Here are my 250 boxes!
Unfortunately Imgur randomized the order of the pages..I really tried to rearrange the images but the thumbnails are really low res and it's practically impossible to recognize the numbers.
Let me know if it is good like that or if you prefer having everything in order..I'm gonna find a way...
Hi there, I'll be handling your box challenge critique.
Congratulations on completing the box challenge, it's definitely a lot more work than most people expect. Not only does it help deepen your understanding of important concepts but it shows your desire to learn as well. Be proud of what you've accomplished and that desire you've shown. That being said I'll try to keep this critique fairly brief so you can get working on the next steps as soon as possible.
Things you did well:
Your construction lines are looking smooth and confidently drawn.
It's good to see that you're taking the time to plan and evenly space your hatching lines. This helps keep your boxes tidy and makes them look more solid.
You're doing a great job of experimenting with orientations, proportions and rates of foreshortening. Experimenting is an important habit to build when learning any new skill, it helps form a more well rounded understanding. I hope you'll continue to display and nurture this habit in the future.
Things you can work on:
Line weight isn't a requirement of the challenge but I do recommend practicing it in your future attempts. It's an incredibly useful tool but one that people often require a fair bit of mileage before they feel comfortable applying it. The sooner you start to build up that mileage the sooner you'll see better results.
There are times when your lines converge in pairs or you attempt to keep your lines a bit too parallel which results in them diverging. This is an example of lines converging in pairs, and this shows the relation between each line in a set and their respective vanishing point. The inner pair of lines will be quite similar unless the box gets quite long and the outer pair can vary a lot depending on the location of the vanishing point. Move it further away and the lines become closer to parallel while moving it closer increases the rate of foreshortening.
The key things we want to remember from this exercise are that our lines should always converge as a set not in pairs, never diverge from the vanishing point and due to perspective they won't be completely parallel.
Overall while you did make a few mistakes your boxes are improving so far and with more mileage you'll continue to become more consistent. That being said I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to lesson 2.
Keep practicing previous exercises and boxes as warm ups, and good luck.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 2.
Thank you for the critique.
Ok about the convergence, it was really tricky to guess the right one when the box was long and thick, and often happened that the 2 set converged in almost 2 different points. After a while I understood that you should be more daring with the inclination of the opposite sides, but like you said, I need more and more practice to achieve that right.
One question about the line weight:
I had a lot of problems when my first line was thin, because to add weight I had to superimpose the line over itself, and this often resulted in multiple lines, cause I never nailed in the first try.
Is the superimposition the right way to add weight?
Last question, how can I get the "The Relentless" avatar? I love it!
You can use pressure to apply line weight with some pens but the way we recommend it is by drawing another line over the original one like you mentioned. It's expected that your lines won't be super accurate because it's something you likely don't have a ton of experience with but as long as you draw the lines smoothly and confidently you'll continue to build up the muscle memory needed to make them more accurately. The super imposing lines exercise will also help with this so be sure to rotate it into your warmups very now and again.
As for the avatar.
There are two ways to unlock new avatars. The first is by giving other students feedback on their work, which increases your reputation. As your reputation increases, you'll hit points that will unlock a new random avatar. The second is by participating in the promptathon events, which are held at the turn of each season. Each prompt released during the promptathon has its own unique avatar, but you can also choose to do any of the other existing prompts during the event, which will unlock another random avatar. It is all lootboxy though - there's no way to unlock a specific avatar with either of these methods.
Hope that helps and best of luck.
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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