Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

11:54 AM, Wednesday May 27th 2020

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...here go my lesson 2 (sorry about some points of crazyness but we have to get some fun out of this, also ;)

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5:32 PM, Wednesday May 27th 2020

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a good job of drawing these with a strong sense of fluidity and movement to them. As your ribbons get narrower and narrower as they move away from the viewer though, make sure you're also applying that compression of space to the distances between the zigzagging sections. You are definitely doing so to an extent, but I think it can still be exaggerated a little further to fully sell the illusion of depth in the scene.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you've done an excellent job of sticking to simple sausage forms. Your contour ellipses also fit snugly between the edges of the sausages while also remaining evenly shaped and confidently drawn. Your contour curves are a bit off, in that they tend to extend a little outside of the sausage's silhouette. Definitely keep working on getting this to be snug within those edges, as it helps sell the illusion that the lines are running along the length of the form.

Also, I noticed you went over those contour curves a couple times - remember that the whole "drawing through your ellipses" only applies to the ellipses themselves, because it allows us to draw them more confidently, continuing the same path a couple times. In the case of lines with a defined start and end point, it doesn't really serve any purpose, so leave those as being executed with a single stroke.

The one other thing I want to point out is that you're largely using the same degree for your contour lines throughout the length of a given sausage. The degree of the contour line represents the orientation of that cross-sectional slice of the form, relative to the viewer's point of view. As we slide along the form, this will naturally change, and as a result the contour line's degree will get narrower or wider, as shown here. Keep this in mind when drawing contour lines in the future.

Moving onto your texture analyses and dissections, you've really knocked it out of the park with these. You're clearly focusing on capturing the shadows cast by the textural forms, on drawing distinct, solid shapes rather than individual lines and outlines, and you're demonstrating an exceptional attention to detail throughout both exercises. You've done an excellent job with these, and should be proud of yourself.

Moving onto your form intersections, you've done well to draw the forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space. Your linework is mostly looking pretty good, although when you go back over your lines to add additional weight, I think your execution of those additional marks is a little more hesitant. Remember that you should still be applying the ghosting method even there, and focusing on executing the marks with a confident stroke. Don't trace over your lines more carefully in an effort match things up. If you go off track, no big deal. But by continuing to practice confident linework in this manner, your accuracy will improve, while maintaining smooth lines and consistent trajectories.

You've got a great start with your intersections as well. These serve as an introduction to a concept students aren't expected to have any prior experience with, so it's completely normal for there to be plenty of room for growth. Specifically we're just exposing students to thinking about the spatial relationships between the forms they draw - a concept at the very core of this course as a whole, and something we'll continue to explore and develop as we continue onwards.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a good job of capturing the interactions between these forms as they exist in 3D space, pushing past the idea that they're just flat shapes on a page. You're also selling a strong illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another.

All in all, really 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.
5:59 PM, Wednesday May 27th 2020
edited at 10:09 PM, May 27th 2020

What an honor to be reviewed by the bo(x)ss himself !!

Thank you so much for your time and accuracy. I definitely agree with your surgical critiques and will try to heal them before coming back for more stitches ;)))

Now plants...

edited at 10:09 PM, May 27th 2020
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