Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

9:09 PM, Monday July 19th 2021

Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction - Album on Imgur

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Hi all, thanks in advance for critiquing! No major issues or questions with this set of exercises, I just felt like the texture sausages were CRAZY time consuming compared to anything else we've done. There are a few notes to myself in color, feel free to ignore them.

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3:43 PM, Sunday July 25th 2021

Hi Youenoh! Congratulations on doing a fantastic job completing lesson 2. I'm Gady and I'll be reviewing your work, so let's get to it.

Arrows:

  • Your linework looks smooth and confident for the most part. The main issue here seems to be getting the feel for depth in the flatness of the paper. Your arrows show you have grasped the concepts of the lesson, but almost half of them still lack some of the perspective principles required for them to appear in 3D space. Remember that the arrows need to get bigger and bigger as they go towards the viewer, and compress as they go further away. Both in size, and the spacing between each fold. Check these diagrams:

https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/011d064f.jpg

https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/0f7c806c.jpg

Now go to your arrows and you can see that you tend to make spaces between folds equal, so this adds up to a flat look.

  • This is not a general problem but I noticed you didn't draw through some of your arrows. Remember this is something you have to do, to engage with the tridimensionality of the objects and not their instantial 2D shape.

  • You added lineweight on the proper places, but it doesn't look very subtle. This is what it should look like: https://imgur.com/OHvr7Mb

Organic forms:

  • You did a good job at drawing your sausages as tubes connecting two spheres. Here you seem to be grinding only one sausage orientation, here's a diagram with at least three of them you should try: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/368871234269741066/790354487055351818/QTEqgJa.png

  • I think you managed to indicate angle variation of ellipses and contours properly and with confidence. Some of your contours look wobbly and overtried, though, so maybe keep this in mind when practising them.

Texture Analysis:

  • First of all I must say this looks beautiful. However, as this is not the main goal of the excercise, I must point out that the main important thing here is actually drawing cast shadow shapes and not lines. Also you are supposed to draw only cast shadow shapes, and not any kind of form shading. Here's a diagram that explains the difference: https://imgur.com/L21Mqxh

  • That being said, aside from crumpled paper, where you properly concentrated on cast shadows, I think you're relying on lines and dotting too much to achieve transition. When thinking about how to approach this, it's better to see cast shadows as closed shapes insted of as lines: https://i.imgur.com/M9JJfr4.png

  • Other than that, I think you have made very good seamless transition on the gradients

Dissections:

  • This is a wonderful job you made here. You have clearly put a lot of time and effort to this excercise, wrapping the textures around the form and breaking the silhouette very cleverly. The few things I can add to this are in the same topic as I pointed out at texture analysis. For example, on pine cone you relied too much on hatching to achieve transition, and on potato you relied too much on dotting.

  • I would just add that on some dissections you might have went over explicit drawing all the shapes insted of implying them, as on pineapple or lizard scales.

Form intersections:

  • You have successfully achieved forms resembling they share the same scene, considering consistent foreshortening. Intersections feel overall solid.

  • I might suggest that you try bolder intersections, as you seem to keep them very tidy and inside of your comfort zone.

Organic intersections:

  • I have nothing to add here, drawings are solid as a whole. Your sausages wrap around each other in a very believable way.

Final thoughts

As I said, this is a fantastic job. Aside from a few minor bumps, you seem to have grasped all the important concepts of this lesson, and I can tell you have what it takes to take your work to the next level.

Next Steps:

Incorporate this excercises to your daily warm-ups and continue with Lesson 3. Good luck!

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.
11:48 PM, Sunday July 25th 2021

Hi Gady,

Thank you for the thorough review and for attempting to find improvements in each of the exercises. Some of the issues I was aware of, but many were new insights. I was specifically planning on doing more form intersections and texture analysis (I don't think my references were the best choices for analyzing or respresenting cast shadows), so I very much appreciate having some new areas of focus for improving on those exercises. I will also focus on the other two orientations of the sausages when I get to Lesson 4. For some reason I thought we needed to show one end facing toward the viewer on each sausage but I definitely misread or misunderstood part of the lesson.

I learned more than I expected to from this critique, thanks again for the quality feedback!

  • youenoh
12:29 PM, Monday July 26th 2021

You are very welcome, I'm glad you found it useful!

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