Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

11:51 AM, Thursday December 8th 2022

Lesson 2 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/oQb9YhV.jpg

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I apologize for not writing my observations in the texture analysis in English. For completeness, here are the same comments translated in English: https://pastebin.com/Kh89CgH6. Thank you in advance to anyone who has some time to spare for a critique.

2 users agree
10:56 AM, Friday December 9th 2022

Hey, Doc! Perhaps you recognize me, but anyhow, I'm Keisari and I'll be the one responsible for critiquing your Lesson 2 submission today. Before we proceed, congratulations on going through Lesson 2!

Thinking in 3D

Your Organic Arrows look good. You're drawing confidently, making correct use of line weight and hatching, and making good use of space. Some of them are sloppy, but that'll improve with practice. One thing I'd like to suggest, though, is that you push their foreshortening further and be more adventurous exploring 3D space -- try and make them approach or get distanced from the viewer at more extreme rates; let arrow segments overlap other segments of the same arrow; vary the spacing between and size of each fold more... Experiment and exaggerate. That will further your understanding of 3D space.

Your Organic Forms also look great and I don't have much to say about them, although it seems you should work on the confidence of your ellipses.

Texture and Detail

Overall, your textures are fantastic and I struggled to find anything to critique. Something I noticed in your Texture Analysis exercise is that the black bars are pretty clearly visible, so you should try and push the shadows more in order to achieve a more seamless transition. On your Dissections, I noticed you seem to do form shading on a couple textures, such as this one and this one. As tempting as it might be, you should not fill in anything but cast shadows, be it form shading, color variation or anything else, even if it's difficult to convey a texture that way. Generally, if you can't properly convey a texture with only cast shadows, you should probably stay away from it in Drawabox's approach.

Construction

For your Form Intersections exercise, you did well abiding to the main goal of doing consistent and shallow foreshortening, albeit there are some cases where you did more extreme foreshortening, mainly in your box-only page, but I presume that to be unintentional. Your forms are very well constructed, you're applying hatching correctly and although it's secondary, you also did great on your intersections. Even then, if you wish to understand them further, I'd recommend checking out the Forms Intersection First Aid Pack and this website, if you haven't already.

Your Organic Intersections also look pretty good -- they're simple, drawn through, confident and you did very well regarding their contour lines and making them stable, capturing their water baloon properties, although I suggest you push their physics a bit further in that regard -- for example, this sausage should sag into the crevices inbetween the sausages below it, although I understand it can be difficult to get that right markmaking-wise.

Next Steps:

Move on to Lesson 3!

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
11:58 PM, Friday December 9th 2022

Thank you for taking some of your time to critique my submission, I really appreciate! I admit that in the dissections exercise I fell back on some textures that are hard to convey with cast shadows only because I was running out of ideas for textures. I will try to avoid it in the future for things like the texture challenge (and also try to avoid making the black bar too thick as you observed). I also agree with you on your point on the sagging, I was indeed a bit afraid of making an overtly complicated shape but it does indeed look a bit too much rigid, I will try to better capture the weight effects in the future. I want to thank you once again, and I'm excited to move on to lesson 3!

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I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.

Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.

Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.

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