250 Box Challenge
1:04 PM, Thursday July 9th 2020
i accidentally drew extra boxes
Congratulations on completing the 250 Box Challenge!
You did a really well overall, your boxes were pretty consistent in their construction. I can see you took your time and were careful in your construction. You also do a much better job of getting your sets of parallel lines to converge more consistently towards their shared vanishing points, good job there!
One thing I noticed throughout your work here is that you drew your boxes rather small. The instructions say to try and keep your pages at around 5-6 boxes per page, which is exactly what you did. However, the reason for this limit is so that you have room to draw your boxes at a larger size than you have. Drawing bigger helps engage your brain's spatial reasoning skills, whereas drawing smaller impedes them. Just keep that in mind in the future and make the boxes bigger next time. I can also see that you didn't really experiment much with adding weight to your lines as shown here. These are just a couple of small steps you can take in your warm ups to really get the most out of the exercise.
Finally while your convergences do improve overall 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.
As I said before, you did a really good job on this challenge overall. If you keep in mind what I have said here you should continue to improve over time.
Next Steps:
Continue to lesson 2!
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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