8:04 AM, Tuesday December 22nd 2020
Hi there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.
You're making good progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, below I'll be listing some things that will hopefully help you in your future attempts at these exercises.
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In the arrows exercise there's a few things to keep an eye out for. The first is that you don't always overlap your lines as much as you should which results in your arrows appearing flat as shown here. Your lines tends to wobble as well which is a sign that you're not drawing as confidently as you could be. On top of these 2 things to improve on I'd also like you to experiment more with foreshortening, by utilizing it in both the arrow itself as well as the space between curves of the arrow you'll create more effective illusions of an arrow moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.
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You're close to keeping your organic forms with contours simple but not quite there yet. Our goal in this exercise is to create forms where both ends are the same size, and we avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. When it comes to contours your lines are looking quite stiff and showing a lack of confidence, you also attempted to redraw quite a few of them which is a habit we discourage. I'd also like you to work on shifting the degree of your contours. 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.
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In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself. This makes it difficult to create gradients with implied information which we could then use to create focal points in more complex pieces, by doing so we can prevent our viewers from being visually overwhelmed with too much detail. For more on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here, I'd also like to quickly direct you to this image which shows that when we're working with thin line like textures if we outline and fill the shadow we will create a much more dynamic texture than simply drawing lines.
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You're headed in the right direction but if you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, right now this exercise is just meant to get students to start thinking about how their forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how to define those relationships on the page, we'll be going over them more in the upcoming lessons. Your forms here are looking pretty solid but you should definitely experiment with different types of forms when doing this exercise as a warm up or in the future.
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Lastly in the organic intersections exercise your forms are a looking a bit more confident which is great but you do have a bad habit of redrawing lines which makes the overall exercise messier than it could be. I'd recommend trying push your light source to one of the top corners to have a bit of an easier time creating shadows, currently yours aren't always consistent but you did try to push them so that they cast which is good. Keep practicing this exercise to help develop your sense of 3D space as well as your understanding of light and shadow.
So normally this would be a clear pass, but I am concerned about the fact that you're submitting work that was completed over a month ago, and that did not have the chance to incorporate the feedback you've received in Lesson 1 and the box challenge. As explained in Lesson 0, you should only be submitting work you've done after receiving feedback on prerequisites to show that you're incorporating the critiques. We tend to be lenient in some ways - for example, not forcing students to redo the 250 box challenge - but Lesson 2 isn't covered by that.
Instead of expecting you to redo lesson 2, which would be silly, I am going to ask for a few pages of revisions to see your work as it is currently, and to ensure that you haven't gotten rusty in the last little while. (Not drawing as confidently in this lesson compared to your previous results is an example of what we're worried about.)
So please re-read and redo:
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2 pages of the form intersections exercise
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1 page of the organic intersections exercise
Once you've completed them reply to this critique with a link to the pages, I'll go over them and point out anything that needs to be addressed and move you on to the next lesson once you've shown you're ready.
Next Steps:
Please re-read and redo:
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2 pages of the form intersections exercise
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1 page of the organic intersections exercise