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12:04 AM, Sunday February 11th 2024
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.
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Starting off in the arrows section your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. 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. This is a good exercise to experiment with line weight but when applying it we want to make sure we do subtly to key areas like overlaps to give clarity to our forms. Here are some things to look out for when applying line weight, and here are some reminders on how to apply it subtly. 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.
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Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise 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 I'd like you to try and shift the degree of your contours more. 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.
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In the texture exercises (more so in your dissections) you're focusing largely on outlines, form shadows, colour changes 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.
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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.
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While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you do a great job demonstrating that your sense of 3D space is developing as your forms begin to wrap around each other believably. 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. Your shadows appear to be following a consistent light source, be sure to experiment with different angles and intensities when trying this exercise again in the future. 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. Quick final note, don't forget to draw through all of your ellipses, you neglect some of them here.
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 move 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.
2:32 PM, Monday February 12th 2024
Hi Tofu, thank you very much for the comprehensive feedback and helpful examples!
I have a question relating to drawing the cast shadow of the textures exercise - I don't think I understand yet how I would be able to draw the cast shadow of textures like fruit halves, straw rope, and other textures that are quite flat in nature. Do you have any examples of how I might draw textures like these, or examples of textures I should focus on drawing instead? Would you mind pointing out some examples in my work where I should focus more on the cast shadow?
Thank you!
3:18 PM, Monday February 12th 2024
As explained here in the lesson material, drawing texture as we do so in this course is all about thinking about the actual forms that are present, understanding how those forms individually sit in space and how they relate to one another within that 3d space, and finally designing shadow shapes based on that understanding, using the shapes to convey the relationship between the form casting the shadow and the surfaces receiving it.
If a surface is truly flat/smooth with no irregularities along it, then it would be conveyed as not having any deviations from this simple structure to cast shadows. So, it would be pretty blank. There are very few surfaces like that, and they tend to be highly reflective as a result.
Everything else though - including fruit halves, which feature lots of little bits of pulp that create an irregular surface, with some sections raised that will cast shadows and other surfaces sunken in (causing the areas around them to cast shadows into them), as well as straw rope which is made up of distinct and separate strands of straw (therefore definitely able to cast shadows onto one another) - certainly does give us 3d elements to analyze, understand, and design shadows from.
Of course it's not easy - this course as a whole is all about understanding 3d space and 3d spatial relationships, with this exercise, like the form intersections, being assigned here to set the tone of how you'll be thinking about the lessons that follow. So as noted in the lesson material there is no expectation that you're going to do it successfully just yet.
That said, your question does suggest that you may be focusing more on observation than thinking about how what you're looking at exists as 3d forms, likely trying to find the shadows in your reference images so they can be copied over - as noted in the section I linked, this is not the intended approach, as it side steps consideration of how things exist in 3d space. So be sure to keep that in mind going forward.
1:24 AM, Tuesday February 13th 2024
Ah I see, I'll keep in mind and try to focus on the 3D forms more going forward. Thank you for the explanation!
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