2 users agree
10:29 AM, Thursday May 6th 2021
edited at 10:31 AM, May 6th 2021

Hello NoahDrakeHolguin,

I'm gonna take this step by step.

Organic Arrows

You did a good job making your arrows fluid, letting them flow on the page. The narrowing of the arrows, and the added line weight help to create the illusion of depth. The only thing that might confuse viewers is the shading. Some arrows have shading that suggests the arrow moves away from the viewer, while the arrow itself suggests the opposite. Practice envisioning your arrows in 3D to make yourself actually believe they are in 3D. You will automatically start to see where shading has to go.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines

Your sausage shapes are consistent and have proper forms. The sausages with ellipses are clean. The ellipses fit into the sausages well. Your ellipses do lack confidence at times. I really suggest drawing through your ellipses once or twice. And don't forget to ghost them properly!

As for the page with halved ellipses: you forgot to give the sausages their spines. That flowing line in the middle. But again, these sausage forms are consistent. When it comes to the ellipses, try to overshoot your ellipses so they curve around the forms. This helps to make them less flat. If you're having trouble with these half ellipses try rotating your page and ghosting the full ellipse a couple of times before putting your pen down.

Texture Analysis

I'll be honest: this isn't an assignment you can easily do with this type of pen. It's important that these textures go from pitch black to nearly white, and that's just hard to accomplish with hatching. Aside from that your notes do tell me you observed the textures, which is the goal of this assignment.

After lesson 5 or 6, I think, there's a challenge of analysing 25 textures. When that time comes I suggest you take the challenge. Be mindful about where you want to put your marks, and really take your time create a seemless transition from dark to light.

Dissections

Good job on breaking through the forms of the sausages with your textures! Keep this consistent, and remember to draw textures additively. This means that you add the texture onto the form instead of taking bits out of the form (I see this in the pineapple head).

Try to refrain from drawing random lines and dots. When you put your pen down you ideally always want to know what it's gonna do. So, again, be mindful when putting down your pen.

Form Intersections

The goal of this exercise is: "...developing your understanding of 3D space and how forms exist within it in relation to each other." For a first step towards this understanding, it's good. Try including all of the forms you put on the page into the space you're creating; some forms are floating by themselves on the sides of your pages.

(Shading is an efficient way to put emphasis on the side that is facing the viewer. For cones, ellipses and cylinders we shade in a different way than normal. You can find an explanation by Uncomfortable here: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/8/hatching)

Organic Intersections

Your sausage forms have proper form and clearly exist in 3D. The shading use some work though. Try to wrap your shadows around the sausages. Your contour lines exist to help with understanding the forms so use them to convince yourself of their 3D'ness. Also: draw through sausages. I notice some of them stop once they're blocked by another form. The goal is to understand how forms exist in the same 3D space, so create the forms in 3D space. It's not just about what we get to see.

Conclusion

You have good technique when it comes to using a pen. Try taking your time when drawing. A lot of these exercises are visibly rushed, like you weren't really into them. You won't learn as well if you just rush. If you're incurably bored by the homework, try the 50/50 rule: practice 50% of the time and draw for your own fun the other 50%.

My advice: add 'Form Intersections' and 'Organic Forms with Contour Lines' (especially the ones with halved contour lines) to your warm up routine. Don't rush through them and you will improve greatly, I'm sure of it!

I saw that you hadn't done the '250 boxes' challenge, is that right? That's an important challenge, so it's a good next step.

Next Steps:

Take a shot at the 250 boxes challenge. If you're really confident you can also just move on to lesson 3, but I don't recommend it.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
edited at 10:31 AM, May 6th 2021
8:16 PM, Monday June 21st 2021

Thank you for the critique! It has been very helpful so far. The 250 box challange has helped out a lot in understanding perspective. I have a better understanding of shape and form and have better spacial awareness within my drawings. Thank you.

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
PureRef

PureRef

This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.

When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.

Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.