A pleasure to meet you, AzureBlazes. My name is Doctormein, And I'll be the one providing you with critique for Lesson 2 for today.

Organic arrows.

As far as your arrow are concerned, your arrows are smoothly drawn, and some of them are following the principle of 3d nicely. (The further the arrow is from us, the thinner they become.) But there are some stuff that you could still improve on.

I will be putting stuff that you could improve on in the format of a list for ease of consumption, feel free to ask me further question If I did not make myself clear in some places.

• Although your arrows are smoothly drawn, I believe you could add a little more overlaps in order to help sell the illusion of three dimensionality. We can see that in some of your arrows there are only 2-3 or sometime 1 overlap part. This, in turn, made the arrows you drawn look flat and unconvincing. Here Is a great example made by Uncomfortable. We can clearly feel the three dimensionality of these arrows due to overlap that it created.

• And If we were to use the same picture Here again, It seems to me like you didn't apply the line weight to the overlapping part. Although this is an optional choice (Since there's no mention of it in the common mistakes section.) I still believe you should do them regardless. It is a good way to practice both ghosting and superimposed line, after all.

• Finally, I'll be talking about Applying perspective to the arrow. (As This picture shows here. In most of your arrows, The width of your arrow remain mostly static. Let's use This picture again for demonstration. The arrow closer to the viewer (The head) Is bigger than the one that is further away from the viewer (The tail.) We will be able to replicate this on a 2d surface by adjusting its size, or in this case The arrows width.

Organic forms

If I were to be honest here, This exercise needs quite a few helping hand. But don't worry, We'll make sure that we take it one step at a time.

• The biggest point I want to make is about the Ellipses Degree. I will be spending a lot of time on this section since I believe it will be the most beneficial to you.

Let's imagine a scenario, You're looking at a coin spinning toward you. At first, The coin is just a line because we're simply looking at it from the side. But as the coin slowly turn to face toward us, It slowly becomes an ellipses with wider and wider degree. Until finally, It became a circle and the process begins anew. Here is a video, In case you're not sure what I am talking about The same rule applies here. Your sausages (Organic forms) degree get wider or thinner depending on how far away it is from the eye line I've compiled This as an example to help student in figuring out how to understand it. I would like you to give it a look.

• In some of your organic forms, I can see a little few clear sign of hesitation after committing to a mark. I can see your line confidence waver a little bit when drawing your organic forms. You could try Ghosting the shape of the sausage out before committing to a mark first in order to help with your confidence. But ultimately, this comes down to practice, so there's not much to be said here.

• Another big hurdle you seem to be facing is that you're struggling a bit with the ellipses alignment. I believe this is a byproduct of a Misplaced center line. Although it's fine to not be exactly perfect, I believe some of the center in your submission is a little too far off the mark. Here's an example of what should happen when you're aligning + showing changes in ellipses degree nicely I also have my own demonstration without the organic form outside. I think you could see how my ellipses aren't actually perfectly align with the line itself but it is "Close enough."

• And lastly, All of the concept that I've mentioned above also apply to Organic form (Contours) Too. I can see quite a few mistakes that got carried over from the ellipses one. (Degree shift, Not Aligning, Organic forms that are a little elongated or pinched, et cetera.) So make sure to apply what I've said above to contours too.

Because this section is a little long on its own, I'll be providing a short summary for this section.

• Ellipses degree are supposed to get thinner or wider depending on your eye line. If we were to look at the side of a circle to start, the further away it is from us, the more it will turn into a circle. While the closer it is to us, the more it will turn into a line. Youtube Video Demonstration

• Make sure to practice drawing out organic forms. You can try ghosting the form before committing in order to help out with your confidence.

• Ellipses alignment might be a byproduct of a misplaced middle line, so make sure to try your best for the middle line to be as middle as possible (You can think of it as a flow line from gesture or even just the spine of the organic form) Don't forget to try and properly align them to the middle line too.

• All I've said Above is valid for contours too.

Texture Analysis.

I can see your attempt in trying to draw shadow shapes instead of outlining the form, that's a very good sign that you're following instruction to the best of your abilities. But of course, there are always things to improve on, And I'll be providing them here too.

• In your corn kernels texture, you're outlining every corn kernels instead of drawing its shadow. I can see in some of the corn kernels that you drew lines instead of shadow shape. Here is an example by Mr.Uncomfortable.

• In all of your gradient, You seem to have forgotten to draw out the transition from dense to sparse. Here is also an example by Mr.Uncomfortable And you can see in your second image that you forgot to do this. Make sure to do it next time.

Dissection

You didn't provide me this exercise, so I'll be skipping this part for now.

Form Intersection

There seem to be a little trouble in this exercise. I'll be going into detail for all of them.

• For your first page, most of your boxes seem to be diverging. Or, in other word, distorted. Although we're not as strict with these boxes as we are with 250 boxes challenge, you should still try to get them to converge as much as possible.

P.S : This concept still applies to form of similar nature to boxes. (Pyramid, Cylinder)

Hey there, I briefly chatted with you on the discord and mentioned I'd be taking a look at your revisions after confirming a few things.

This will be quick but it'll hopefully help guide you in the correct direction:

• Your organic forms with contours are looking a bit better, there's still room to simplify them to meet the ideal "simple sausage" described in the lesson itself, but I believe that you'll continue to see improvement with more mileage.

• It seems you didn't do a page of arrows as asked but I'll quickly comment on your original attempts. Your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. You're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. At times you don't overlap your edges when you should, this results in your arrows flattening out as you can see here. I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.

• In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself. This makes it difficult to create gradients with implied information which we could then use to create focal points in more complex pieces, by doing so we can prevent our viewers from being visually overwhelmed with too much detail. You also show that you're drawing from memory rather than giving yourself enough time to focus on your reference. Most of our time when doing exercises like this will be spent observing our reference and looking away for a quick second to add something to our page. For more on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here. I'd also like to quickly direct you to this image which shows that when we're working with thin line like textures if we outline and fill the shadow we will create a much more dynamic texture than simply drawing lines.

• In the form intersections section you don't actually attempt to draw the intersections which you were instructed to do.

• While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you show that you need a bit more time becoming comfortable with thinking of how these forms interact in 3D space and how they'd wrap around one another. I recommend trying to stack your forms perpendicularly rather than trying to keep them headed in the same direction to help make wrapping them around one another a smoother task. You're keeping your forms relatively simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. Your shadows are hugging the form creating them rather than being cast on to another surface believably. It appears like your shadows aren't following a consistent light source, I recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page to start with, it's easier than working with a light directly above your form pile.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds upon each other and I'd like to make sure you understand a few of these concepts a bit more before potentially creating more problems down the road.

With that being said I'd like you to please re-read and complete:

• 2 pages of form intersections with the intersections actually drawn.

Once you've completed the pages mentioned above reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll go over them and address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready for the next lesson I'll let you know.

If you have any questions before getting started let me know.

I look forward to seeing your work.