Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

9:08 PM, Thursday March 28th 2024

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Hi, I took a little break from drawabox after the 250 boxes challenge. I felt more confident in my drawing and it showed, thanks to the lessons and challenge. I came back, because even though my line drawing were better, i felt that my "organic" forms and ellipse needed improvement. I still think they do, especially my ellipses. Im going to spend some time drawing cylinders before doing the lesson 3 (if I pass of course). If you have ideas of exercices, please i'm intersted.

Thank you again for your time.

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8:39 PM, Sunday March 31st 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 in the arrows section your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. You're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. 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 some of 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. You're keeping your line work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. 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.

  • 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. 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 are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work.

  • While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you show that you need a bit more time becoming comfortable with thinking of how these forms interact in 3D space and how they'd wrap around one another. I recommend trying to stack your forms perpendicularly rather than trying to keep them headed in the same direction to help make wrapping them around one another a smoother task. 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.

Overall this was a solid submission, while you may have some things to work on I have no doubt you will improve with more mileage. I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to the next lesson.

Keep practicing previous exercises as 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.
4:31 PM, Monday April 1st 2024

Thank you for your reply. You are very kind. It is true im more confident with my lines. I did something like 200 cylinders to practice drawing ellipses and im probably going to do the same with organic forms to get more mileage.

Thank you again for your review. I hope you will review my next work.

6:13 PM, Monday April 1st 2024

It may be best for you to review what's explained on this page (both what's mentioned in the video at the top, and in the section further down about warmups). We largely do not find grinding to be an effective approach for studying, and instead encourage students to revisit the exercises they encountered throughout the course as part of a regular warmup routine instead. This allows us to get that mileage but without relying on our own arbitrary judgments as to when we're "ready" to continue forwards, and keeps us from putting ourselves in situations that can undermine the efficiency of our practice, and lead us more towards burnout.

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