For the asphalt texture in the dissections, I was genuinely trying to make a mostly dark texture with lighter grains in it, it just ended up looking like heavy scribbling. I also hope you'll be understanding that I got confused with some intersections and a couple shadows with the organic forms.
I'll be the TA handling your Lesson 2 critique.
You're making progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson and hopefully this critique will help you in your future attempts.
Starting off with the arrows section you want to be making sure you're drawing confidently to keep your arrows as smooth as possible, accuracy will come with mileage. There are spots where your arrows bulge/narrow suddenly, this is an issue because it gives the impression that your arrows are stretching which hurts their solidity. Remember that as our arrows move closer to the viewer we want them to widen consistently. It's good to see that you're trying to implement line weight, just remember that you want to keep your applications subtle and you'll become consistent with mileage. Here are some things to look out for when applying it. I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.
Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise your forms are getting a bit too complex. We want to create our forms with both ends being the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. You're keeping your line work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. Speaking of contours you're doing a good job trying to shift the degree of your contours so far, be sure to keep experimenting. 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.
In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself. This makes it difficult to create gradients with implied information which we could then use to create focal points in more complex pieces, by doing so we can prevent our viewers from being visually overwhelmed with too much detail. You also show that you're drawing from memory at times rather than giving yourself enough time to focus on your reference. Most of our time when doing exercises like this will be spent observing our reference and looking away for a quick second to add something to our page. For more on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here. I'd also like to quickly direct you to this image which shows that when we're working with thin line like textures if we outline and fill the shadow we will create a much more dynamic texture than simply drawing lines.
It's quite common for people to feel like they don't fully grasp the form intersections exercise, if you feel like you may fall into this category try not to stress too much. This exercise is 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 the upcoming lessons. Your forms are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work.
While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you show that you need a bit more time becoming comfortable with thinking of how these forms interact in 3D space and how they'd wrap around one another. I recommend trying to stack your forms perpendicularly rather than trying to keep them headed in the same direction to help make wrapping them around one another a smoother task. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. I'd like you to draw through all of your forms when tackling this exercise again in the future. Just like when we drew through our boxes it will help us better understand the 3D space we're attempting to create. When drawing your shadows you don't push them far enough to cast, instead they mostly hug the form creating them, try pushing them further. It appears like your shadows aren't following a consistent light source, I recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page to start with, it's easier than working with a light directly above your form pile.
I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds upon each other and I'd like to make sure you understand a few of these concepts a bit more before potentially creating more problems down the road.
Something that is noticeable in your submission is you fill your pages with tons of attempts, while filling the page is great it's often times more beneficial (and helps prevent burn out) if you take your time and do fewer but bigger attempts.
With that being said I'd like you to please re-read and complete:
1 page of the organic forms with contours exercise. (5 or 6 bigger forms is fine)
1 page of the organic intersections exercise. (Try simplifying your piles a bit more, it'll be easier to keep track of what's going on and help you get more comfortable with the process.)
Once you've completed the pages mentioned above reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll go over them and address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready for the next lesson I'll move you on.
I look forward to seeing your work.
Next Steps:
Please re-read and complete:
1 page of the organic forms with contours exercise.
1 page of the organic intersections exercise.
Here are my reattempts, for the organic intersections I tried to focus more on angling the shadows with a light source and stretching them down forms but ended up with issues in their own right there: https://imgur.com/a/lWUq7YC
I think much of my problem is I haven't figured out how to draw organic forms "head-on", only really from the side, hence I had problems drawing those perpendicular to lengthwise forms.
On the subject of textures I'd like to say I was using that technique for drawing line-like narrow shadows, otherwise I had many issues I hope to remedy with the 25 textures challenge, though I feel my understanding is so lacking I'd need some help in that regard.
Tofu has tagged me in to handle these revisions, so let's jump right in.
Starting with your neweset set of organic forms with contour curves, I can see that you've made a more concerted effort to stick to the characteristics of simple sausages. There are some discrepancies here and there but the point is that you're aiming in the right direction now. There are however a couple issues that I do want to call out however:
It appears that for some reason you've stopped 'overshooting' your curves as instructed here. This is resulting in your contour curves mostly coming out much more shallowly than they ought to, and in some circumstances actually flying off the surface of the sausage (rather than giving any impression that they hook back around and continue along the other side. Do not stop overshooting those curves. You may see it as 'trainingwheels' and may feel eager to shed them as soon as possible, but it is much more beneficial to keep them on throughout this course.
Remember that all of the ellipses you freehand throughout this course must be drawn through two full times before lifting your pen, as discussed back in Lesson 1.
Another point I noticed is that you seem to be slapping those ellipses down somewhat arbitrarily, without necessarily understanding what they signify. This goes along with your uncertainty of how to capture the impression that a sausage form would be faced head-on. This ellipse at the tip of a sausage form is actually no different from the contour curves themselves - they're all just contour lines. It just so happens that when the tip of a sausage faces towards the viewer, we're able to see all the way around that surface, and thus we're able to see the whole contour ellipse instead of just a partial curve. This also means that the full ellipse should only be drawn on the ends that are oriented towards the viewer, and that it needs to be consistent with what the contour curves themselves are telling us about the form's orientation. All of your contour curves have been drawn in such a way that tells us that both ends of each form are turning away from the viewer, and so none of these sausages should actually have an ellipse at either of their tips. There are other ways to lay out contour curves however. On this chart you can see sausages in different configurations - pay attention to what the contour curves themselves say, and then look at which ends have ellipses and which don't.
I also recommend that you review the Lesson 1 ellipses video, as it goes over the role the degree of a given ellipse plays in establishing the orientation of the circle it's meant to represent in 3D space - where a narrower ellipse signifies a circle that is turned away from the viewer, and a wider ellipse signifies a circle that is facing the viewer head-on.
As to your work on the organic intersections, you're doing a good job considering how the forms themselves wrap around the ones beneath them, demonstrating believable relationships in 3D space and a clear sense of the gravity applying to the scene. When it comes to the cast shadows themselves, you're headed in the right direction but I am seeing some difficulty in determining how to actually cast the shadows such that they run along the surfaces they're falling upon - specifically situations where those surfaces are curving away from the form casting the shadow.
Here's an example of how I might tackle designing one of the larger sausage's shadows, such that it actually wraps along the surfaces beneath it.
I think those shadow concerns for your organic intersections are pretty normal and can continue to be dealt with as you move forwards, but the issues with your understanding of those contour lines in the first exercise does still need to be addressed. As such, I'd like you to do 1 more page of organic forms with contour curves.
It looks like I misinterpreted how to apply contour lines, hence why every form I drew had its ends going away from the viewer; I thought it was wrong to have a contour at an end curve the opposite of the way the end goes, or to have all contours for a form curving the same way. In that light I made an effort to overshoot and keep in mind the heading of the organic forms, though I think my ellipses degrees may have suffered somewhat. https://imgur.com/a/xa1UhFN
Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"
It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.
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