Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

8:49 PM, Saturday November 30th 2024

Dont know why theyre not in order - Imgur

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Whoa lesson 2 is done. There are a bunch of days in between these and when I look back at them I can see my mistakes. Hope I will continue to improve in the future. Please give me critiques if you can????

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5:01 AM, Sunday December 1st 2024

Hi there! I saw your submission so I figured I'd take a look:

Organic Arrows and Contours. I'm seeing clean confident line work for the most part here, save for one kind of wobbly arrow on the right side of the page here. There are some errors with line width across a number of these however. This creates arrows that do progress through space, but they have sections that appear less dynamic, which brings down the overall appearance of the arrow in question. Practice, as always, will help with this. Make sure you consider the path your second line will take as it moves in tandem with the first. I traced over a few of your arrows in case you find it helpful. Other than that, I thought you did a good job of keeping track of how the arrow bends in space. It may help to apply some line weight to the line that overlaps the other on the arrow.

With the contours it looks like you have the right idea as far as the ellipses shifting in degree as the sausage moves closer or away from the viewer. The sausages are well made with good effort to ensure that the forms are evenly sized throughout. Make sure you keep your ellipses aligned 90 degrees to the minor axis as you work though. I also noticed with your contour curves page that you ran into the trap of contours that don't probably shift in degree on the ellipse. It is a bit harder compared to the ellipses assignment, especially since we aren't drawing through the elliptical mark we make. Make sure you ghost your ellipses, even if you aren't drawing a full one. Alignment to the minor axis applies here as well.

Texture. Your analysis page looks pretty spot-on as far as utilizing cast shadows to describe form; one thing to look out for is not utilizing the black band in the analysis window. Those bands are as much a part of the shadow shapes as anything else you put in that window, so those bands should stretch and merge into the other shadow shapes in the window. A small detail at the end of the day, but if you end up doing the texture analysis challenge, then it's something to keep in mind.

Dissections generally look okay. You definitely try to keep the textures following the form of the sausage, and you push the silhouette out to capture the texture's forms. There are a number of these that sort of miss the mark. The ones that stand out to me are the thorns, tentacles, rippling water, and the succulent. These surfaces can be a bit complex to understand, so I drew some sketches that might help you see the forms that we're supposed to be describing. These surfaces are generally considered smooth with the exception of the forms that protrude from the surface. These surface forms will typically not be drawn through, so we really have to lean on pushing the silhouette to make them visible. With the rippling water, the silhouette is the only way to show this texture. I do want to note here, that in lesson 3, there's a demo of a cactus where the bumpy surface is completely drawn through; I don't remember the logic of that, but I believe it wasn't a construction that had any texture to the drawing, I just wanted to warn you that it may seem contradictory. Incidentally, doing the organic intersections exercise can help improve your understanding of these surface forms, and that happens to be the next section.

Form and Organic Intersections. If there was a page that was just box intersections, it looks like it wasn't successfully uploaded. That said, these intersections look logical, though the lines are a tad scratchy here; much like any other assignment, we want to strive for smooth confident lines every time. Organic intersections look pretty good too, though you may want to keep your forms more uniform in design. That said, this is nothing I'm going to nag you about, it looks like your contours make sense in these.

Next Steps:

Okay, after looking at everything, I think you're good to go on to Lesson 3. You'll be working more with arrows and ribbons, and it'll probably help a lot to help you develop those consistent lines. Add these exercises to your rotation of warm-ups, and they'll help you improve as time goes on. If you do use these in warm-ups, just make sure to limit your texture dissections to one sausage or so, there's no need to do a whole page at this point. At this point, it's also recommended that you attempt the 25 Texture Analysis challenge. It's not bad advice, as it will help you improve your comprehension of texture surfaces. This isn't something to rush though, just do one analysis every once in a while with your warm-ups.

Last thing I'll mention is that in Lesson 3 there's a number of demos, but there's also an "informal demos" section. I found this section to be indispensable as far as improving my own understanding of arrows and dimensionality in our forms. There's another part about complex leaf shapes that's also super helpful. Either review it or just glance at it, I'm sure you'll do fine in the lessons beyond. Best of luck to you!

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
12:20 PM, Saturday December 7th 2024

Hi! I want to thank you so much for taking your time providing such a detailed critique. The images you sent are super helpful. I will try my best in the upcoming lessons ! (There is a missing page with form intersections , no idea why it didn't upload. It was like the other 2 ,few different forms not just boxes)

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