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.

• In the arrows exercise you're off to a good start, your lines and arrows are flowing confidently for the most part. I do have two things I'd like you to work on however, the first is something I notice you do across all your exercises which is that you tend to have a lot of blank space on your page left over and tend to draw fairly small. Remember that for a lot of these concepts what will help you truly understand them is mileage and drawing large enough to see all your mistakes clearly, by no means does this mean grind but you can definitely make better use of your pages and it'll help you in the long run. I'd also like you to work on your foreshortening, the size of your arrows changes very suddenly and you don't always utilize it as much as you could in the negative space between your arrow's curves. As you can see here foreshortening helps us create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space.

• Your organic forms with contours get a bit too complex. Our goal in this exercise is to create forms where both ends are the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. As for your contours I'd like you to push your curves more and also 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.

• In the texture exercises (more so in the dissections, you're getting closer in the analysis) 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.

• If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, you're on the right track but 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 and like they belong in a single cohesive space which is great, one thing I notice is you don't always draw through your ellipses which is something you should be doing.

• Your organic intersections will benefit from improving your forms with the advice mentioned above. There are a few other things you can work on that I'll mention quickly. The ellipse on the end of your forms should be larger and the degree should shift with the others, and I'd like you to draw through all of your forms. Like when we were drawing boxes we can build up a stronger understanding of how these forms rest in 3D space by drawing through them, currently they're mostly just resting on one another rather than wrapping around each other. The majority of your shadows could be pushed further as well, they often hug the form creating them instead of being cast on to the form/ground below. I'd suggest pushing your light source to the top left or right corner as it's easier than working with a source that is directly above the pile of forms.

This is a good start but I won't be moving you on just yet, I'd like to make sure you understand a few concepts here before moving you on, seeing as how each lesson builds upon each other if you struggle with a current exercise it may make later ones more difficult.

With that said I'd like you to re-read and re-submit:

• 1 page of the organic forms with contours exercise.

• 1 page of the organic intersections exercise.

Once you've completed these pages reply to this critique, I'll go over them and address anything that needs to be worked on and move you on to the next lesson once you've shown you're ready.

Take your time, really think of how these forms exist in 3D and draw confidently. I know you can do this and look forward to seeing your work.