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9:00 PM, Saturday June 13th 2020
Starting with your arrows, these are flowing quite nicely through space. Don't forget though that as you apply perspective to the positive space of your arrow (the width of the ribbon which gets narrower as it moves away from the viewer), you also need to be applying perspective to the negative space - that is, the distances between the zigzagging sections, which should get tighter as we look farther back.
Your work on the organic forms with contour lines are really well done. You've done a great job of sticking to simple sausage forms, you're drawing your contour ellipses and curves with a confident, persistent pace so as to maintain smooth, even shapes, you're keeping those contour lines snug between the edges of the silhouette of the form, and lastly, you're demonstrating a good grasp of how the degree of your contour lines shifts narrower/wider as you slide along the length of the form. The only thing I want to emphasize has to do with this last point. You're showing that you understand most of how this works, but do remember that as a general rule of thumb, if the form in question were perfectly straight, then the end closer to the viewer would have contour lines that are narrower, and the end farther away would be wider (as shown here in regards to cylinders). You appear to have this a bit backwards in some of your organic forms with contour curves.
Moving onto your texture analyses, you've got a good start. You're clearly making an effort to work more with clear shadow shapes rather than outlining the textural forms present along the surface of your objects. You're also demonstrating a good deal of attention to detail. The primary issue I'm seeing however is that the filled shapes you're drawing basically are focused on filling the gaps, or the "negative space" between your textural forms. This is technically not correct.
In most cases, the shadow shapes you draw each have to have a specific relationship with the form that is actually casting them. This doesn't simply mean filling the cracks between them, but rather to think about them in terms of being chunks of form which cast shadows onto the sides of their neighbouring chunks. This would usually fill most of the cracks, but you'd end up having visible side-faces to neighbouring chunks that actually show how the texture itself is three dimensional.
Continuing into the dissections, the same principles stand - good attention to detail, and a definite focus on shadow shapes in most cases. I did notice however that when you deal with textures that have individual, distinct textural forms (like your octopus' suckers, or your raspberry's big ball-forms) you revert to outlining those forms instead of jumping right into cast shadow shapes. In doing so, you get more limited in how you can actually transition from high density to low density areas of texture.
For both of these exercises, I have one recommendation. Instead of allowing yourself to draw things in line (where the start and end point of a stroke are different), force yourself to draw your marks in two steps. First, outline the shape itself you mean to draw, then fill it in, as shown here. This will force you to think explicitly in terms of shapes and not in terms of lines.
Moving onto your form intersections, your work here is largely well done. You're doing a good job of drawing the forms such that they feel consistent and cohesive in the same space. When it comes to the intersections themselves, these are a great start. They're not all perfect, but being that this is just a first introduction to the concept of defining spatial relationships between forms, they are not expected to be. This is a concept we'll continue to explore throughout the rest of this course as we develop your understanding of how the objects you're drawing exist in 3D space, rather than just as flat shapes on a page.
Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along quite well. You've defined how they interact with one another in 3D space instead of as flat shapes stacked on a page, and you're capturing the illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another. Just one thing to keep in mind in the future - try and avoid making forms too limp and over-eager to conform to all the bumps beneath them. Looking at your last page, I'm specifically talking about the top-most form, which kind of behaves like a deflated tire, just filling all the gaps beneath it. The other forms feel much more solid, and while they still sag and hang over the forms beneath them, they maintain a stronger sense of volume. More like a filled water balloon, or a physical meat sausage.
So! All in all, very nice work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 3.
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