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5:29 AM, Wednesday April 8th 2020
Heyo! I’ll be going through this~
Starting off, your lines look good! I’ll quickly remind you that, in the first exercise, you’re meant to be superimposing each line 8 times- some of these feel like less, though I could be wrong. Also, be careful that you’re not altering their trajectory. If a line goes off course, you should maintain said course, rather than course-correct. I notice that, in the ghosted planes exercise, the confidence of your ghosted lines drops a little bit. Regardless of the big picture, all you’re doing is drawing the same line over and over, so try not to let the magnitude of the task overwhelm you.
Though there’s definite improvement throughout the set, your ellipses are still a little lacking in confidence. Remember that between confidence and accuracy it is in fact confidence that must be prioritized. A confident, but inaccurate form can still be used as a foundation for a solid construction. An accurate, but wobbly one cannot. Though I’ll end up requesting an extra page of ellipses from you, your actual understanding of these 3 exercises is quite good, so no worries on that front- it’s just an issue of confidence.
Moving on to the box section, I’d like to remind you that automatic reinforcing, that is, correcting an incorrect line, is discouraged. As for the exercises themselves, they’re quite nicely done. Great work, in particular, on the last 2 exercises- the rotated boxes exercise and the organic perspective exercise. These are meant to be quite difficult, but both look quite solid. The only thing I’d like to point out is the (slightly too dramatic) foreshortening on the organic perspective exercise, but your next step should take care of that.
Next Steps:
Before you move on to it, I’d like to see one more page of ellipses, of an exercise of your choosing, where you’re particularly mindful of their smoothness, and not at all worried about their accuracy.
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.