10:57 PM, Tuesday November 15th 2022
Hey, I'll be looking at your submission.
Organic Arrows: On the first page, you seemed to be afraid to overlap the edges, but this got better with the second page. In future warm-ups, work on getting more confident with overlapping. This sells the idea of a drawing being in 3D. Also, hatching tends to be inconsistent on some arrows. One thing to remember is that you should hatch on the part of the arrow that is being overlapped. If there is no overlap, or the part is doing the overlapping, it should not be hatched.
Organic Forms with Contours: While I can see the ellipses on the dissections exercise, I would appreciate seeing this without all the textures to better appreciate the ellipses. If you have that picture before doing dissections, please submit that. If not, I would recommend doing another page of contour forms with ellipses. For the page with contour lines, the contour lines look mostly fine, as they hook around, but you should make sure that they vary as you go through the sausage form. Most of these contour lines have the same degree. Furthermore, you do not want to use a lot of contour lines for a sausage. Depending on size, you should use three max for a small sausage and five (maybe six) for a big sausage. What happens is that not only do you not have the space to vary the degrees of the contour lines, but you also ruin the illusion of 3D when you "overemphasize" the curviness of the sausage. You did a good job in showing that the contour changes direction when the sausage bends, so keep that up. However, I would recommend doing another page of organic forms with contour lines and focusing on conveying the form with 3-5 contour lines.
Texture Analysis: You did really well in capturing shadows with the implicit method. And your transition into light looks remarkable. One thing to keep in mind is to make sure the transition from dark to texture is much smoother. You don't want a stark dark to light; it should blend in.
Dissections: For most of these textures, you managed to capture implicit shadows well, too. Some that I really liked were the tentacles, the coconut, and the ice cream. There were some textures that look less implicit and more explicit, basically you drawing what was there. One good example is the pizza texture. This one is a little difficult because in order to convey the texture, you have to draw the food that is there. However, it is still possible. You can convey the texture by focusing on the overlapping pepperonis or toppings. You could also do a cheese pizza texture by focusing on the broiled/brown spots on the pizza. One other suggestion is focusing on one slice instead of the whole pizza. Or maybe you can focus on the crust, as that might be easier to convey. Another example is the fur texture, which is also a difficult texture. Uncomfortable gets into this in a future lesson, but fur texture is not just zigzag lines or spikes. It is important to draw each tuft like it is unique, because it is. It is similar to the grass texture. Now, since you are practicing implicit shadows, this can be a little difficult, but keep in mind if you are drawing animals in the future that drawing the fur texture depends on drawing a tuft singly.
Form Intersections: Good intersections overall. If you decide to do this as warm up in the future, feel free to push the intersections more and allow the forms to "interact" more by pushing them closer. This challenges your mind to figure out how they interact, but it is a fun challenge. You tend to use a lot of dramatic foreshortening in this exercise. Be cautious of this in future warm-ups, because it can be jarring to have several dramatic foreshortened forms intersection each other with shallow foreshortened forms also in the mix. It would be better to focus more on shallow foreshortening in all these forms for future warm-ups. Finally, hatching shouldn't be used to convey intersections; it is used to show which side of the plane is facing us. Also, it is optional, so you don't have to hatch if you don't want to. Just keep this in mind for future exercises that involve hatching.
Organic Intersections: The sausages and contour lines look fine here. It does seem that you struggle to figure out where to place shadows; there are even some sausages that lack shadow when they should have it. As a rule of thumb, any sausages on the bottom should have a cast shadow; this establishes what surface they are on and forms the basic for the structure itself. As for the other sausages, it is best to place the sausages first before placing the shadow. This forces your brain to figure out how the shadows will interact with the surfaces. They shouldn't just be straight and stiff; they should conform to the curved surface if the shadow is falling on a curved surface. In addition to that, it would be best to limit yourself to 6-8 sausages per page so you can better track how the sausages fall on each other and how their shadows interact. I would recommend doing one more page of organic intersections and limit the number of sausages to 6-8. Focus on how the shadows should fall on the surfaces for each form. Sometimes, they might not have much of a shadow.
Overall, keep up the good work. I'll place what you need to redo in the revisions section. Once again, it is one page of organic forms with ellipses, one page of organic forms with contour lines, and one page of organic intersections.
Next Steps:
One page of organic forms with ellipses
One page of organic forms with contour lines
One page of organic intersections