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6:42 PM, Thursday September 10th 2020
Hello, and welcome to drawabox. I’ll be going over your submission today~
Starting with your superimposed lines, these are looking mostly good. They’re smooth, and properly lined up at the start, though you’ll occasionally alter their trajectory- this is incorrect. The ghosted lines/planes look quite confident, too, though I have 2 things to point out. Firstly, I notice that your lines will sometimes arc as they approach the end point. Remember that the goal here isn’t for the line to be accurate, but rather confident. So long as it is, it’s perfectly fine for it to stop short of, overshoot, or even entirely miss the end point. Secondly, I notice that the center lines of the planes are sometimes a little off. This isn’t part of the exercise, but it becomes important later on, as you start to think about bisecting ellipses on their axes, so see if, starting now, you can spend a little longer on the planning stage.
The table of ellipses exercise looks solid. The ellipses occasionally a little stiff, especially in one of their rotations, so I’ll remind you once again that our goal is for them to be confident, and circular, first and foremost. It’d be nice if their rotations were tight, and they themselves properly fit within their frames, but not at the cost of it. Try, also, to lift your pen off the page at the end of their rotations, rather than flick it off- it’ll get rid of that little tail at the end. The ellipses in planes exercise looks great. You’re clearly aiming for them to touch all 4 sides of the plane, but not to the extent that they lose their roundness- that’s the way to go. Finally, the funnels exercise looks good. The minor axis cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves, and, as a bonus, the ellipses increase in degree as they move away from its center.
In the box section, the plotted perspective exercise looks nice and clean- well done. The rough perspective exercise is quite nicely done, too- you’ve got 2 sets of lines that are parallel/perpendicular to the horizon, and 1 set that converges towards it – quite comfortably, too. This is, in all honesty, as good as one can expect to perform in this exercise, but if you’d like to take it even further, spend a little longer planning each point. Ghost it to its end point, and beyond it, to the horizon, and see where it intersects it. If you’re not satisfied, adjust accordingly. Nice work on the rotated boxes exercise. It’s missing 4 boxes (the corner ones), but what’s here is great. Your line-work is confident, the boxes themselves are snug, and rotate fairly comfortably (if a little quickly). Finally, the organic perspective exercise looks perfect. You’ve been mindful of the foreshortening of your boxes, as well as their size, and their convergences, too, look quite solid- this latter point being beyond the scope of even this lesson!
Well done, all around. I’ll be marking this lesson as complete, so feel free to move on to the box challenge.
Next Steps:
250 Box Challenge
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)
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.