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10:55 AM, Saturday January 4th 2025
Hello Vega123, I’ll be critiquing your submission today; if you have any questions, feel free to ask below. With that said, I’ll go ahead and review your submission.
Organic Arrows
Your line quality proves to be mostly consistent within both pages. There’s a bit of wobble when you cross over past the 2nd overlap so make sure you’re ghosting the entire curve to avoid hesitancy when you need to move your pen in another direction. The direction of compression on your arrows is clear; the width of the arrows gets smaller as they grow further away, which conveys proper perspective. Hatching lines tend to wobble or lean in some sections so make sure that all instances of exercises are receiving the same level of line quality.
Organic Forms
Starting on your forms, sausages clearly show the intent of a tube with two spheres on opposing ends, but they still have some bulging or pinching at the ends. Try to aim for the width of sausages to remain consistent throughout the entire length and to round off the ends as much as you can. I’m seeing a tendency to use sausages only orientated away from the viewer, I’ll share this image here of the variation of orientations you can use for future warm-ups.
Organic Forms with Contour Ellipses
Ellipses on sausages are clearly drawn through at least 2–3 times across all forms. Some wobbly lines take shape on the follow-through action, so as a reminder, remember to keep the confidence strong for all ellipses. The degree shift could be pushed further as multiple ellipses on the mid sections look like they repeat themselves more than once. I suggest starting out by limiting the number of ellipses per sausage to 4-5 and evenly spacing them out. This allows for degree shifts to be a lot more distinguishable.
Organic Forms with Contour Lines
The degree shift is somewhat difficult to gauge and appears to look the same across the entire length of the form. In addition to the stiffness of the contour lines making the roundness of the form appear less convincing. Reasonably so, it's a lot harder to convey degree shifts with contour curves. Fundamentally, contour curves are separated by the difference of only showing the visible part of the ellipse. The degree shift should be approached in the same way as the ellipses; the degree shift of the curves will change as they progress through the sausage. Try to consider the half of the curve that is not visible and how it would change depending on the degree. Similar advice as the contour ellipses: 4-5 curves, so you're given the chance to plan out how the openness of the curve will change. I’ve added an example here on one of your sausages to demonstrate.
Texture Analysis and Dissections
Starting with the texture analysis, it's clear you’re getting a grasp on how cast shadows operate on the crumbled paper. You’ve done great to blend the black bar on the paper but the other 2 transitions are a little weak, they’re still fairly easy to point out and don’t really contribute to showing how the texture gradually changes from dense to sparse. On the other end of spectrum, all 3 texture frames seem to abruptly cut off at roughly the same spot. Pure light will blast away most of those larger cast shadows but there should still be some shown in the small cracks of the texture.
Now onto dissections. Unfortunately, textures fall into explicit outlining to bridge the gap in solving the rhythm of cast shadows. Specifically the jackfruit, wool, strawberry, and brick textures. We want to use detail density to our advantage in order to describe the same abundance of forms without having to go in and actually draw each individual bump. This is tied to the 3rd step in the texture approach where we design the cast shadow based on the 3D forms noted in the reference. All other fine details should be filtered out. It's fairly easy to fatigue observing textures across two pages, but try to enforce the concept of implying forms as much as possible. As a last pointer, make sure you’re taking those opportunities to break past the silhouette. It helps on textures such as the brick and wool sweater to pull off the illusion as it wraps around the sausage.
Form Intersections
Solving the intersections in different forms is pretty challenging on the first go, so I'm not too concerned about your ability to cross each object. As explained on the lesson page, it's more about how cohesive the page appears —the illusion that these forms exist in the same space. That being said, a majority of boxes seem relatively the same size, with a few outliers that lengthen in one dimension or another. Try to keep them equilateral as much as possible.
Organic Intersections
The drawn forms appear somewhat shaky, suggesting that you may not be investing the necessary time to build up the pile. The curvature of the contour lines is good but shows similar tendencies of hesitant line quality. Overall, the structure of a few forms gives away the illusion that they could balance on top of each other. In some cases, completely levitating above the underlying form. If we think of these forms as water balloons, it's much easier to judge how the masses will behave against one another. The cast shadows are mostly okay but are missing the floor shadow on both pages, which majorly affects the believability that the pile is grounded somewhere flat and solid.
Okay, I think that just about covers it. Before you move forward to Lesson 3 I’ll need these items below:
1 page of organic intersections
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Review the exercise text and video content, and observe how the sausages sag over each other.
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Take you time with the process, skipping over instructions here can create blindspots in later lessons.
Next Steps:
- 1 page of organic intersections
9:28 PM, Saturday January 4th 2025
Hello, Thank you for your critique.
As such, I've redid the Organic Intersections exercise after watching the videos and observing the sausages. My revision homework is given in the link
Thank you so much for your critique again. I hope the revision is fine.
4:31 PM, Sunday January 5th 2025
Hey Vega, I'm happy to see that your cast shadows look much better here, wrapping around the contour of the form below. It's clear you're thinking about the placement of each sausage with the concept of gravity in mind. One last tip: keep that sag consistent on both ends of the sausage. Hugging the mass contours as much as possible will help support the illusion of mass.
Line confidence still presents as an obstacle to overcome. From your arrows, it's evident you are capable of achieving smooth lines. It might be beneficial to adjust some techniques, like the speed of your arm motion, but I'm sure you'll improve as the exercise gets more comfortable to complete during warm-ups.
All in all, I think you understand the Lesson 2 concepts well, so I’ll go ahead and send you off to Lesson 3. Keep up the good work.
Next Steps:
Remember to take these exercises into your warm-ups (10–15 minutes), and you can move on towards Lesson 3. Good Luck!
4:32 PM, Sunday January 5th 2025
Thank you so much for your critique! I'll keep this in mind moving forward
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