8:30 PM, Thursday September 10th 2020
Starting with your arrows, you've got them flowing pretty nicely, although one thing to keep in mind is that right now you've got them primarily moving across the surface of the page. As these arrows are to exist in three dimensions, the gaps between the zigzagging sections are subject to perspective and foreshortening, so they should be getting tighter as we look farther back in space. You should also play with foreshortening on the ribbon as a whole, exaggerating how the scale changes as it gets closer or farther away.
Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you're definitely striving to stick to simple sausage forms as mentioned in the instructions, which is good, although there is a bit of hesitation in your execution which causes your lines to waver. While it's not that big of a deal on the outer sausage, your contour ellipses definitely suffer more from this. Remember that when executing these ellipses, you should be leveraging the ghosting method to help you execute your marks with greater confidence (and without hesitation), while also drawing from your shoulder to ensure that your marks are consistent and smooth. The flow of your ellipses is always the first priority - accuracy is important, but it is secondary.
I can see that in your organic forms with contour curves, they're a bit hesitant as well, so keep an eye on that. Also, you are showing an understanding of how the contour curves' degrees shift wider/narrower in the bottom right one, but you don't really apply this at all in any of your other attempts (contour ellipses or contour curves). This is something that should impact how you draw the contour lines in general.
Lastly, one thing from the exercise you're missing is the addition of contour ellipses on the tips of the forms where they're actually oriented to the viewer. You did this once in that bottom right example, but in this case the contour curves suggest that the tip is actually pointed away from the viewer. Please consult these notes to better understand how those contour ellipses at the tips actually work.
Looking at your texture analyses, there are definitely aspects of this exercise that are moving in the right direction. You specifically did a great job with the crumpled paper texture, where you clearly focused entirely on purposely designed shadow shapes, and used them to control the density of the texture as you moved from left to right.
That said, there is a pretty big jump from what you did there to the other two rows. For the leaf veins, you opted to fill the veins in, instead of treating them as 3D forms (which they are - tubes running along the surface of the leaves) and capturing the shadows they'd cast. Instead you filled in the veins themselves, which is not in line with the notes in the texture section of this lesson. In your third row, the stem texture was somewhat in the right direction, albeit vastly oversimplified. I think taking more time to observe your reference images while working on that gradient would have helped.
Lastly, you missed an important instruction for this exercise - you were to fill in a solid bar of black along the left side of the gradient. This is so you'd be forced to take your texture to its fullest, densest extent, and smoothly transition from there all the way to solid white. Please take more care in the future to read the instructions and follow them to the letter.
Throughout your work on the dissections, I think you continue to show considerable improvement. Not only are you demonstrating really solid observational skills and more careful study of your references, you're actually avoiding a lot of common pitfalls (like relying strictly on outlining your textural forms), and are leveraging really nice density control in textures like the raspberry and the spruce bark.
Continuing onto the form intersections, the first thing that jumps out at me here is that you're definitely not using the ghosting method as introduced back in lesson 1. I'm not seeing the tell-tale little points (which often get engulfed by lines, but which still usually leave subtle signs), and more importantly, the linework itself is quite hesitant resulting in shaky strokes. The ghosting method exists primarily for one purpose - to allow us to execute our marks with confidence, free from hesitation, keeping them smooth. Secondary to that it also helps us reinforce our control and accuracy, but the confidence and smooth execution is the true core of the technique. It should be used for each and every line you draw throughout this course.
Looking back at your box challenge work, you are obviously capable of drawing your forms well, with solid, confident linework, but you made the choice not to take as much care for your work here. This also resulted in your boxes being skewed in places - not terrible, but very obviously not the best you're capable of. I can also see that you neglected to construct your cylinders around a central minor axis line, as demonstrated in this step of the instructions (along the right side of the diagram). Lastly, I am quite pleased to see that you made ample attempts at the form intersections themselves. While these are not the primary focus of the exercise, they are intended to serve as a solid first introduction to thinking about how our forms interact with one another in 3D space. At this stage I'm not concerned with whether or not they're correct (although yours appear to be coming along great) - just planting a seed that will develop as we continue to explore this concept throughout the rest of the course.
Now, I think it's very likely that you put less effort and time into the construction of the forms themselves (the focus of the exercise) so you could focus on the part that was more difficult. That brings us around to the importance of following the instructions as they're written.
I do have one suggestion to make for the intersection lines themselves: I prefer it when students use the same pen to draw the intersection lines as they did for constructing the forms, rather than reaching for a different colour. The benefit is that this establishes those intersection lines as part of the structure itself - that those relationships are defined not as something separate or extra, but as a part of the resulting construction.
Lastly, your organic intersections are looking pretty good. You're doing a good job of establishing how the forms interact with one another as 3D forms, and of establishing an illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another.
As a whole you have done a good job, but I am firm in my belief that certain aspects of your work here are not necessarily your best. In order to allow you to demonstrate your understanding of some of the issues I've raised, I'm going to assign some additional pages below.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses
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1 page of organic forms with contour curves
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3 pages of form intersections
Be sure to reread the instructions for each exercise in full before attempting it, and to take your time with every aspect of it. Do not rush.