Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
7:04 PM, Saturday July 25th 2020
critique welcome, had a rather hard time with the last ones
Starting with your arrows, you're capturing a lovely sense of flow and fluidity, and across many of these are applying appropriate foreshortening to the negative space in between the zigzagging sections, which helps you to convey a strong sense of depth in your scene.
Throughout the organic forms with contour lines you've clearly made an attempt at sticking with simple sausage forms as described in the instructions, though in the first page you did struggle a little with ends that were more stretched out rather than properly spherical/circular. Your contour lines are drawn fairly well, wrapping nicely around the surface of the rounded sausage forms, although you do appear to be mostly drawing your contour lines with the same degree across a given sausage form. 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.
Continuing onto your texture analyses, you are doing a great job of working with clearly and purposely designed shadow shapes. This does help put you in a stronger position to control the density of your textures, though you appear to have missed or forgotten the purpose of the solid black bar on the left side of the gradient. It is there so students are forced to create a smooth, seamless transition from it to the texture itself, showing that the student can create a transition from one extreme to the other. Please be more mindful of this in the future.,
Additionally, in your third row, I think the shadow shapes you've drawn are somewhat more focused on creating a somewhat abstract pattern of shapes, rather than specifically designing the shapes around the forms that would cast them as shadows. Remember that each shape is itself directly related, and should imply the presence of a physical form on the surface of an object. It's easy to get overly focused on just drawing an arrangement of shapes, without thinking about what is actually producing them, but this would generally result in a flat result rather than the impression of there being forms present there.
Throughout your dissections you continue to develop your observational skills and attention to detail, with a variety of different textures that you've experimented with quite well. One issue I can see here however is that when you tackle textures with more distinct textural forms, you tend to fall back into outlining each one in its entirety instead of working strictly with the shadow shapes that imply their presence. Give these notes on the topic a read.
Throughout your form intersections you've done a decent job of drawing these forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space, although I do get the impression that your linework is a little more hesitant, likely not making as consistent a use of the ghosting method asi t ought to, and resulting in very subtle wavering. It's not easy to pick up on, but rather leaves a more subconscious impression. Remember that every single mark you draw should be executed using the ghosting method, specifically so we can allow ourselves to execute those marks without hesitation or fear of making a mistake, as explained in this response to another student. Also, don't forget to draw through each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons.
As far as the intersections themselves go, you're off to a good start. This is something I'm merely introducing to students here, to get them to start thinking about how their forms might relate to one another in 3D space and how we might define those relationships. This is something we'll continue to explore throughout the rest of the course.
As a side note, some of these pages aren't really close to being filled - so in the future, please make a more concerted effort to use all the space available to you on the page.
Lastly, your organic intersections are off to a good start. Your'e establishing how these forms actually interact with one another in three dimensions, not just as a series of flat shapes stacked on a page. Some of these aren't quite as successful in this regard - for example the right-most sausage form on the first page of this exercise feels more like it was pasted on top without consideration for the forms underneath it and how it might wrap overtop of them, but all in all you're doing a good job.
I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, though be sure to continue working through these exercises as part of your regular warmup routine.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 3.
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