Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

3:53 PM, Sunday August 2nd 2020

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11:01 PM, Monday August 3rd 2020

It appears that the album you submitted only contains the texture analysis exercise, and nothing else. Admittedly it's quite well done, but unfortunately I won't be able to do the critique until you submit everything else. Go ahead and send me a new album as a reply to this comment.

Next Steps:

Submit the rest of your Lesson 2 homework.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
12:44 PM, Sunday August 16th 2020

I'm so sorry, don't know how that happened. Here is new album: https://imgur.com/a/1XVw3CF

7:08 PM, Monday August 17th 2020

Alrighty! So, starting with your arrows, you've got them flowing quite nicely through space, and you're generally demonstrating a well developing grasp of how the spacing between their zigzagging sections ought to get narrower and more compressed as we look farther back. I was actually going to chide you on how on the first page you cut off one arrow where it got overlapped by another, but it seems that everywhere else you were much more willing to let them overlap one another, which I'm very pleased to see.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, these are for the most part pretty well done. I think there's still room for improvement in sticking to simple sausage forms (as explained here), but the discrepancies are all quite small and minor. Slight pinching through the midsection, ends that are slightly different in size, and ends that are just a little bit more stretched out rather than remaining entirely circular. This all shows me that you're aware of what you should be striving for, and that you are making good headway towards it.

Overall your contour lines are drawn pretty well, but one thing that caught my eye is that the degree of your contour lines is often drawn to be quite consistent throughout the entirety of the length of the sausage. The degree of a contour line basically represents the orientation of that cross-section in space, relative to the viewer, and as we slide along the sausage form, the cross section is either going to open up (allowing us to see more of it) or turn away from the viewer (allowing us to see less), as shown here.

Moving onto your texture analyses, as I mentioned before, these are all very well done. You're clearly making excellent use of shadow shapes to imply the presence of your textural forms rather than employing more explicit drawing techniques. The use of those shadow shapes has also given you the tools to effectively control the density of your textures as you move from left to right. You continue to adhere to this throughout your dissections as well, although there are some places where you end up slipping back to outlining certain forms in their entirety - for example, anything with more discrete, separated forms tends to result in the issue explained in these notes.

Looking through the form intersections, you've done an excellent job of drawing these forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space. You're also showing an excellent start with the intersections themselves. I'm particularly glad that you shifted to using the same black ink instead of drawing those intersections in red as you did towards the beginning - by drawing them in black you're treating them as part of the drawing, rather than some additional analysis, and this helps to solidify your grasp of how the lines themselves define the relationships between the forms as they exist together in space. This is precisely what this part of the exercise is meant to expose students to. We fully expect all kinds of mistakes (although yours were in most cases very well done), as students don't usually have prior experience with this sort of thing. It's all about getting them to start thinking about the relationships between their forms in 3D space, so that planted seed can continue to develop as we explore this concept further throughout the entirety of the course.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along nicely as well. You're doing a good job of establishing how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, rather than as a stack of flat shapes on a flat page, and you've done a good job of conveying a sense of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another. I did notice a couple places where you didn't quite draw each sausage form in its entirety (just a few places where the silhouette of the form gets cut off where it is overlapped by another). Just remember to draw everything in its entirety in the future, as this helps us to understand how the forms exist together in 3D space, and the idea that the forms continue to exist even if some other form blocks our view.

All in all your work here is very well done. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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