Howdy, TA qzhans here to give you your critique! Before we begin, I just want to congratulate you on giving those 250 boxes a good ol' pen and ink smackdown. It is a doozy of an assignment and you've joined the prestiged club of its completers.
Overall, I'm seeing a marked improvement throughout your 250, and I'm not surprised; there's a consistent use of the error checking method and a lot of diligence being applied in how you add line weight to your boxes. I also like how you tried different box sizes, not sticking to a rigid 4 or 5 per page. In the future however, you can try even bigger ones in your warmups.
Also, although you've done a pretty good job with convergences, some of your middle back lines are still stubbornly not jumping in line with the rest of them. That's okay, and is something that gets ironed out over time, but I'll offer some advice. When you go to draw a line, think only about the lines that are supposed to be parallel to it (share a vanishing point). Lines closer to an existing line will converge slower, while the opposite is true for lines further away.
The only thing I want to say before closing is that the preferred method of submission for DaB assignments are imgur posts. It makes it a lot easier on us, which in turn helps us give you a better critique. Other than that however, I salute you, and send you off to Lesson 2!
Next Steps:
This critique marks this lesson as complete.Thank you for the feedback. I will make the effort to create a imgur for the next lesson and take into account you tips for my warmups with this exercice. Thanks! :D
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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