Lesson 0: Getting Started

There are a few major distinctions between the two main categories of feedback a student can receive on their homework.

• Community feedback is free, but not guaranteed, as it relies on the good will of other students. While we have future plans to expand the reliability and structure of what our free students are able to access, right now I highly recommend making use of the unofficial critique exchange program hosted on our Discord server by one of our TAs, Elodin.

• Official critique is paid, although it is one of our core principles to price it as cheaply as possible - to the point that we actually pay our teaching assistants considerably more than a student would be paying for the same critique, something we can only achieve through our credit system (which is explained in more detail in the video). Official critique essentially provides access to reliable confirmation of whether you understand what you should be aiming for in the application of the assigned exercises, and one-on-one instruction for what you may have misunderstood or completed incorrectly (within reason, given our limited resources).

In order to ensure that we're able to provide that feedback as cheaply as possible, we do impose certain hard requirements (which are only recommendations when submitting to the community):

• Students start at Lesson 1, only moving onto the next lesson or challenge when their previous lesson or challenge's assigned work has been marked as complete by a teaching assistant or instructor. You effectively have until you're finished Lesson 1's homework to decide which track you'd like to take (without redoing anything). Meaning, once you submit your work for official critique, you will be waiting until it is marked as complete to move forwards.

• You must work with the recommended tools. We'll get into this in more detail later in Lesson 0, but for the most part it means working with fineliner pens and paper - not digitally, not in pencil. I cannot stress this enough - it's not because we think pens are the greatest tool ever invented. I myself am almost strictly a digital artist.

• All submissions for official critique must be complete. Meaning, you may not submit partial work. In the case that a lesson includes multiple sections (like Lesson 1 has the Lines, Ellipses, and Boxes sections), all sections' assigned work must be included in your submission.

• There is a 2 week cooldown between submissions. If you were to submit your homework today and have it marked as complete, you would not be able to submit your next lesson or challenge until 14 days have passed. This is not a deadline, and most of the lessons will probably take more than 14 days to complete.

• Modifications to our instructions are not permitted. You may feel that our instructions do not suit your particular situation fully, and on that basis may feel that tweaking them is merited. Our instructions are not just there to ensure that students get the most out of the course and stay fully aligned to the manner in which the course was designed, but it's also there to help ease the burden on our staff. Ensuring that students make every effort to follow the instructions as they're written helps avoid time consuming pitfalls and in turn helps us keep the cost of providing official critique down. This is extremely important due to the fact that we price our feedback lower than what we pay our teaching assistants to provide it. Ensuring that we streamline their work is critical to being able to keep our prices as low as we do.

• It is the student's responsibility that they give themselves as much time as they require to go through the instructions and apply them in order to do the work to the best of their current ability. I'm not saying you need to submit perfect work, or even good work. You just need to make sure that you're giving yourself all the time you need (in other words, not rushing, not setting arbitrary deadlines that cause you to rush, etc.) to complete the work as well as you can now. This is necessary for us to be able to provide this service as cheaply as we do, and students who are repeatedly found to be rushing through may be removed from the official critique track. This is not to be mean, it's a logistical issue - those who rush put the responsibility for that choice on our TAs, increasing their workload, and increasing our expenses.

While we strongly recommend that everyone follows these rules regardless of what track they follow, they are only hard requirements for those receiving official critique.