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3:30 AM, Monday July 13th 2020

Starting with your arrows, really nice work capturing how they flow smoothly and fluidly through space, and in properly applying foreshortening to both the positive space of the ribbon itself (which gets narrower as we look farther back) and to the negative space (the gaps between the zigzagging sections that compress as they get farther away from the viewer).

Moving onto the organic forms with contour lines, you are clearly making an attempt to stick to simple sausage forms, although I do feel this is an area that can still see improvement. In this section, I explain that the forms should be two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You achieve this in a few cases, but more often than not you have the midsection getting a little more narrow, as well as the ends either being of different sizes or coming out more stretched rather than properly circular/spherical.

Your contour lines themselves are largely well done. You've drawn the ellipses with confidence to maintain even shapes, and have wrapped the contour curves well around the rounded surfaces. You've also done a good job of keeping them snug within the silhouette of each form. Lastly, you're doing a good job of demonstrating your understanding of how the degree of the contour lines changes naturally, growing wider or narrower as we slide along the length of a given form. Nicely done.

Moving onto the texture analyses, you do indeed have a good start on these - you're working largely with clear, purposeful shapes, and are doing a good job of transitioning from black to white over the course of the gradients. You continue to explore this further as you get into the dissections - here your textures become more noticeably three dimensional - the corn on the cob for example really pops out, and you do a great job of working with those shadow shapes. In some cases however - like the alligator scales - you do fall back to relying on outlining each individual textural form (an issue I describe in greater detail here) though, so do keep an eye on that. The corn is exactly what I want to see - no clear outlines, just focusing on the shadows cast by one form at a time, on its surroundings. It's obviously a lot more difficult to work like this because it requires you to really grasp how a form sits in space without drawing it first, but it will get easier with practice.

Your work on the form intersections is largely well done, though I did mention in the instructions that you should stay away from forms that are more stretched in one dimension (like longer cylinders), as they add complexity to an already difficult exercise through their introduction of more difficult foreshortening. Aside from that, you are doing a good job of constructing these forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space. Lastly, I'm very pleased to see that you've put a great deal of effort into the intersections, and you've got a great start with them. Admittedly this is intended to be challenging - students aren't expected to understand how to do this just yet, but the point is to get them to start thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how those definitions can be captured in your drawings. This is something we'll continue to explore at length throughout this entire course, but it's great to see you digging into it with such voracity now.

Lastly, your work on the organic intersections is very well done. You've done a great job of capturing how the sausage forms interact with one another in three dimensions, rather than just as flat shapes stacked on a page. You've also clearly established an illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another. Very well done.

All in all, your work here is coming along well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:49 PM, Monday July 13th 2020

Thanks for your review! I enjoyed this lesson and felt like I learned alot.

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