MichaelWein18

It’s an honor to have a lesson graded by Uncomfortable, so I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to grade my lesson so thoroughly. Speaking frankly, it was a bit demoralizing when I first read the critique to have to redo it, but while I was doing the lesson I spent a lot of time feeling like I was doing something wrong and was worried that I might get passed onto the next lesson without really getting what was in this one, so I appreciate your honesty. A couple of questions:

The one exercise you seemed to think was fine was the arrows exercise. Do you think I should redo it as well or can I just restart with leaves and submit the previous photo for arrows?

Probably the biggest emphasis in your critique was on taking time to think about each and every mark and put it down carefully (even though you didn’t explicitly mention it, I assume that ghosting is part of that idea). My problem is this - even when I take a lot of time to think out whatever line/shape I’m drawing and make sure to ghost before drawing, the mark I end up making usually just feels… off? I know that’s a cliche, and that the whole point of getting better at drawing is to be able to put down marks in a way that is more accurate to what we want to draw. I’m not trying to make an excuse, but I think that part of the reason why I start drawing more rushedly is because of the frustration that results from spending a lot of time thinking about putting down a mark to see it not looking the way I want it to. Probably the best example of this is during the branches exercise - even in my best branches, I feel as though the major axis of each ellipse is unintentionally larger or smaller than the previous ellipse’s major axis, and that the lines have bad transitions between them, taper in and out, and that I lose control. What would you recommend doing in order to tackle this problem?

Hey, really sorry for the late redos - it's just been a crazy few months. Anyway, here they are, and thank you in advance.

https://imgur.com/a/3LbHlkf

https://imgur.com/a/5TTzEF0

Here are my redos. Thank you for the critiques! Also, assuming these are accepted, do you think I shoud submit my old artwork from the Lesson 2 I did a while back, or should I redo it? If the answer is to just submit the old artwork, what do you think I should do in the meantime? Can I go ahead to Lesson 3?

Thank you so much for reviewing my lesson!

Hello! I’ll be reviewing your exercise today.

Starting with Organic Arrows, your lines look confident, and you’re doing a good job of applying perspective. However, you’re not overlapping your lines as much as you should be doing in this exercise.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines - Your ellipses seem to be drawn confidently and there is variance in the degrees of those ellipses, and in the page with contour curves, you’re doing a good job of hooking your curves around the form. I was a bit worried about your sausages at first, but by the second page of this exercise, they look nice and simple. One issue I did notice though was that the lines you draw through the forms sometimes seem to be a little bit off in terms of their accuracy.

Your texture analysis looks great! I thought you did a good job going from dense to sparse and showing the shadows of the texture you drew.

Your dissections also looked great to me-you did a great job of breaking the form and showing the curvature of the form, and besides for that, your textures look great.

Your Form Intersections seem passable to me. I have a bit of trouble with intersections myself, so while I can tell that some of them are off, I’d have a bit of trouble telling you why. Some of your forms seem a bit unrealistic to me, but it looked like you were drawing your lines confidently and that you had the right idea in mind with all of them so I think that as time goes on, your accuracy will improve a bit and they will look a bit more realistic.

Your Organic Intersections are okay - I thought you did a good job of drawing simple forms and and drawing contour lines, but your shadows seem to stick to your form quite a lot. Additionally, I thought you could have put more emphasis on the forms sagging or wrapping around the other forms.

Overall, I think this was a decent exercise and I think you can move onto Lesson 3. As a favor, I’d like to ask you to please grade my own Lesson 2 work (which needs a lot of work compared to yours imo) - I haven’t gotten it reviewed yet and I want to make sure that I’m aware of my mistakes (especially in textures) before I move onto a more difficult exercise.

Hello! I’ll be reviewing your exercise today.

Starting with Organic Arrows, your lines look confident, and you’re doing a good job of letting your edges overlap. However, I don’t’ feel as though you applied perspective as much as you could and should in this exercise

Organic Forms with Contour Lines -your ellipses seem to be drawn confidently, your sausages look nice and simple, and in the page with contour curves, you’re doing a good job of hooking your curves around the form. However, an issue I noticed with this exercise and a later exercise is that you’re not showing much variance with the degrees of your ellipses.

