Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

2:10 PM, Friday February 4th 2022

Lesson 2 - Google Photos

Lesson 2 - Google Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/6LH48w6vuWLRJLaeA

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5:13 AM, Monday February 7th 2022

I'll be the TA handling your Lesson 2 critique.

You're making progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson and hopefully this critique will help you in your future attempts.

  • Starting off with the arrows section you want to be making sure you're drawing confidently to keep your arrows as smooth as possible, accuracy will come with mileage. There are spots where your arrows bulge/narrow suddenly, this is an issue because it gives the impression that your arrows are stretching which hurts their solidity. Remember that as our arrows move closer to the viewer we want them to widen consistently. It's good to see that you're trying to implement line weight, just remember that you want to keep your applications subtle and you'll become consistent with mileage. here are some things to look out for when applying it. At times you don't overlap your edges when you should, this results in your arrows flattening out as you can see here. I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.

  • Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise your forms are getting a bit too complex or too simple to the point they're nearly ellipses (they do improve in later exercises which is nice to see). We want to create our forms with both ends being the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. You're keeping your line work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. Speaking of contours I'd like you to try and shift the degree of your contours more. The degree of a contour line basically represents the orientation of that cross-section in space, relative to the viewer, and as we slide along the sausage form, the cross section is either going to open up (allowing us to see more of it) or turn away from the viewer (allowing us to see less), as shown here.

  • In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself. This makes it difficult to create gradients with implied information which we could then use to create focal points in more complex pieces, by doing so we can prevent our viewers from being visually overwhelmed with too much detail. You also show that you're drawing from memory rather than giving yourself enough time to focus on your reference. Most of our time when doing exercises like this will be spent observing our reference and looking away for a quick second to add something to our page. For more on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here. I'd also like to quickly direct you to this image which shows that when we're working with thin line like textures if we outline and fill the shadow we will create a much more dynamic texture than simply drawing lines.

  • It's quite common for people to feel like they don't fully grasp the form intersections exercise, if you feel like you may fall into this category try not to stress too much. This exercise is just meant to get students to start thinking about how their forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how to define those relationships on the page. We'll be going over them more in the upcoming lessons.Your forms are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work.

  • While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you show that you need a bit more time becoming comfortable with thinking of how these forms interact in 3D space and how they'd wrap around one another. Try to avoid leaving ends floating in the air, think of the forms as sausage stacked on a plate in front of you. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. Your line work does get a messy here compared to previous work, remember that even if you're close to the end of the lesson you want to take your time to create your best work. When it comes to your shadows you're pushing them enough so that they cast rather than just hugging the form that creates them which is a great start. Your shadows appear to be following a consistent light source, be sure to experiment with different angles and intensities when trying this exercise again in the future. I recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page to start with, it's easier than working with a light directly above your form pile.

Overall this was a solid submission, while you may have some things to work on I have no doubt you will improve with more mileage. I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to the next lesson.

Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!

Next Steps:

Keep practicing previous exercise as warm ups.

Move on to lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:58 PM, Wednesday February 9th 2022

Hi Tofu,

Thanks for the crtique. I just wanted some clarification on the organic arrows exercise.. So did you mean the arrows that I had drawn as they move closer to the viewer become narrow/bulge?

Could you also elaborate on the foreshortening of the arrows aspect because that isn't very clear to me. Foreshortening makes sense when it comes to the boxes but for arrows not so much

12:58 AM, Thursday February 10th 2022
edited at 1:17 AM, Feb 10th 2022

Tofu's tagged me in for the explanation, and fortunately this should be a quick one. Basically by referencing this section of the instructions, he was pointing out that the spacing between your arrow's zigzagging sections (the negative space in between the ribbon itself) was either remaining the same, or inconsistently jumping back and forth between big and small gaps. Instead, those gaps should be getting smaller and smaller as we look farther back in space.

I've marked those gaps out on your work here to add some more clarity to the concept.

As for the bulging, here's what he meant.

edited at 1:17 AM, Feb 10th 2022
11:54 AM, Saturday February 12th 2022

Thanks Uncomfortable. I just realized that when it comes to constructing the second identical curve all the problems that have been mentioned come up because I think about making consistent spaces, making sure the lines overlap and then at the same time trying to take into account perspective which then leads to the inconsistent spaces, bulging e.t.c which affect the 3d feel of the arrows. So my question is there another way other than the instructions provided to approach drawing the second curve or is matter of getting that mileage through practice?

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