Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

4:29 AM, Thursday February 27th 2020

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Post with 41 views. Lesson 2

Hello Uncomfortable and TAs! Submitting my lesson 2 work for review, looking forward to your feedback. Thanks so much!

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9:59 PM, Thursday February 27th 2020

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a good job of capturing the fluidity with which they flow through space. I am noticing however that while you're applying perspective to the positive space - that is, the width of the arrow's ribbon, you're not quite applying it to the negative space - the spacing between the zigzagging sections, which ought to compress as we look farther and farther back. This will help you convey the full depth of the scene more effectively.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you're doing a great job of sticking to 'simple' sausages (two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width). When it comes to the contour ellipses and curves however, I'm noticing that in most cases (aside from a few of the ellipses) you're keeping the degree of the contour lines pretty consistent. Instead, they should be shifting naturally along the length of a given sausage, as each one defines a circular cross-section. As we move along the length of the form, the orientation of that cross-section changes relative to that of the viewer, which means that it needs to be drawn either wider or narrower.

You're making some good progress with your texture analyses, though I do think that you're still focusing more on line and outline than you ought to. In doing so, you're attempting to draw each textural form directly, defining its boundaries, instead of drawing them in an implicit manner (as explained here) by capturing the shadows they cast on their surroundings. Always remember that the marks we draw here are shadows being cast by those textural forms, not actual lines that are present on the subject.

Additionally, in the pine cone texture you ended up relying a lot on hatching lines to capture the shading on your textural forms. As explained here, this is not what we want to be doing in this exercise - any time we catch ourselves drawing generic hatching lines, we can assume that we're simply shading for shading's own sake. This whole exercise is focused around developing alternatives to hatching that allow us to transition from dark to light while conveying additional information about the surface quality of the object.

You're continuing to make progress throughout your dissections, working more and more with cast shadows (though you do still define outlines in a lot of places, examples like the orange skin on the second page are showing a move in the right direction.

Throughout the form intersections, you're doing a pretty good job of capturing the forms such that they feel consistent within the same space, and you're showing a great start with the intersections themselves (which are merely introduced in this exercise, and further developed throughout the entirety of the Drawabox course). One thing I did notice however is that you missed the instruction that discourages the use of forms that are stretched in any one dimension, instead focusing on those that are more equilateral (roughly the same size in all three dimensions). I see a number of longer cylinders throughout, and these bring more foreshortening into the mix which can make an already challenging exercise more difficult.

Finally, your organic intersections are a good start, though they definitely come off somewhat rigid. You are indeed doing a good job of capturing how these are three dimensional forms in a 3D world, not just flat shapes pasted on top of one another on the page, but in the future try and think more about how the sausage forms would wrap around one another where their weight is not being supported. At the moment, yours seem stiff enough to be able to hold up their own weight, even when there's nothing immediately beneath them.

All in all, you're doing a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
2:50 AM, Friday February 28th 2020

Thanks so much for the feedback!

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