Your texture analysis looks good, I thought you did a good job going from dense to sparse and showing the shadows of the texture you drew.

I thought your dissections were okay. I think you are supposed to write down next to each texture what texture you were trying to draw in order to make it slightly easier for those reviewing your exercise to understand how well you did it, but it looks like your textures were pretty good. However, you missed out on an opportunity for the texture to break the silhouette of the form. Additionally, your textures don’t really seem to wrap around the form all too much.

In terms of your Form Intersections, I thought you did a good job of drawing confident and believable shapes. For the actual intersections themselves, I’ll be honest with you - I had a lot of trouble with this part myself and so while I can tell you that your intersections somehow don’t seem very believable to me and could use some work, I’m not exactly sure why. However, I think this part was expected to be difficult and was not the focus of the exercise so I don’t think you need to redo it.

Your Organic Intersections are okay - I thought you did a good job of drawing simple forms and drawing cast shadows, but similar to an earlier exercise, the degrees of your contour lines don’t seem to change as much as they should. Additionally, I thought you could have put more emphasis on the forms sagging or wrapping around the other forms.

Overall, I think this was a decent exercise and I think you can move onto Lesson 3. As a favor, I’d like to ask you to please grade my own Lesson 2 work - I haven’t gotten it reviewed yet and I want to make sure that I’m aware of my mistakes (especially in textures) before I move onto a more difficult exercise.

https://imgur.com/a/I7n3f77

Thank you for the critiques. Here are revisions.

If these get approved, what are my next steps? Do I go redo the 250 Box Challenge or do I just get approval for the critique I just got there in order to move onto Lesson 2, or do I wait for an official critique of that challenge as well? If I'm allowed to move onto Lesson 2, should I redo that one, or just submit what I have there?

Hello Loople! I’ll be reviewing your submission. Before I begin, I want to make something clear- I am not an expert and will therefore not be able to give you the professional critiques that you would get from an official critique. In fact, I just completed my lesson 2 submission (and did not do nearly as well as you did IMO), and I am merely reviewing your work in the hopes that you will review my work as a favor in return (if you don’t want to, that is fine. However, it would be very much appreciated and having already reviewed yours, it doesn’t seem to take very long) and because Uncomfortable said that reviewing someone else’s work is good practice. However,

I will do my best to grade your work adequately!

Starting with Organic Arrows-overall, they all look good. You’re doing well to overlap your edges and the shading looks good. However, I don’t think you’re using perspective to show all three dimensions of space in some of the arrows as much as you can and should.

In Organic Forms with contour lines, your sausages look simple and great! However, for both pages, I noticed that the degree of the ellipses don’t seem to change all that much-they are all very similar. Additionally, for the page with contour curves, your curves are all a bit shallow-they don’t really hook around the form as they should.

Both of your texture exercises looked great to me. In the texture analysis exercise, you did well to show a transition from dense to sparse and you focused very well on cast shadows, and your dissections exercise was very good.

You did well in the form intersection exercise to draw believable shapes, except for the pyramids-I was having a little trouble figuring out what was the base and what were the sides. I also see definite improvement with the intersections throughout.

Your Organic intersections exercise was okay. I thought you did well with the cast shadows and drawing simple forms, but it felt like your forms lacked real solidity. I think this was because of the issue mentioned earlier in Organic Forms - the degree of your ellipses don’t change all that much. I think it was also because you stuck with doing only one set of contour lines rather than adding an additional set of contour lines that are almost perpendicular to the ones you have that show the curves of the form in a different way.

While there were some minor issues, overall, this submission looks really solid to me. All of your lines look confident and you showed improvement throughout the exercises. I would say that you are ready to move onto the next lesson!

Dear Francis,

They look great! I definitely notice improvement, especially with the funnels and and the rotated boxes (these look great). While the issues you mentioned still exist to some degree in the organic perspective and ghosted planes exercises, you will get a lot of practice in the 250 boxes exercises.

It looks to me like you are definitely ready to tackle the 250 boxes exercise. Good luck - I'm doing it now, and it takes a lot longer than it looks, but I'm also finding it to be a lot more fun than the earlier exericises.

Thank you so much for all of your help! Can't wait to see your revisions soon.