250 Box Challenge
8:30 PM, Sunday February 25th 2024
thank you for taking a look at my work!
this was done before the update on 19th feb 2024
Hello Thelollypop, I’ll be reviewing your 250 Box Challenge today.
First off, congratulations on completing the first hurdle of Drawabox. It’s definitely a long marathon but the quality of work between the start and end pages really demonstrates overall improvement. Now let's begin with the critique.
Note: As you mentioned this was submitted before the revised 250 box challenge so I'll be reviewing based on the old method. But I still suggest looking over the new topics for a deeper understanding.
Things you did well:
Lines confidence definitely was a major strength here as you practise to draw straight from the shoulder. Construction lines are relatively straight and you maintain confidence in your lines.
Clear experimentation of box size, foreshortening, and orientation. This is a positive habit to carry forward and helps progress our spatial reasoning.
Things you could work on:
Hatching overall looked good; however, a majority of the time the lines end up wobbling as they progress to the opposing edge. Try ghosting a couple extra times in order to avoid hesitation. Remember to be mindful and perform the same level of execution as you would with any line.
Line weight; not a requirement however it’s a great tool to apply to subtly reinforce the form. I've seen a few boxes where line weight is applied but I still suggest experimenting with that more in future warm-ups/lessons.
Sets of lines sometimes converge in pairs rather than collectively towards their respective vanishing points. When constructing a box, be aware of the initial Y line and how each adjacent line should angle itself to the vanishing point. Here’s a diagram showing what to aim for.
Overall, you've done a good job of steadily improving your box quality . I'll mark this down as complete and send you off to Lesson 2. Good luck!
Next Steps:
Lesson 2.
thank you so much for your reply! while this exercise made me gain some confidence I didn't really have the confidence to try line weight. however, I'll try to use it in warmups in the future. your encouragement and constructive feedback (especially the diagrams) really helped to put in perspective where to go next and what to practice.
Thanks for the feedback! I try to include visual representation when I can. Also no worries on line weight, take it at your own pace.
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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