.
Thank you for this thoughtful reply, there's a ton to unpack. I like the analogy of perceiving the paper as a window into 3D space. Your notes about not tracing, and incorporating construction lines into your tone are also really good ones.
In the times when you're not solving tricky spacial problems, are you just relying on the intuition that you've built up?
Yup, pretty much. Since I perceive it as though I'm building things up in 3D space (due to how my brain has been rewired through these kinds of processes), a lot of it automatically falls into place, so I don't need to be thinking so consciously about everything. Instead my brain can focus on being more conscious with my use of design.
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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