Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
6:44 PM, Tuesday July 7th 2020
Hello. Here's my Lesson 2 submission.
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3:33 AM, Wednesday July 8th 2020
Starting with your arrows, you're doing a great job of getting them to flow smoothly and confidently through space, and are also doing a great job of conveying a sense of depth within the scene through the application of perspective to both positive and negative space.
Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you're definitely striving to stick to simple sausage forms, and for the most part you're doing pretty well. Do however keep an eye on the ends of your sausages - some of them come out a little stretched rather than circular, often on just one side of the sausage. The contour lines themselves were drawn well - you did a great job of drawing them confidently, so as to keep them smooth and evenly shaped. Another thing to keep an eye on however is the degree of your contour lines, as right now they're being kept really consistent throughout the length of your sausage forms. 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.
Skipping onto the texture analyses, your first two rows are coming along great. You're demonstrating a clear focus on the shadow shapes, designing them purposefully and controlling the weight of those shadows to shift seamlessly from dense to sparse areas in your texture. Your last one was clearly a bit of an experiment gone awry, where you got caught up more in arranging the feathers as you'd find them in a wing. The key here is to focus on one area of feathers where they're packed in at a certain density, and then spreading that across the whole of your texture. We control the density of our textures not by changing the nature of what's being captured, but rather by changing how we approach drawing it. Making shadows deeper, or blasting them away with direct light, either way the texture itself doesn't change.
You continue largely doing a great job as you explore different textures throughout the dissections, and I'm pleased to see that you're still sticking to the use of shadow shapes rather than outlining your textural forms entirely.
Jumping ahead to the form intersections, you're knocking it out of the park here. Your forms feel cohesive and consistent within the same space, and you've got an excellent start on the intersections themselves. While these are meant to be an introduction to thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how that can be defined with contour lines, you're showing a well developed grasp of how that all works. We of course will continue working at this throughout the rest of the course, but you're definitely already at an advantage here.
Lastly, your organic intersections are solid. They capture clearly how the forms interact in 3D space, rather than as flat shapes on a flat page, and they imply a clear illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another.
All in all, great stuff. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 3.
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