Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

12:00 PM, Tuesday August 25th 2020

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Wow, I forgot how hard the form intersections are. It's really tough to figure out where the intersection should go and I think I broke my brain. Organic intersections were almost like therapy afterwards :D

Thanks for looking at my work!

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8:16 PM, Thursday August 27th 2020

Starting with your arrows, these are looking quite good. You've got a strong sense of confidence driving them as they move through all three dimensions of space.

Continuing onto your organic forms with contour lines, you're largely doing a pretty good job - it's clear that you're adhering to the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned in the instructions, although there is still a slight tendency to let the sausages get a bit wider through the midsection. Remember that we want the ends to be circular/spherical, and for the midsection to basically be a consistent tube maintaining the same width all the way through.

Your contour lines are doing a good job of wrapping around the forms well, although one thing that I am noticing is that the degree of your contour lines tend to remain roughly the same all throughout. 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.

Moving onto the texture analyses, you're largely doing a very good job here. It's clear that you're focusing entirely on the use of clearly defined and designed shadow shapes, and that you're using them to control the density of your textures as you move from left to right. While in your first two rows you didn't quite manage to push the density far enough to seamlessly transition to the solid black bar, you did manage to do this more successfully in the third row. Overall you also demonstrated a lot of care and attention to detail, along with strong observational skills. All of these strong qualities are on display throughout the dissections as well, where you've done a great job of exploring a wide variety of different textures.

Looking at your form intersections, I'm actually largely quite pleased wth your work, and I think you've done an excellent job. The only issue that jumps out at me is that your linework is at times a little bit hesitant and wobbly, and I'm not really seeing signs that you're actually using the ghosting method. You've got plenty of cases of more confident linework where the lines stay smooth and straight, but the use of the ghosting method is important regardless for every mark you draw, to properly allow us to execute our marks without hesitation or fear of making a mistake, while still maintaining appropriate control and accuracy.

You're off to a great start with the form intersections themselves. Now, it's entirely normal for these to be challenging, because I don't expect students to have any prior experience with this. It's just meant to be an introduction to having students think about how the forms they draw might relate to one another in 3D space, and how those relationships can be defined on the page. By having you make an attempt here, we plant a seed that will continue to develop as we explore this concept throughout the rest of the course.

Lastly, your organic intersections are similarly coming along well, establishing how the forms interact with one another in 3D space rather than as a series of flat shapes stacked on the page. There is one issue however - remember that you should be drawing each sausage form in its entirety. Currently you appear to be allowing many of them to get cut off where they go behind a form that is already present. While I want you to consider how the form wraps around the form beneath it, you should still be drawing each one in its entirety, only sorting out the layering with line weight and cast shadows once they've been drawn in full.

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.
7:56 PM, Friday August 28th 2020

Thank you for the really great critique and for clarifying some of the issues I was having with my contour lines. It has helped a lot. :)

I'll admit I did get a bit slack on the ghosting or sometimes I didn't ghost enough which led to some sloppy lines. I'll pay more attention to this as I move on through the lessons.

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