Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
9:31 AM, Friday June 5th 2020
Huh, I had brake on drawing. Now I just forced myself to continue doing homework ^^
Starting with your arrows, these are flowing very nicely through all three dimensions of space. I'm also seeing a strong sense of depth that comes from compressing both the positive space (the ribbon and its width, which narrows as we look farther away) and the spaces between the zigzagging sections (the negative space).
Moving onto your organic forms with contour ellipses, you're doing a good job of keeping your sausage forms "simple" (as prescribed in the instructions). I do feel that your ellipses and contour curves could stand to take a little more time through the planning and preparation phases of the ghosting method before executing them in order to improve on their general accuracy, keeping them snug between the edges of the sausage forms, etc. but they are definitely being drawn very confidently, and are maintaining an even shape.
One thing you need to keep an eye on however is the degree of your contour lines. You're doing a good job in the contour curves, but I feel that the degree of your contour ellipses tends to be too consistent, instead of shifting naturally along the length of the form as shown here.
Your work in the texture exercises - both the texture analyses and dissections - is relaly quite well done. You're doing a good job of relying less and less on explicit outlines to define your textural forms, and more and more on strong shadow shapes. You're also demonstrating a capacity for controlling the density of your textures from left to right, and are showing strong observational skills overall. You especially knock it out of the park with your dissections. Really, really well done.
Moving onto the form intersections, you've doing a good job in drawing these forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space. The intersections themselves are a good start - though as is expected, there is certainly room for growth here. This is entirely normal, as this aspect of the exercise is all about introducing students to thinking about how their forms relate to one another. It's not something we expect prior experience with, and we will continue to explore these principles further throughout the entirety of this course. As it stands, you're off to an excellent start.
Lastly, your organic intersections do a good job of establishing how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, rather than just as flar shapes on a page. You're also capturing a sense of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another. One thing you will want to continue to think about as you move forwards however is how cast shadows are projected onto underlying surfaces, and how they actually wrap around those surfaces. You're getting there, but I think more practice in applying them to your drawings will yield better results.
All in all, really well done. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 3.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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