Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

3:23 AM, Friday October 22nd 2021

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Well here we go, lesson 2.

This one took a bit, and certainly challenged me in new ways. It also gave me more of an appreciation for a lot of things in regards to texture, cast shadow, etc.

So uh, pick'em apart and tear'em down. Let me know how I did.

Thank you for your time,

Kraken.

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3:35 AM, Monday October 25th 2021

I'll be the TA handling your Lesson 2 critique.

You're making progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson and hopefully this critique will help you in your future attempts.

  • Starting off with the arrows section you want to be making sure you're drawing confidently to keep your arrows as smooth as possible, accuracy will come with mileage. There are spots where your arrows bulge/narrow suddenly, this is an issue because it gives the impression that your arrows are stretching which hurts their solidity. Remember that as our arrows move closer to the viewer we want them to widen consistently. It's good to see that you're trying to implement line weight, just remember that you want to keep your applications subtle and you'll become consistent with mileage. here are some things to look out for when applying it. 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. As a final note, try not to doodle on your homework pages, it can lead to distracting yourself from the concepts you're trying to learn.

  • Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise a few of your forms are getting a bit too complex. We want to create our forms with both ends being the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. You're keeping your line work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. Speaking of contours you're doing a good job trying to shift the degree of your contours so far, be sure to keep experimenting. 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. It's tricky to tell if you noticed the issue so I'll bring it up just in case but when you add your small ending ellipses on the end of a form you want it to be only on the end facing the viewer, it's also a contour ellipse in itself so don't make it too small or it won't be useful.

  • 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. 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.

  • It's quite common for people to feel like they don't fully grasp the form intersections exercise, if you feel like you may fall into this category try not to stress too much. This exercise is just meant to get students to start thinking about how their forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how to define those relationships on the page. We'll be going over them more in the upcoming lessons.Your forms are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work.

  • 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 (your first page achieves this better than your second page where your forms get a bit lost in each other). You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. When it comes to your shadows you're pushing them enough so that they cast rather than just hugging the form that creates them which is a great start. 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.

Overall this was a solid submission, while you may have some things to work on I have no doubt you will improve with more mileage. I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to the next lesson.

Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!

Next Steps:

Keep practicing previous exercise as warm ups.

Move on to lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:21 AM, Monday October 25th 2021

Hello Tofu,

Thank you as always for the feedback on these. It's very helpful to have trained eyes peep at all these things.

I think I'm starting to understand the degree of the sausages and what not a bit more. I hope that came through better as it went from the original contour exercise to the stacked sausages.

As for the texture lesson. I did lose my mind there. That was the absolute worst thing I've ever had to try and accomplish and I've decided that I'm only going to live in a smooth world for now on. I received some good information from the Box Chief himself in the discord on that lesson (Right before I drew the last texture, the Sunflower Seeds) which seemed to help some.

Either way! It's on to lesson three. Your feedback is heard and I'm going to work toward incorporating that going forward.

All the best,

Kraken

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