Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

9:11 PM, Saturday July 20th 2024

Drawabox Lesson 2 - Google Drive

Drawabox Lesson 2 - Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UxJXLlPJPZ_btzIn6vZ1XbIwmSLjqiZE?usp=sharing

Took a while! Especially textures.

Note that 2 sausages are blank during the dissections exercise. They were my first attempts at drawing forms with contour, and so they aren't drawn properly. I tried finding out if I should bother doing dissections on them anyways, but I couldn't get an answer. I'd be fine trying dissections on them before lesson 3 if needed.

2 users agree
6:01 PM, Wednesday July 31st 2024

Hello Chy, my name is Finch and I will critique your submission today.

Thinking in 3D

2 pages of organic arrows: I'll start off by saying that these arrows are nice and confident. The first arrow of page 1 seems to miss an overlap right at the start of the arrow, but you have corrected it in all other arrows. Try to lessen your lineweight a bit, right now the lineweight goes over an entire side of the arrow, while it is already effective if only applied by the small parts that overlap (take a look at the image attached here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/4/step4). Having too much lineweight can make your lines seem less confident than they really are. Do not worry too much about accuracy, but if you want to improve your confidence when drawing line-weight, you might want to add superimposed lines to your warmup pool a bit more often: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/superimposedlines.

2 pages of Organic forms with contour lines: These are looking good so far, your contours and ellipses fit really nicely in the forms as well. You are starting to get the general shape of the form down, although some forms are a bit thicker in the middle or have different sized ends, if you want to work at this you can use this exercise in your warmups a bit more often, since these forms are common for constructions in lesson 4 and 5.

Two things to focus on here is to make sure that you shift your degrees and that your ellipses and curves follow the form. Right now, your degrees are not shifting enough: these forms turn in space and a shift in degrees should reflect that as well (https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/degree). Make sure that you align your ellipses and contours to the form, they should be perpendicular to the sausage: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/alignment. You can also see it like a funnel, where the spine serves as a minor axis: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/18/step3.

Texture and Detail

1 page of texture analysis: These look great! You've really taken the time to observe each texture carefully.

2 pages of dissections: These look nice, you've kept the implicity and detail shown in the texture analysis page. I do see a bit of a decrease in detail on the second page, make sure that you take breaks and cut exercises in sessions, especially for longer exercises like this. I remember that the dissections took me about 5 sessions of 30 min-1 hour each, probably even more. Do not grind it all in one session since it increases the risk of burning out. You're not afraid to break the silhouette on any of these textures which is good. Make sure that you think about the curvature of the form, especially for textures like rope and basket weave: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/7/curvature. One way you can do this is by planning the general form of larger shadow shapes, as if you were to ghost them. By having this 'frame', you can plan out the texture while not getting caught up with any details just yet, which is usually the reason why the textures fail to curve around the form.

Construction

4 pages of form intersections: These are looking good, you're not afraid to intersect many forms on one page and your lineweight has improved. One thing I noticed is that you tend to make the boxes have quite a dramatic perspective. This makes them feel quite stretched compared to the other forms: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/8/stretched. Make sure that your spheres are round as well, stretched forms tend to read as flat ellipses instead of 3D spheres.

2 pages of organic intersections: These are looking good. You're making sure that the sausages stack well and the shadows follow the form nicely. Be a bit more careful with how you fill in big shadow shapes, you can easily fill in big pieces with a black marker, I like to use a black tombow brush pen but acrylic markers (and maybe even small paint brushes) would work as well.

All in all, your submission shows that you understand the topics discussed in this lesson. Make sure that you use lesson 1 and 2 exercises as warmups before you work on drawabox in every session. Good luck with lesson 3!

Let me know if anything explained is unclear, I don't mind explaining it in more detail or drawing it out for you.

Next Steps:

Lesson 3, good luck!

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
7:37 AM, Thursday August 1st 2024

Thank you for the critique! Your comments were insightful. I'm definitely guilty of grinding out the dissections haha. I had quite an issue with the organic forms with contour lines, so thank you for pointing that out. I appreciate your critique! And I'll keep your warmup suggestions in mind

11:25 AM, Thursday August 1st 2024

I'm glad my critique helped! Grinding happens to the best of us haha, good luck on your drawabox journey!

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