Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
7:15 PM, Monday August 15th 2022
Glad to finally be done with this lesson, this took way too long lol
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
2 users agree
10:28 PM, Saturday August 27th 2022
Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 2 homework.
Organic Arrows
-Starting by the organic arrows they are drawn with a good deal of confidence, I did notice a few cases where they are pretty wobbly, but most of your marks look good. The main thing that you need to keep working on is the perspective of the ribbon, it seems that you are aware of the fact that the arrow gets wider as it moves closer to the viewer, but sometimes it bulges or contracts when it should not. One thing that you can try is to actually draw your marks slower while maintaining good confidence, this will give you a much better control of the ribbon, of course it can be challenging at first but as you gain more mileage it will get a lot easier.
-On some arrows from your first page I noticed that you are not letting their edges overlap, which results in them looking flat, you can read more about this issue on this note https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/4/overlap .
The major issue here though is that you are not aware that the negative space between the zigzagging sections of the ribbon should decrease as it moves further away, as shown here ( https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/011d064f.jpg ), this is the only thing missing for your arrows to actually look tri dimensional.
Organic Forms with Contours
-The shape of your sausages is moving in the right direction, you have done your best to keep them simple and equally sized, there is still room for improvement, so remember to stick to the recipe of two balls connected by a tube of consistent width as shown in this diagram https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/a20182ab.jpg .
-When it comes to the contour ellipses you are doing a good job, you do seem to be aware of how they change degree as they move through space, but you had a bit of trouble with the contour curves.
THe issue with the curves is that they don’t really change degree as they move through space and remain fairly consistent. Contour curves are a useful tool to describe how a form sits in 3D space but they can easily work against us by flattening our drawing, the best approach is to use the ghosting method to think about each mark’s purpose and how you are going to achieve it best, once that is done you can focus on executing that mark with confidence. This way you will avoid drawing contours that do not really add any useful information to the drawing. And also keep in mind that you don’t need to draw too many to convey the tridimensionality of a form.
Texture
-On the texture analysis I like to see that you have made a bold use of the ink to achieve a smooth transition from dense to sparse, and in general you are doing a good job, trying to rely on implicit markmaking rather than explicit..
-The dissections are moving in the right direction, I think that there were some instances where you actually relied on form shading, like the strawberry where you filled entire forms with ink. Remember to first design the shape of the shadow shape, think about how it wraps around the surface it falls on and also think about the form casting it. And lastly I want to quickly redirect you to this diagram https://imgur.com/oAx2pRD which shows that when we are working with thin like line textures it is better to first outline the shadow shape and then fill it rather than simply drawing lines, this will help us to achieve a more dynamic result.
Form intersections
-Moving on to the form intersections you are doing great, you have kept the foreshortening shallow and your forms are not too different when it comes to size, which makes it look like theyre actually sharing the same 3D space. If you feel like you don’t fully grasp them yet don't worry as we will be revisiting this exercise in future lessons
Organic Intersections
-Finishing with the organic intersections there are some issues with this exercise.
First, I like to see that you have kept the sausages simple, but avoid the technique where you draw a big initial sausage first and then add a bunch of smaller ones on top of it, try to keep them equally sized. Once you are doing that, you can focus on thinking about how these forms lump and bend under the force of gravity, you can try to think about them as if they were balloons filled with water.
The cast shadows also need some work, right now they seem to be hugging the form casting them, so try to push them further and give them a nice curve, you can take a look at these notes to better understand this point. https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/9/shadows
Okayyyy, so that’s all I wanted to address, I will assign you some revsions so you can tackle some of the issues I have raised here. Good luck.
Next Steps:
Please do the following
-1 page of organic arrows.
-1 page of organic forms with contour curves
-2 pages of organic Intersections
9:44 PM, Tuesday September 27th 2022
Sorry these revisions are a month late, I had to take a break from drawing due to issues with my shoulders.
5:57 PM, Wednesday September 28th 2022
Don't worry, I am glad to see you again.
-Starting with the organic arrows it seems that you did follow my advice, and you are handling the foreshortening of the arrow much better in both the width of the ribbon and the negative space between the zigzagging parts.
-On the organic forms, your sausages are turning out much better and their shapes are more consistent, it also seems that you are being much more deliberate when it comes to adding the curves. There’s only one thing I want to call out and it’s that I can see that you are drawing a full ellipse on the front, keep in mind that this ellipse is fully visible because it’s the closest to us then as the sausage starts to moves backwards the curves should increase in degree rather than decrease. This diagram may help to make things more clear https://imgur.io/CfKiLtt .
-And finishing with the organic intersections, I think you will need to keep working on this on ethe most. You are still employing the technique where you lay down a big initial sausage and then add a bunch of smaller ones on top of it. You want to do your best to keep all of the individual sausages roughly the same size, the differences in size does really help to undermine the solidity of the entire set.
There is certainly some improvement in the cast shadows and you are pushing them further, so just keep working on this exercises a bit more, I am fully confident that you know what you should be aiming for right now, but just in case I'll link you to this example https://i.imgur.com/RhgBLdU.jpeg of a student's work. You can see that the difference in size is not too great and there’s a focus on laying down the sausages completely perpendicular to each other.
For now I’ll let you move on since you will have plenty of opportunities to work on these exercises in the next lessons, good luck!!
Next Steps:
Lesson 3
5:23 PM, Thursday September 29th 2022
Ah ok, I was definitely overcomplicating the organic intersections. Thank you for the critique!
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Sakura Pigma Microns
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.