Hey there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.
You're making a lot of progress towards grasping the concepts in this lesson, I do notice a few things to work on so I'll be listing them below.
Your arrows are off to a great start,my only real suggestions here are to keep an eye on your line tidiness, some get a bit messy at points rather than confident and that you may want to experiment with foreshortening the negative space more. You do a great job of foreshortening the arrow itself, but you tend to play it quite safe with the space between curves. (negative space) Utilizing both can really help sell the illusion of an object moving through 3D space, you can read more about the idea here. Keep in mind that I don't think you're doing a poor job of this, just that experimenting with it more can help you build a stronger understanding.
In the organic forms with contours exercises you're doing a good job of keeping your sausages simple. I will say though that they could be drawn a bit more confidently, you end up with some squared, pinched or wobbly ends rather than maintaining a nice smooth round form. When experimenting with these more in the future remember to shift the degree of your contours along the form, it looks like you had it in mind here but a can't hurt. 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. Other than that just keep an eye on your line confidence in regards to contours as well, your contour lines have some pretty noticeable wobble occurring.
When it comes to the texture exercises you're off to a really great start. You're clearly paying attention to your reference a lot, and focusing on the shadows rather than outlines, that being said you are kind of working around some of the instructions to get your results. There are quite a few spots where you're using hatching which when it comes to making pretty pictures is great, but in this exercise it results in you not thinking of the forms that are creating the cast shadows. Remember we're using cast shadows to imply information which allows us to create a gradient while only using solid black or white, creating gradients with hatching kind of defeats this point. Overall though, if you keep practicing it's clear you'll grasp the ideas here with enough mileage. You can get a remind on the importance of cast shadows and gradients here. One last suggestion is when making thin line like shadows, it's often best to outline the form and fill it in still rather than drawing lines, if you take a look here you can see that it results in a much more dynamic texture.
Your forms are looking solid in the form intersections exercise, if you feel like you don't understand intersections themselves just yet don't stress. Right now the point of 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 lesson material.
Lastly your organic intersections are resting nicely in 3D space, just like earlier the biggest thing to work on here is your line confidence as some of your forms are looking rather squared rather than smooth and round. I'd suggest trying to simplify the amount of forms and focus on keeping them nice and smooth, this will also have the benefit of making it easier to understand how to cast your shadows which will help you later on when attempting more complicated pieces. Just remember to keep your light source consistent so that you can properly cast your shadows in a single direction.
Overall this is a solid submission and you've shown an understanding of a lot of the core concepts introduced here. You do have some things to work on but I believe you can do so in your warm ups and with some extra mileage. I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to lesson 3.
Keep doing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck!
Next Steps:
Do previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.
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