July Announcements

To get us started, Happy Canada Day for those of you celebrating it, and an early Happy Fourth of July to those of you in the United States.

There's a few bits of Drawabox news I wanted to report, including some changes to the responsibilities of our wonderful teaching assistants, the next big steps of development on the Drawabox website and community, and some updates on the progress of our forays into selling pens.

Teaching Assistants and Critiques

June was a pretty big month for us, and we saw a 35% increase in homework submissions, likely due to a combination of Drawabox's continuous growth and the surge of people on their summer vacations looking to spend that time as productively as possible.

Back in the day, this kind of increase would not have been easy to manage, and I'd have been forced to tweak prices to get the demand down to a reasonable level - now with our teaching assistants, I'm glad to say that is no longer the case! That said, there has been one final change that we've been looking to implement in order to make Drawabox's cheap, accessible and high quality critiques sustainable into the future.

Some of you likely remember that when the teaching assistants were first added back in February, they were tasked with the Lesson 1 and Box Challenge submissions, though those pledged to a higher tier could still have their work critiqued by me personally. At he beginning of June, in response to the big wave of submissions, I changed the wording of the tiers to remove this little loophole - basically stating that all "early lessons" would be critiqued by teaching assistants under my supervision and guidance. For now, that's still lesson 1 and the box challenge, but as the TAs continue to build up their level of experience, I will be eventually expanding their responsibilities. One day I hope for Drawabox to become an online school with many competent instructors able to provide students with strong foundational training at the same kind of low price you guys enjoy now. I also want it to become a springboard for TAs to become instructors in their own right, expanding into their own particular areas of expertise and even writing their own lessons.

What's important here is that I changed the wording at the beginning of June, but have continued to do those early critiques myself - it was basically a buffer period to eliminate any unnecessary surprises. This new policy change will go into effect officially today.

Every critique written by a teaching assistant is essentially going to say the same thing I would, and after the review has been given, I always read through them myself to make sure nothing's been missed. On occasion I'll drop in with an extra point of advice to offer, but this is rarely necessary, and instead I just assign the completion badge on reddit and move on. This basically just allows us to serve a lot more people without me becoming overwhelmed.

Community Platform on the Drawabox Website

Most of you probably realize that though Drawabox takes a lot of time, it's not my full time job. I work at a studio that produces games and VR safety training, doing anything from illustration and concept art to UI design, game programming, web development, and much more. I'm very pleased to say that July is the first month that I'm going to be shifting to a lighter work schedule so I can spend more time on Drawabox (and other projects, like my web comic, Orc and Gnome's Mild Adventures).

This, in combination with the TAs being able to take on a bigger portion of the critique work, is freeing me up to start working on the next part of the big website update. I'm sure you've all been enjoying the big rebuild I launched back in December. That was only phase 1! The second phase is going to be a dedicated community platform built right into the website.

Right now the community exists across our subreddit, /r/ArtFundamentals (where all the official patreon-only critiques occur, along with students reviewing each others' work) and on our discord server. The discord server will continue existing as it has, but I've grown more and more frustrated with Reddit's inability to meet our particular requirements as a community. Reddit itself is fine (I mean, I have opinions about the whole redesign, but that's besides the point) but it's just not serving our community as well as it could.

By building a place for community members to post their homework (either to the community or for critique from me and the TAs), we'll be able to reduce the level of confusion that comes from being spread out across so many different services. We'll be able to integrate more cleanly with Patreon, award proper achievement badges for completing lessons, and perhaps most importantly, do more to ensure that those community-homework-submissions have a better chance of receiving attention and response. While we can never guarantee that people offering their time to review each others' work will be able to look at everyone's submission, there are certainly things we can do to help.

So, I'm very excited to start working on that. It's definitely going to be a ways away - months to be sure - but until now I've only been able to roughly plan out how I wanted to attack the problem, without the actual time to invest into getting started.

Drawabox Pens!

At the beginning of June, we launched a test solution for the fact that a lot of people struggle with getting their hands on good quality fineliners with which to complete the lessons. Aside from a few small pockets of the world, they're generally way overpriced, and usually sold in packs with 'assorted sizes'. Given that we encourage students to work with 0.5mm tips, this becomes a problem.

So we contacted a few suppliers, tested out samples, and ordered a batch of 2000 to sell to the community, and the response was fantastic. We were able to sell them in packs of 10 (all the same tip size) at $16.50 USD each, and we were out of stock within two weeks. The overall response we've gotten has been very positive - people seem to be quite happy with the quality and the price.

Needless to say, we sent out for more. We're just about ready to start selling again, so expect an announcement on the subreddit or on our twitter in the next day or so. As we move forwards, we're going to try and order larger batches and do so earlier so we can reduce restocking time, or eliminate it entirely.

That's all for the announcements! I hope you all have a great month.