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2:02 AM, Wednesday October 28th 2020
Hey there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.
While I can tell you put quite a bit of effort into this lesson, there are a number of spots for you to work on in order to improve and you may not have given the instructions as much attention as you could have. I'll be listing what I noticed below.
- In the arrows exercise you want to make sure you're keeping your hatching to only involve perpendicular lines, running parallel lines as well results in lines floating in the arrow that don't look as tidy as they could. While you can and should experiment with foreshortening the negative space surrounding the arrows more as discussed here. The biggest concern I have with this exercise is your line quality, there's quite a bit of noticeable wobbling occurring and you're possibly not using your shoulder or ghosting enough.
Looking back on your previous submissions I noticed you mention that you felt like ghosting appeared to stop helping for a while. At the end of the day everything we do is the result of a choice. We can choose to ghost, we can choose to execute the mark with confidence and without hesitation. We can't choose for the lines to come out well, but we can choose to take the steps to improve our chances.
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Your organic forms with contours exercise attempts have a few issues. You're attempting to draw forms that are too complicated, for a lot of people it's actually part of the challenge keeping them simple, we want to aim to keep both ends of the sausage roughly the same size, and avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form. You can read more about what qualifies as a simple sausage here. It does appear like you attempt to shift the degree of your contours along the form, but in case you aren't intentionally here's a quick reminder. 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. Besides those 2 notes again I'll point out that your line quality could be better here, it's probably most noticeable in your contour lines, but there are some spots in your form construction and ellipses as well that have quite a bit of wobble.
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When it comes to the textures exercises you have a bit of a mix of results. There are places where you're focusing on outlines and negative space rather than the cast shadows being created by forms along the texture itself. You also tend to focus on explicitly drawing every detail rather than allowing yourself to use/fuse cast shadows to imply detail, while working on small segments that are floating on their own like this it doesn't appear like a problem but if you work on a larger piece this can create issues where not only do you have to draw every tiny detail but you can create visual overload rather than having strong focal points. You can read more about the importance of cast shadows and implying detail here. For reference I'd say that your rope texture is a good example of what I mean by overly detailed, and rocks in sand are a good example of you focusing on outlines and negative space. On the flip side, your moon texture is quite well done, it's focused on cast shadows and has some nicely implied craters because of your gradient of light across it.
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If you feel like you don't fully grasp the form intersections exercise just yet don't worry, right now it's 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 upcoming lesson material, with that said though the 2 biggest issues in this exercise are line quality (as mentioned before) and that you used under drawings which as discussed here is something you really shouldn't be doing.
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Lastly is your organic intersections, I have 3 quick final notes for you here. The first is line quality, the second being that you attempted to draw your forms too complicated and it hurt their overall solidity. The final being that your shadows are hugging the forms creating them rather than being cast on to the forms below them, and they aren't behaving as consistently as they could be.
While it may appear like I tore into you a bit through this submission, know that I do so because I know you're capable of more than this. I won't be moving you on just yet because I'd like you to redo a few pages of organic forms with contours and organic intersections.
So please re-read through the exercises and resubmit:
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2 pages of organic forms with contours
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1 page of organic intersections.
Once you've completed them put them in an album and reply to this comment and I'll take a look at them, and either address any further issues that need to be worked or move you on ahead to the next lesson.
Remember that you can do this, you just have to keep in mind the previous lesson material as it all builds off each other. I know your line quality can be better than this because it has been in the past.
I look forward to seeing your updated attempts, good luck.
Next Steps:
Please re-read through the exercises and resubmit:
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2 pages of organic forms with contours
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1 page of organic intersections.
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