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8:40 PM, Monday September 21st 2020
Starting with your arrows, you've done a pretty great job here - they're feeling confident and fluid in how they move through space. The only thing I want you to keep an eye on is that in some cases you apply foreshortening pretty well to the negative space between the zigzagging sections as we look farther back, but in others the spacing changes a lot more erratically. While this isn't necessarily incorrect - perhaps the physical arrow isn't maintaining the same spacing as it moves back and forth, that is something to keep in mind. The viewer will always expect such changes to be consistent and repeating unless it's made really obvious that they're not - which arguably you do make pretty obvious, but again. Just something for you to keep in mind.
Continuing onto the organic forms with contour ellipses, these are for the most part quite well done, with one key issue - you're not sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as explained here in the instructions. This is important because sticking to two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width is critical to making those forms feel as solid as possible, which will be important when we use them as the basic components to more complex constructions later on.
Jumping onto your texture analyses, I'm very pleased to see your bold, confident use of clear shadow shapes, and that you're thinking about how to leverage them to control that gradient as it moves from left to right. I do however want to call out that for your second row, the scales texture, when it starts to get more sparse the areas where you're having your shadows linger longer are incorrect. As explained in these notes (specifically at the bottom of the diagram, where it deals with this exact context), shadows caught where multiple forms meet are going to stick around longer, because those areas are harder for light to penetrate. The areas further out in the open - which is where you opted to have the lines stick around - are far more accessible to the light, and would be blasted away first.
Continuing onto your dissections, I think you do ap retty great job of continuing to develop your observational skills, and your approach to drawing these textures. There are admittedly some places where you fall into the trap of outlining things too much instead of strictly relying only on shadow shapes, but there are others where you're much more focused on just capturing the shadows these forms will cast, instead of outlining them explicitly. For the tortoise texture on the second page, remember that drawing the actual shading on those forms counts as drawing the forms explicitly - we only want to worry about cast shadows. Leave the form shading out entirely.
Moving onto your form intersections, you've done a great job of drawing each of these forms with clear, concise linework, and that has helped you to capture them with a strong sense of solidity, and cohesion as they exist together in the same space. You've also got a good start on the intersections themselves. This is a concept we're merely introducing at this point - it's a tricky one, and it's meant to be - we're not too concerned with whether or not the intersections are correct here (although many of yours are), just that students are making the attempt so they can continue thinking about these spatial relationships and how to define them as we continue to explore the matter throughout the rest of this course. As it stands, you're doing very well.
Lastly, your organic intersections are similarly very well done. You're doing a great job of establishing how the forms relate to one another in 3D space, rather than as flat shapes on a flat page, and you've established a strong illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another.
All in all, your work here is very well done. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 3.
The Art of Brom
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.