Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

5:01 PM, Wednesday July 1st 2020

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6:04 PM, Wednesday July 1st 2020

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a great job of getting them to flow smoothly through space. One thing you can do to keep improving these is to exaggerate how the spacing between the zigzagging sections compresses as they move away from the viewer. This will help give a greater sense of depth to how the arrows move through space.

Moving onto the organic forms with contour lines, your sausage forms are generally doing a pretty good job of matching the characteristics of simple sausage forms mentioned in the instructions. You do however have a tendency to stretch out one of the ends (rather than making it circular/spherical), so keep an eye on that. Your contour lines themselves are generally coming along fairly well. The contour ellipses are drawn confidently and smoothly, achieving nice even shapes. The contour curves are a bit more stiff at times, but I'm glad to see that you're overshooting them to wrap around the rounded surface of the form.

The only other issue is that the degree of your contour lines tend to be very consistent throughout the length of the form, which isn't actually correct. 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.

Looking at your texture analysis work, you've really knocked this out of the mark. You're clearly focusing on the shadow shapes of your textures, and are demonstrating exceptional observational skills and attention to detail, while continuing to avoid any use of outlines to define your textural forms. Lastly, you've also achieved the full gradient transitions from dark to light, and perfectly blend that solid area of black and the solid area of white on either end. Very well done.

You continue to apply this just as well throughout your dissections. Sometimes students will slip back into outlining their textural forms in certain places here, but you hold true to focusing on cast shadow shapes only. You've also experimented with a number of different textures, and approached each with a custom approach specific to that particular texture. Lastly, you're doing a pretty good job of wrapping these textures around the forms as well. Very well done.

Moving onto your form intersections, you've done a pretty great job of drawing these forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space. You've also got an excellent start to experimenting with your intersections - this is something we don't expect students to handle all that well just yet, instead choosing to throw them into the deep end of the pool as an introductory experience, before we continue on to explore the challenges involved in defining how those forms relate to one another in 3D space (which we'll be doing throughout this course). You're showing an already strong grasp of how the forms relate to one another though, which is excellent.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along pretty well - you're establishing how those forms interact with one another in 3D space rather than as flat shapes stacked on a page. You're also doing a pretty good job of creating an illusion of gravity, although I think you're a bit prone to letting your sausage forms actually cut into one another, which somewhat undermines each one's impression of solidity. While these forms are flexible, you should still treat them as though they can't quite cut into one another in this manner. Think of them like a pile of water balloons - they'll warp around those beneath them, slumping and sagging to either side, but they won't break their surfaces.

So! All in all, your work here is really well done. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the good work.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:30 PM, Wednesday July 1st 2020

Thanks Uncomfortable! This is really helpful and encouraging, and, as always, your attention to detail and thorough feedback is remarkable. I'm looking forward to jumping into lesson 3.

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Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.

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