11:27 PM, 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.

  • Starting off with the arrows section you want to be making sure you're drawing confidently to keep your arrows as smooth as possible, accuracy will come with mileage. 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. It's good to see that you're trying to implement line weight, just remember that you want to keep your applications subtle and you'll become consistent with mileage. here are some things to look out for when applying it. 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.

  • 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. Some of your line work here shows a lack of confidence as well, remember that our first priority is that we want all of our linework/ellipses/contours to be drawn confidently and mileage will improve our accuracy. 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. Don't forget to draw through all of your ellipses as well, you neglect some of the smaller ones here.

  • In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines 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. You also show that you're drawing from memory at times rather than giving yourself enough time to focus on your reference. Most of our time when doing exercises like this will be spent observing our reference and looking away for a quick second to add something to our page. 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.

  • 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 largely look pretty solid but your line work continues to hamper your results.

  • 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. I'd like you to draw through all of your forms when attempting this exercise again in the future, it will help reinforce your understanding of the 3D space you're creating. 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.

I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds upon each other and I'd like to make sure you understand a few of these concepts a bit more before potentially creating more problems down the road.

With that being said I'd like you to please complete:

  • 2 pages of the form intersections exercise, focus on following the principles of markmaking which should be followed for any mark you draw.

Once you've completed the pages mentioned above reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll go over them and address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready for the next lesson I'll move you on.

I look forward to seeing your work.

Next Steps:

  • 2 pages of form intersections
When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
11:49 PM, Saturday February 17th 2024

Hey Tofu! Thank you for all this detailed feedback - I've tried to redo the arrows and sausages and am definitely noticing the difference (still struggling w/ consistency on the arrow width).

Looking back at submission, I completely see me falling off the ghosting and regressing back to drawing from my wrist - especially on the form intersection exercise. I'm still struggling to get the intersections and think distracted me back to bad habits. I tried doing more warmups with the basic line exercises but even with that it took a lot of tries to get a version without some regressions. I still don't think I have the intersections down, but hopefully the line making is looking better. Curious to hear your thoughts. Thanks again!

https://imgur.com/a/3fRNRbw

11:57 PM, Saturday February 17th 2024

These look solid, the form intersections are tough and you'll get more experience with them as you work through the course which will make the task easier.

Primarily the concern was your lines and this exercise has a mix of striaght and curved lines so it's a good gauge of whether or not you continue to struggle. I'm happy to say that these are looking much better.

It's understandable that students sometimes get overwhelmed when dealing with new concepts that they may slip on some of the older ones, just remember that everything is intended to build upon itself so try to keep them in mind the best you can. Drawing confident will be something expected throughout the whole course.

That said I'll be marking your submission complete, best of luck in lesson 3.

Next Steps:

Move on to lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
1:33 AM, Tuesday February 20th 2024

Thanks! I'll keep at it :)

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