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7:58 AM, Saturday February 20th 2021
Hi there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.
You're making good progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, below I'll be listing some things that will hopefully help you in your future attempts at these exercises.
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Your arrows are off to a strong start, there are a few spots where your lines begin to wobble showing that you may not be fully comfortable with the idea of drawing confidently yet but with more mileage this will become more consistent. Something that will also improve is the consistency in the width of your arrows, there are moments where they begin to widen/narrow a bit unnaturally but again this is something I'm not overly concerned with because as long as you're mindful of the fact you want them to be consistent they should improve with mileage. No major complaints here, I'm glad to see you're experimenting with foreshortening as well, keep it up.
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Good job keeping your organic forms with contours simple, people tend to get a bit too complex in this exercise. For the most part these are looking pretty solid, the line work of your contours is definitely the weak spot, again a sign that you may not be drawing as confidently as you could be. Just remember that as long as we're drawing confidently our accuracy will improve with time, so if you need to overshoot the boundaries you've established to keep your line/ellipse smooth then do so. You're attempting to shift the degree of your contours which is great to see as well, keep experimenting with it. 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.
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Your textures are quite well done, you do a great job focusing on cast shadows rather than just the outlines and negative space. This exercise is one that most people find difficult, especially at this point in the course but you demonstrate good observation skills here so it wouldn't surprise me if you have drawn/done some form of art that requires rendering in the past (if you are a full blown beginner however great job taking your time and following the instructions). Every texture is it's own challenge so you may find some are more difficult than others. With mileage you'll start to get more comfortable recreating them, I'd say your sponge and knuckle skin are the weaker attempts. 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.
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If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, you're on the right track but 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 here are looking solid and likey they belong in a single cohesive 3D space, good work.
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Your understanding of 3D space is clearly developing which is shown in your organic intersections exercise. Your forms are starting to wrap around one another believably and you pushed your shadows so that they were cast rather than just hugging the form creating them. I just have 3 quick notes for you here, the first is again your line confidence could be better as you have some wobbling occurring here again. I'd like you to try and push your contours further so that they hook back into the form more as seen here, they currently tend to end as soon as they hit an edge. Finally I'd like you to draw through all of your forms when doing this exercise again in the future, much like how we drew through our boxes we can gain a better understanding of how these forms rest in 3D space by making sure we draw through them in their entirety.
Overall this was a very solid submission, you do have a few things to work on here and there (most notably your line/ellipse confidence issues) but I believe if you keep these issues in mind during your warm ups you'll improve with more mileage. I'll be marking your submission complete and moving you on to the next lesson.
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!
Next Steps:
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
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Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens
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.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.