Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

1:03 PM, Monday February 27th 2023

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Hello,

I think I struggled a lot with this part. Form intersection in particular, was difficult in that I wasn't able to picture how those shapes would overlap. I also struggled with organic arrows--shading them was a challenge. Didn't know which side to shade. Nevertheless, let me know how I fared. And as always, thanks in advance for any feedback.

3 users agree
4:24 PM, Friday March 10th 2023
edited at 5:08 PM, Mar 10th 2023

Hello DNGJ02, good work on getting through this lesson! I will critique you submission today. I have noted that you struggled with seeing the form intersections, and this is totally normal. It is a difficult exercise for most of us.

Your Organic Arrows look OK perspective-wise. You have understood why the turns create a feeling of depth as I can see that you really paid attention to increase the distance between the turns as the arrow comes forward towards the viewer. In some of the arrows, this is less apparent than in others, but it's a pass. If anything, your curves are a bit wobbly and some joins are sloppy. Also, try to do the shading more carefully with even strokes. It doesn't take that much longer but the result looks a lot more neat. It's very little effort for a much better result, don't you think?

As for your struggle with seeing where to shade, try to consistently decide which curve goes above the other, and shade the area underneath that curve.

In the Organic Forms with Contour Lines it looks like you were in a rush, even if you did the assignment correctly. Like before, I strongly advise you to slow down a bit, as this is not only a chance to do the lesson, but also incorporate and practice earlier markmaking skills from previous lessons. You still pass, but if you don't slow down in the future as the exercises get progressively harder, your communication to the viewer may suffer because of unnecessary wobbles and sloppiness.

Your strongest submission are the textures, both for the Texture Analysis and Dissections. Some suffer a lot when doing these but I can see that you had fun, were meticulous and careful about what you were observing. You avoided all the common traps, and made sure to use the cast shadows to communicate wrapped forms around some random sausages. Well done!

In your Form Intersections, the sloppy lines makes everything a lot more busy than it should be. Although, you still manage to stay true to the main goal of this exercise, which is to keep consistently sized shapes, not doing the intersections perfectly as it is very hard. I see three cylinders and a sphere that are a little bit too big on all pages, but most of the shapes are consistent.

Finally, Organic Intersections, are good, but still suffer from a little bit of sloppiness. In the first of the two pages, your cast shadows don't really stick to the form of the underlying sausages, and you do the mistake of putting two parallell sausages next to each other, but your second page looks a lot better! In your second page, you fufill all the criteria of a successful exercise. Well done on correcting your own mistakes!

Next Steps:

Move on to Lesson 3. From here on, stop rushing, and have patience with your markmaking especially for the more "boring" exercises. I think you would benefit from revisiting all the exercises of Lesson 2 at least twice (except the textures, which were really nice so you could also move onto the 25 Texture challenge).

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 3 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
edited at 5:08 PM, Mar 10th 2023
3:41 AM, Tuesday March 14th 2023

Thank you for the review! I definitely agree I rushed some of the exercises that I considered 'boring'. Will try to be more patient with them in the future and improve my markmaking as well.

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