Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

9:43 AM, Tuesday January 19th 2021

Drawabox lesson 2 - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/BbDrdR1

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Tough lesson. Individual notes on some of the exercises is inside the imgur link. Thank you!

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10:35 AM, Thursday January 21st 2021
edited at 10:44 AM, Jan 21st 2021

Hello, here's feedback for L2.

Organic arrows -- You're off to a good start, some of the arrows are changing consistently in size with each bend, and the hatching is done on the correct bend to show the 3-d perspective. The main area to work on is the confidence on the linework. You've done a lot of straight lines for 250 Boxes so it's understandable that the first curved lines you draw are wobbly. But I recommend doing a few Organic Arrows for drawing warmups in future, to keep practicing how to draw confident curves first. Once you can draw confident curved lines, you can then practice making them more accurate/growing at the correct rate.

Also, some of the lineweight on the bends aren't drawn on the correct edge - it's meant to be drawn on the edge that is "closest" to the viewer, also the edge that is next to the hatching. Keep this in mind when you do arrows for warmups.

Organic forms with contour -- The curved lines start looking more confident here, good work. Some of the sausages are a bit deformed (eg. top right & middle right in Contour Curves page; middle left in Contour Ellipses page) but drawing simple sausages comes with practice. (They look better in Organic Intersections.) One thing you can practice doing more is changing the degree of the ellipses/contours as shown here, as they currently all have about the same degrees.

These sausages are also good warmup practice and you need to draw more of them in later lessons, so I recommend warming up with a few of them to keep practicing on drawing simple forms like in Uncomfy's example.

Texture analysis -- Yup, I remember seeing this page though I don't remember what I commented then. I vaguely recall pointing out the forgotten white bar on the right side of the panels... :P

Texture analysis is hard and I think you made a good stab at it overall. Although all 3 textures look kind of same to me, I don't know if you did or didn't draw the same one three times. But the goal is to practice observing details in a texture and then figuring out how to draw it, and I think you've accomplished that.

Dissections -- This exercise is also hard, it's the L2 equivalent of Rotated Boxes. :D I think finishing it is a big accomplishment, so well done. There are still things to keep in mind, though: (a) the texture is meant to wrap around the curvature of the sausage, (b) since the texture wraps on the sausage surface, you have to break the silhouette to draw the texture accurately as it bends around, (c) some textures are drawn with explicit detail and outlining (eg. octopus tentacles page 2).

Uncomfy explicitly deals with (a) and (b) mistakes on the lesson page, and they help to give textures a sense of being 3-d. You've started doing both steps with some textures (eg. mushroom page 1, animal scales page 2, pineapple skin page 2) but most of them sadly still have a flat look. So it's worth being mindful of these 3 points moving forward, because you'll keep applying them in L3 and beyond.

Form intersections -- I'm afraid I have to ding you for not following the exercise instructions. The purpose of the lesson is to draw forms/solids that look like they're all located together in 3-d space; if they're in the same space but are overlapping, they will be intersecting, and intersecting while maintaining consistent perspective with the neighbouring forms. You're right that the point is not to draw perfectly accurate form intersections -- but you still have to draw them to show "your understanding of 3D space and how forms exist within it in relation to each other." (Quoted from Uncomfy in "Purpose of this exercise" section.)

Organic intersections -- The linework here is significantly improved from Organic Forms with contour - great work! Cast shadows also look good, I think you got the idea. As for how the cast shadows fall/drape on the forms below -- you follow the contour of the sausage underneath. The shadow will always "drape" on the underlying sausage by following its contour curves. IMHO, Uncomfy's examples don't show this too well, so I'll shill my L2 homework (here and here - I deliberately exaggerated how the shadows curve).

But I think you've gotten the idea, especially in page 1. All you need to do is make the shadows a bit wider and follow the contour curves more.

.

I think you did a great job with L2 and are ready for L3... however, I think Form Intersections must be finished properly, to demonstrate that you can draw forms intersecting with each other while maintaining consistent perspective. As long as you can draw an intersection between two forms, and keep the 3-d orientation of each form the same as you cut all the intersections, that's sufficient.

So please draw intersections on all 4 pages of Form Intersections and reupload them.

If you're struggling, feel free to PM me/reply here, or ask on Discord #lesson2, I and others can help you there.

Good luck, I believe in you. :)

Next Steps:

Finish intersections on all 4 pages of Form Intersections, and reupload them.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
edited at 10:44 AM, Jan 21st 2021
12:19 PM, Thursday January 21st 2021

Since I also started a critique, here are additional points:

Keep the lineweight in the arrows subtle, 1-2 superimposed lines are good enough. I put more lineweight in areas that have intersecting lines and can cause confusion, in this case I would put some lineweight on overlap to emphasize what is in front.

Lesson 1's super imposed line exercise also includes curved lines, so you could also add that to your warmups to train skills needed for better arrows.

Also, to give you a better idea of how cast shadows work imagine this scenario: I have a sausage IRL on a table and if I take a spray can with red color and spray over the sausage with a fixed angle then you could see that some spray goes on the table, some of the sausage but you can also notice that there is this area where there isn't any color. That is the equivalent of a cast shadow in essence.

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