Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

5:05 PM, Tuesday June 30th 2020

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Thank you for reviewing! I'm looking forward for some feedback.

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6:45 PM, Tuesday June 30th 2020

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a great job of drawing these such that they flow smoothly and fluidly through space. The only thing I'm a little concerned about though is that you're attempting to reinforce the entirety of your lines with line weight. Line weight should only be employed where you want to clarify which line is in front of which. Instead of going back over the whole thing, focus it only where it is most useful, and get used to blending it back into the existing stroke.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, it's clear that you're trying to stick to simple sausage forms as discussed in the instructions. You do a decent job of this, although you do have a few places where the ends of your sausage forms get stretched out (rather than remaining circular/spherical), and also a couple where the ends of those sausage forms end up being of different sizes. Just something to keep in mind as you continue moving forwards.

The contour lines themselves are being drawn fairly well. The ellipses are smooth and confident, and the contour curves wrap around the forms believably. You're also showing an awareness of how the degree of your contour lines ought to shift narrower or wider as you slide along a given form.

Your work on your texture analyses is coming along great. You're clearly focusing on how to work purely with cast shadows and to rely less and less on outlining your textural forms. You're also demonstrating strong observational skills. Just one minor point I wanted to mention - on the first texture (the rock texture), you do a great job of blending that black bar along the left side to the point that it's unclear where it stops and the texture ends. That's exactly what we want. The other two textures don't quite have this, and have a much more obvious break where you jump from the black bar to the texture.

Moving onto your dissections, you're continuing to explore different kinds of textures quite well. Just one thing - don't use any kind of hatching in your textures. The whole shadow-shape focus is about creating a pattern that alternates between dark and light specifically to provide us with a more useful alternative to hatching which actually conveys information about the object's surface. So, incorporating hatching here defeats the purpose. You only did it in a couple places (dragonfruit, stone, etc), but it's definitely something you shouldn't use in this exercise (or in drawabox at all).

You've done a great job of drawing your form intersections such that the forms feel cohesive and consistent within the same space. You've also got a great start on the intersections themselves. The intersections are intended to serve as an opportunity to expose students to the idea of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how we can define those intersections. Because it's an introduction, it's fully expected that students won't be getting things down perfectly, and that many students will struggle a great deal altogether. All of that's fine - this is something we'll continue exploring throughout the next lessons, and you're definitely off to a great start.

I have just one small thing to reiterate here - like what I mentioned in regards to your organic arrows, you have a habit of trying to reinforce the line weight of all your lines in their entirety. Instead, draw those initial lines confidently (you appear to have tried to keep them faint in a lot of cases), and then only add line weight to clarify specific overlaps between forms. Don't add line weight to the entirety of lines, and definitely don't go back over lines over and over without thinking about it, as this is a common, but bad habit to develop.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along decently., You're establishing how those forms interact with one another in 3D space, and capturing a believable illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another. The sausage forms themselves aren't the greatest though - you really want to push the idea that these forms are two equally sized spheres connected by tubes of consistent width. Avoid having sections that swell out, ends that are of different sizes, or ends that get more stretched rather than remaining properly spherical. Fortunately this is something we'll continue working on quite a bit as we move forwards as well, but certainly be sure to focus more of your warmups on these as well.

All in all, your work here is quite well done. There are things to keep in mind, but you're well on your way. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:40 PM, Tuesday June 30th 2020

Thank you for a super quick reply and great feedback. I will keep it in mind moving into lesson 3.

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