Phew this was way, way harder than I anticipated. I struggled so much with all the different exercises. In particular the intersections, texture study and dissection exercise. For the intersections I mistakenly assumed I needed to draw slowly to get the intersections right. In hindsight I should have drawn those just like I do with everything else.
Hey there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.
You're making a lot of progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, below I'll be listing a few things that you can work on to hopefully improve your results when you attempt these exercises again.
Your arrows are off to a good start, only have 2 quick suggestions here. The first being that sometimes your arrows bulge or pinch in terms of width, remember that we want to keep them flowing as smoothly as they can and if they grow larger it should be consistent growth. The second being I'd recommend you experiment with foreshortening the space between curves of the arrow more, as seen here if we utilize foreshortening here as well we can really sell the illusion of an arrow moving through 3D space.
A few of your organic forms with contours get a bit too complex, our goal is too keep both ends of the form roughly the same size and to avoid pinching, bloating, or stretching along it's length as discussed here. I'm glad to see you're trying to shift the degree of your contours, but don't be afraid of pushing them further when necessary. 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.\
Your textures are looking mostly well done, there are a few spots wher you focus more on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows but textures like your Broccoli attempt show that you are getting the idea down just need more mileage. By focusing on cast shadows we have an easier time creating gradients which are quite helpful when we want to create focal points and prevent the viewer from being overwhelmed by too much visual information.
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, good work.
The forms in your organic intersections could be simplified a bit more but these are good attempts. There are some spots where you could wrap your forms better, but again we don't expect you to nail it the first try, you're understanding of 3D space is clearly growing, great job. One thing that does stand out is your shadows could be pushed a bit further in some spots, they're often quite small and don't always feel like they're being cast in a believable way.
Overall this was a really solid attempt, you have some things you can work on but I'm sure you'll get the hang of these concepts with more mileage. With all of that said I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to the next lesson.
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.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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