25 Texture Challenge
11:14 PM, Thursday March 17th 2022
thanks for your time
Really impressive to stick with it and complete the full texture challenge! I think you took terrific notes on your textures which translated well to the final drawings. My personal favorite was the rope strands, I can tell you really put a lot of time and effort into the studies and drawings.
Hello wifu4lifu, congratulations on making it all the way through 25 textures! This challenge takes a great deal of patience and your work looks carefully crafted throughout.
You’re demonstrating excellent observational skills in your direct studies, along with mindful note taking, striving to understand the textural forms you’re seeing, and you seem able to extrapolate your observations to create your gradients convincingly too.
I think your avocado skin was particularly well done. You’ve used bold black shadow shapes, with no guesswork, and no attempting to shade with hatching or stippling. The black bar on this gradient is completely invisible and you’ve created a seamless transition from black to white, it’s fantastic. Conversely, the tyre tread has an abrupt transition to the black bar on the left of your gradient, I think it would have benefitted from some bolder shadows on the left.
Your decision to use hatching on your tree bark is not one I agree with, it’s getting into form shading territory, and the reference has some well defined shadow shapes you could have used. Here’s how I went about doing bark https://imgur.com/a/PAM8eXR making a clear decision about where the shadows end instead of using hatching to hedge my bets.
For your fur, while you’ve managed to avoid the trap of outlining tufts of fur, I still feel like you might benefit from seeing this diagram https://imgur.com/Yg2Rjr8 which shows the gaps between tufts being designed more as shadow shapes instead of hatching lines. This would allow you to create bolder, deeper shadow shapes for this texture and give you a better chance at creating a more seamless transition with the black bar on your gradient.
The last thing I want to call out before I mark this as complete is I can see cases where you seem to be employing faint underdrawings to draw your textural forms explicitly before defining your shadow shapes. It’s not present in all your textures, but I can see it on your tree leaves, yarn, and tentacles. Just to be clear, you should only be drawing the shadow shapes for this exercise, not the textural forms themselves. Every single mark we draw as part of a texture is a shadow shape as explained in this section https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/2/implicitexplicit I get it, it’s really hard, but learning to draw implicitly is a useful skill and that instruction is part of the exercise for good reasons.
Anyway, that about wraps things up. Overall you’ve done a superb job with these, and you’ve definitely earned your badge for this one. Congratulations and well done!
Next Steps:
Keep up the great work! =D
Damn. Well, thanks for taking the time to explain everything to me. It's really helpful. I honestly wasn't expecting a response so thanks a lot!
You're welcome, glad it was helpful.
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