This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
11:20 PM, Wednesday March 13th 2024
Hello Rihral, 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: 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.
-
Hatching: from the start of the challenge, it's evident you patiently place your lines with the same confidence as every other line.
-
Experimentation of box size, foreshortening, and orientation. This is a positive habit to carry forward and helps progress our spatial reasoning.
Things you can work on:
-
2-3 sets of lines often 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.
-
Line weight is appropriately applied, however the superimposed line sometimes wobbles/arcs as it reaches the end of the box edge. We want to always apply lines according to the principles of marking making in lesson 1, so try to maintain confident lines as you add the overlapping line.
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.
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.