Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
1:45 PM, Wednesday December 9th 2020
Hello!
Here's Lesson 2
Best regards
Hi there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.
You're making good progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, I'll be listing some things below for you to work on that will hopefully help you in your future attempts at these exercises.
Right away your arrows exercise shows the start of a pattern throughout your submission, you get really complicated really quickly. While it's great to experiment there is also a lot of benefit in keeping things simple and building up a strong foundation which helps when you do go to more complicated tasks. I don't mean to discourage you from experimenting, I do think it's a matter of balance though. Some of your arrows flow very unnaturally because you aren't giving yourself room to utilize foreshortening in the space between curves of an arrow, this is partly because you don't give yourself any places to utilize it, so I'd suggest doing more simple S shaped arrows, for more info on foreshortening check here. You also don't give yourself much room to practice hatching or using line weight here, these are useful tools that will benefit from experimenting, just try and keep it tidy as some of your hatching lines are quite messy and lacking confidence.
In the organic forms with contours exercises it's a bit of the same story, you over complicate your forms quite a bit. Our goal in this exercise is to create forms where both ends are the same size and to avoid pinching, bloating, or stretching along length of the form as described here. There are some spots where your lines wobble or you attempt to redraw lines, remember to give yourself enough time to ghost properly and then execute your line confidently, once it's down on the page it's on the page and you to work with it, redrawing is a bad habit we don't want to build. I'd like you to experiment with trying to shift the degree of your contours more in the future as well, in some spots you utilize the idea and in others you don't. 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.
In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself. This makes it difficult to create gradients with implied information which we could then use to create focal points in more complex pieces, by doing so we can prevent our viewers from being visually overwhelmed with too much detail. For more on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here, I'd also like to quickly direct you to this image which shows that when we're working with thin line like textures if we outline and fill the shadow we will create a much more dynamic texture than simply drawing lines.
If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, right now this exercise is just meant to get students to start thinking about how their forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how to define those relationships on the page, we'll be going over them more in the upcoming lessons. Overall your forms are looking solid here and like they're in a cohesive space, just watch your hatching as it gets a bit messy.
Lastly in the organic intersections exercise you show that your sense of 3D space is growing which is great, just have to remember to keep things simple. By keeping it simple you'll not only benefit your understanding of 3D space but also avoid losing solidity in some of your forms, you'll also have a helpful tool to experiment with light and shadow.
Overall this was a solid submission, you do have errors and things to work on but they're mostly caused by you going too complex too quickly. I believe you're capable of improving your results with some more mileage and simplification so I'll be marking your submission complete with the hope that in you'll try to follow the directions a bit more closely in the future.
Keep doing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3.
Next Steps:
Do previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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