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2:01 AM, Wednesday March 18th 2020
Your arrows are off to a good start. They flow smoothly and confidently through space, though one thing to keep in mind is that perspective applies to both positive and negative space. The positive space is reflected in how the ribbon of the arrow itself gets narrower as it moves farther away. The negative space is represented in how the spacing between the zigzagging sections gets compressed as we look farther back. It's easy to forget this second part, and to have perspective only apply to the positive space instead. Don't be afraid to let the use of perspective on negative space cause your arrow to start overlapping itself - this is a great way to show the depth of the scene.
Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, I'm definitely seeing that you're working to keep your sausage forms simple. One area where you're not quite achieving this is in keeping the ends spherical. Right now they're somewhat more elongated, so be sure to keep an eye on that. Secondly, looking at your contour ellipses, their degree appears to remain fairly consistent across the whole length of the form. Instead, as the orientation of each cross-section changes relative to the viewer, the ellipse itself will grow wider or narrower, as shown here. Also, keep in mind that the smaller ellipse you draw on the tips of your sausage forms should also follow the pattern of your other contour ellipses' degrees. It doesn't look like you're necessarily thinking much about what degree the smaller ones ought to be, and most of them come out very wide and circular, even if the contour ellipses just before it are much narrower.
The thing about contour curves vs. contour ellipses is that they are actually the exact same thing. The only change is that when drawing contour ellipses, we're doing so as though we have x-ray vision, and we can see those lines as they wrap all the way around the sausage form. When drawing contour curves, we're only drawing the visible portion of those lines. So the full ellipses still exist, they're just partially on the opposite side of the form. That means that when we look at the tip of a sausage form that is facing more towards us, we'll actually be able to see the whole contour ellipse once again (just like the smaller contour ellipses you added at the end of your contour ellipse sausages). This means that you could, and should, do the same thing for this second page.
Lastly, one major concern with your contour curves is that you're regularly having the contour curves fall outside of the silhouette of your sausage forms. Since we're trying to give the impression that these contour lines run along the surface of the form, we need to work on having those curves sit snugly between the edges of the form, so it appears as though the lines are right on the surface.
Moving onto your texture analyses, your first one - the crimpled paper - is really well done. You're clearly thinking in terms of shadow shapes, rather than outlines. As you get into your other two textures however, you definitely slip back into laying things out with solid outlines, creating these clear borders between forms. It's really important that you keep pushing the full focus on shadow shapes. Lines don't exist in the world around us, and so while we are always going to be tempted to just outline things first, then later think about the shadows they cast, this defeats the purpose of the exercise. The same principle appliews to your dissections, where you're really just drawing outlines throughout. I strongly urge you to go through the texture section of this lesson again. I feel that you had a strong start with the crumpled paper, but you gradually let the explanations covered in the lesson slip, and just focused on what little you remembered of it.
One other thing worth mentioning is that you've drawn a lot of these dissection textures as though they were sitting on flat surfaces - you need to think more about how the textures wrap around this rounded surface - about how the surface turns away from the viewer as we come along the sides.
Now, I'm not going to ask for you to redo these texture exercises, because they are an introduction to a series of concepts, and I give a lot of room for students to have issues with them. Additionally, your second page is visibly better - in that you're thinking much more in terms of cast shadows, although those outlines are still very much present. Still, it's a step in the right direction.
Your form intersections are a good start, and are also moving in the right direction. The forms you've drawn feel quite cohesive and consistent within the same space, and the linework is drawn confidently and executed with solid control, for the most part. You're also exploring the intersections themselves - something we're again only introducing here, and will continue developing throughout the entirety of this course (as this concept is tied to the overall spatial reasoning skills at the core of drawabox).
Lastly, your organic intersections are showing some of the elements we're looking for - you're letting some of the forms wrap around each other - though I do feel that there's a lot of room for improvement here. Firstly, the forms tend to feel somewhat flattened out, and where some forms pile on top of others, we don't seem to register the volume of those underneath as much as we should. Additionally, the way you've drawn your cast shadows is very scratchy and haphazard - you should be outlining the shadow shapes themselves, then filling them in fully.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, I think it's a good idea to revisit the organic form intersections.
Next Steps:
I'd like you to do 2 pages of organic forms with contour ellipses, 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves, and 2 pages of organic intersections. Before each one, be sure to reread the notes/instructions and watch the associated videos to ensure that you follow the instructions to the letter, and focus on the core purpose of each exercise.
2:26 AM, Saturday March 21st 2020
here are my revisions, I still had a tough time with the organic intersections.
6:20 PM, Saturday March 21st 2020
I'm seeing improvement in most of the areas I pointed out - you're definitely trying to make the ends more spherical, and for the most part it's working, though there are now situations where you get pinching/narrowing through the midsection of your sausages, so keep an eye on that. Your contour curves are generally doing a much better job of sticking to the surface of the forms as well.
One thing that you still do need to keep at the forefront of your mind though is the degree of your contour ellipses and contour curves. They're still remaining pretty similar in width throughout. In your contour curves you do have some cases where they reverse in their curvature (which is essentially like narrowing so much that they get into a negative width, which is good), but they jump from one to the other with no intermediate steps.
I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but make sure you focus on the shifting widths/degrees in particular when doing these exercises as part of your regular warmup routine.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 3.
Color and Light by James Gurney
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.