Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
9:00 AM, Saturday February 15th 2020
I finally redid lesson 2. I forgot how long this lesson took.
Might have taken a while, but overall you did a pretty solid job of it. There's only a couple things I want to point out, for the most part this lesson as done very well.
Starting with your arrows, these are solid. You're doing a great job of capturing the depth of the space on that first page, though I did notice that on the one at the end of the album, you're more hesitant to allow the spacing between the zigzagging sections to compress enough that the farther sections start to overlap. You do this more correctly towards the upper-right of this page, but overall it's an important thing to keep in mind. Also worth mentioning, you did leave a fair bit of blank space on both those pages (between 4 arrows on each page), but ultimately how much you choose to fill each page is up to you.
Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking pretty good, with two thins to keep an eye on:
You're hesitant when you draw the ellipses, which results in them coming out a little shaky and uneven. Remember that the ghosting method is intended to be used for each and every mark you put down without exception - this is so you execute the marks with confidence, rather than worrying about whether or not they'll be accurate. We worry about accuracy during the planning and preparation phases.
Also, I noticed that your ellipses' alignments were a little off when your sausage forms turned in space, so keep an eye on that as well.
For your contour curves, you seem not to have followed the instructions as you should have. You didn't draw the central minor axis line (around which the contour curves should be aligned, since they are the exact same as the contour ellipses, just part of them is hidden on the opposite side of the form). You appear to have added a length-wise contour line instead. Make more of a point of following the instructions to the letter in the future, and don't rely on your memory.
I can definitely see that in your texture analysis exercise, you're pushing yourself pretty hard to achieve those gradient transitions from dark to light, and you're definitely not afraid to be bold with your use of solid blacks. One thing I am noticing though is that you're leveraging a great deal of form shading rather than cast shadows - this is something I address in the newly rewritten lesson 2 material. Texture itself is all made up of cast shadows - that is, what we get when one bit of form blocks the light source from reaching another. It's easy for students to confuse it with form shading (where the surface of a given form gets lighter or darker depending on its orientation relative to the light source), but they are entirely separate things. Always focus on capturing cast shadows rather than form shading when capturing texture. I recommend that you take a look at the videos on these topics in the lesson page linked above, which have also been rerecorded - specifically to be more concise and more easily digestible.
Another thing I noticed is that you are somewhat still reliant on outlines, but you're fighting against that and are making good progress. Try not to think in terms of hitting a point in your gradient where you'll no longer use outlines - instead, try to think entirely in terms of shadow all the way through. Often towards the far left these shadows will encompass the entirely of a form, but it will be because the shadow will be cast along one side, and then the shadow of a neighbouring form will close off the other side. This difference from having a form's own outline defined on each side is definitely significant.
Jumping down to your form intersections, these are definitely coming along well, with a couple things to keep in mind:
In the instructions, I mention that you should avoid forms that are more stretched in any one dimension, sticking instead to those that are equilateral - or roughly the same size in all three dimensions. This is to eliminate any unnecessary complexity being introduced from further foreshortening, which just makes a difficult exercise even harder.
Try to keep your forms' foreshortening shallower - this helps keep the sense of scale more consistent across the whole set of forms. The relationship between foreshortening and scale is explained back in lesson 1.
Lastly, your organic intersections are looking pretty good. You're doing a great job of conveying how the slump and sag over one another, creating a very strong illusion that the forms are all existing together within the same space, rather than pasted on top of one another.
So! All in all, there are a number of things to keep in mind but you're still doing a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 3.
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This course highlights programs across the full spectrum of options, ranging from the current industry standard Adobe Photoshop, to the Free-and-Open-Source darling Krita, as well as the mobile favourite, Procreate.
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