Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

1:07 AM, Sunday November 16th 2025

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On Form Intersections #2-4:

I did some experimentation with hatching to better understand overlaps. I didn't like the hatching on the spheres and took it out for follow pages.

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7:22 PM, Monday November 17th 2025

Jumping right in with your arrows, great work focusing on drawing your arrows with confidence - it's helping you to lean in nicely to the fluidity with which these structures move through 3D space. When it comes to the application of foreshortening, you're doing a great job of applying it to the positive space, but when it comes to the negative space it is more limited, with the gaps between the zigzagging sections often being of arbitrary sizes, rather than gradually compressing more and more the further back we look. Be sure to focus your future practice of this exercise on that concept so that you can better engage with the depth in the scene.

Looking at your sausage forms with contour lines, I can see that you are generally trying to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages, although you do pretty consistently tend to have your sausages come out a little wider through the midsection, rather than maintaining a consistent width throughout its length as described here. That's definitely something to continue focusing on when practicing these in the future.

When it comes to the contour lines, you're doing a great job of drawing these with confidence so as to achieve even shapes and appropriate curvatures. While I do see appropriate consideration of the degree with which each ellipse is drawn in some cases, there are also others (as we see here for example) which contradict that point and suggest that your grasp of the behaviour of the degrees may not be entirely solid just yet (in that example, the degree steadily gets narrower as we move away from the viewer, when it should be getting wider).

You can review this section from the written material on that topic, but more broadly the issues you've encountered here and in the previous exercise align with areas that our lesson material did not cover in as much detail as they do now (since then our update of the demo/videos for the first section of Lesson 2 from early in October sought to bolster these areas), so the videos for both exercises would also be worth reviewing.

Continuing onto the texture section, one thing to keep in mind is that the concepts we introduce relating to texture rely on skills our students generally don't have right now - because they're the skills this entire course is designed to develop. That is, spatial reasoning. Understanding how the textural forms sit on a given surface, and how they relate to the surfaces around them (which is necessary to design the shadow they would cast) is a matter of understanding 3D spatial relationships. The reason we introduce it here is to provide context and direction for what we'll explore later - similarly to the rotated boxes/organic perspective boxes in Lesson 1 introducing a problem we engage with more thoroughly in the box challenge. Ultimately my concern right now is just how closely you're adhering to the underlying steps and procedure we prescribe (especially those in these reminders).

It appears that your texture analysis work is missing from your submission, so you'll need to provide that to confirm that it was completed - though in your dissections I can see this approach of designing/outlining your shadow shapes first, then filling them in, has been used quite a bit. It is of course there alongside other approaches (like less controlled one-off strokes) rather than to their exclusion, although that is pretty normal at this stage. Just be sure to try to stick to this approach for all of your textural marks when dealing with textural problems within the bounds of this course (which you are not especially far off from doing).

While it's true that there are certainly going to be shadows that are cast that are so small they can't reasonably be executed using our two step methodology, in such cases it's better to actually leave them out, for the following reasons:

  • A designed shape, despite not being something we can create quite as small as a one-off stroke, tapers in a more nuanced, delicate fashion, whereas a one-off stroke is more likely to end in a manner that feels more sudden. Thus, the shapes lean better into our goal of creating a gradient that transitions from black to white (and ultimately we have to pick a point for the shadows to drop off altogether anyway, so pushing a little farther with singular strokes isn't strictly necessary).

  • Drawing in one-off strokes allows us to lean more into drawing directly from observation (as opposed to observing, understanding the forms that we see as they exist in 3D space, then creating shadows based on that understanding), which can be very tempting as it can allow us to create more visually pleasing things without all of the extra baggage of thinking in 3D. But of course, 3D spatial reasoning is the purpose of this course.

Moving onto the form intersections, this exercise serves two main purposes:

  • Similarly to the textures, it introduces the problem of the intersection lines themselves, which students are not expected to understand how to apply successfully, but rather just make an attempt at - this will continue to be developed from lessons 3-7, and this exercise will return in the homework in lessons 6 and 7 for additional analysis, and advice where it is deemed to be necessary). The way in which you're drawing your intersection lines clearly demonstrates that you're thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, so that's great to see. That said, don't use different colours of pen here. There's no need to add hatching to more than one surface on a given form, as it only serves as a visual cue to help us understand which sides are turned towards the viewer, and which are turned away.

  • The other, far more important use of this exercise (at least in the context of this stage in the course) is that it is essentially a combination of everything we've introduced thus far. The principles of linework, the use of the ghosting method, the concepts surrounding ellipses along with their axes/degrees, perspective, foreshortening, convergence, the Y method, and so forth - all of it is present in this exercise. Where we've already confirmed your general grasp of these concepts in isolation in previous exercises, it is in presenting it all together that can really challenge a student's patience and discipline, and so it allows us to catch any issues that might interfere with their ability to continue forward as meaningfully as we intend.

As to this latter point, I can see that you're applying the methodologies introduced throughout the course to great effect. I have just two quick points to call out:

  • When drawing your cylinders, don't default to drawing their side edges as being parallel on the page (as we see here - it's actually pretty common for students to do that across the board, but it seems you avoided this in the others, which is good to see). Basically this would only occur when the intent is for the cylinder to be oriented perpendicularly to the viewer's angle of sight, as those are the conditions where the side edges' vanishing point would be pushed to infinity, as discussed back in Lesson 1. If that is not your specific intent - and in this exercise where we're rotating our forms arbtirarily in space, it wouldn't be - it's important to always include some minimal amount of visible convergence.

  • For your other cylinders where you did include convergence, there was another issue - as we see here you tend to draw the far end ellipse as being of a narrower degree than the end closer to the viewer, which as discussed in Lesson 1's ellipses section is incorrect. The farther end will always have an ellipse of a wider degree, though being otherwise smaller in its overall scale.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along nicely. You're clearly thinking about how these forms drape over one another under the influence of gravity, and you're leveraging your cast shadows to further emphasize that.

All in all, your work is coming along well - although before I can mark this lesson as complete, you will need to provide your completed texture analysis work which was missing from this submission.

Next Steps:

Please provide the missing texture analysis page.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
11:58 PM, Monday November 17th 2025

My first attempt at the final texture immediantly became very inacurate to both the reference and the principles of the texture. I decided to redo it with a different texture.

9:54 PM, Wednesday November 19th 2025

This all looks to be in order - although do keep in mind the aspect of the gradient that has us striving to blend the solid black bar on the left and the solid white bar on the right into the gradient in a seamless fashion, as discussed in this section of the instructions.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto Lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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