View Full Submission View Parent Comment
0 users agree
12:58 AM, Monday January 11th 2021

Hi there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.

You're making good progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, below I'll be listing some things that will hopefully help you in your future attempts at these exercises.

  • In the arrows exercise the biggest to work on that I notice is your line quality could be cleaner. There are spots where your confidence is wavering which leads to your lines wobbling quite a bit, and your line weight is applied quite heavily rather than subtly. I'd like to point you to this example of what we are hoping to achieve by applying line weight. Other than that you're off to a good start but your foreshortening could be a bit more consistent and you could be utilizing it in the negative space between the arrow's curves more. Take a look at this example to see how beneficial foreshortening both the arrow itself as well as in the negative space can be in order to create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space. One final note I have for you is to remember that hatching should be applied after ghosting and planning before confidently executing your mark, in quite a few places your hatching gets a bit messy and appears rushed.

  • In your organic forms with contours exercise your forms are pretty close to being kept simple which is a good start, remember our goal here is to create a form where both ends are the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. Your contours themselves are looking pretty well done, I'd like you to try and shift their degree a bit more however. 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.

  • In some of the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space (fur/brain/honeycomb ) 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.

  • If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, you're on the right track but right now 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 here are looking pretty solid and like they belong in a single 3D space, your linework has also tidied up a bit which is good to see.

  • Your organic intersections are off to a good start, your forms don't always wrap around one another in a way that makes sense but you're close and with some more mileage you'll have them down in no time. Your shadows are behaving pretty consistently and you're pushing them far enough that they're casting and not just hugging the form creating them which is great. This is a great exercise to build up your understanding of organic forms in 3D space as well as your basic understanding of light and shadow so keep experimenting.

While there are a few things to work on this was a solid submission overal. I'll be marking your submission complete and moving you on to the next lesson.

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

Next Steps:

Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups.

Move on to lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
1:44 PM, Monday January 11th 2021

Hello,

thank you very much for the thorough critique! You are right in every aspect, I am not at all happy with my line quality and the texture exercices were really the hardest for me. I will try to implement all your suggestions for improvement.

Off to the lesson 3.

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.

Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.

These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.

We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.

Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.