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Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes
Some Quick Reminders
If you haven't yet read through Lesson 0, you absolutely should before moving forward. It covers important information on how these lessons are meant to be used, and highlights common pitfalls many students encounter that can hinder their progress as they move forwards.
Video vs. Text
As you may have noticed, Drawabox is presented in both videos and text. This is because the content we teach here is dense, and it helps students to absorb the material when it is delivered in multiple formats.
While we are working to make the videos more concise and to touch on all the same major points in both text and video format, as of February 2021 we are only just beginning revising the video content. Most of the videos are older - some by a year, some by a few - and many of them are not as up-to-date as the text content. They are still useful, but should not be treated as a replacement for the text.
Even when the videos are fully updated however, there is immense value in absorbing the material in different formats. Our brains easily become complacent, so going through it in multiple formats is more effective, even than just rewatching the same video several times.
Expect to both watch the videos and read the text, in order to get the most out of this resource.
But Comfy! I have trouble with reading!
Between June and December 2021, we worked with Audiblogs, an awesome startup that allows you to turn websites and articles into audiobooks, using neural network driven text-to-speech. They provided audio versions of our first lesson as a free preview, then charged a small monthly fee to access the others, to help with their bandwidth costs.
Since then, we've amicably ended that partnership (you should still check them out) - but worry not! We've implemented the feature ourselves and are providing it completely free. We're going to keep an eye on how much it costs to provide, but we would like to keep it free into the future, if it continues to be feasible to do so.
So! Feel free to click the "Listen with Drawabox" button at the top of each article to have the content read to you. You can also hit the little play button on the right of each bookmarkable section, or use the bookmarks right on the player to jump to a specific section.
So- if you've read through all of Lesson 0, are ready to follow the instructions of the tasks laid before you, and to both watch the videos and read through the text, let's get started. You can click the link at the bottom right of the page to move onto the next section.
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.