Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
12:33 PM, Saturday October 17th 2020
As always, any and all constructive criticism is appreciated!
Best
Simon
Hey there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.
You're making some great progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, I do notice a few things you can do to get better results in the future so I'll be pointing them out below.
Your arrows are looking quite well done, my only real suggestion here would be to experiment more with foreshortening the negative space between the arrows. As discussed here by foreshortening both the arrow and the negative space we can really sell the illusion of an arrow moving through 3D space. You definitely did do this in places, I'd just recommend experimenting more in the future because you kept things fairly similar in each arrow here.
In the organic forms with contours exercise you did draw your sausages a bit more complicated than your goal. Often keeping them simple is a challenge in itself for a lot of people so don't stress too much, you want to keep both of your ends roughly the same size and avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the length of the form. For a more detailed reminder of what makes a simple sausage, check here. Lastly you want to make sure that you're shifting the degree of your contours along the form's length as well. You can read about that concept here, and if you'd like another visual example you check here.
When it comes to the texture exercises you do get closer to your goal a number of times, it does appear like you're focusing more on outlines and negative space rather than the cast shadows created by forms along the texture however. Remember that by focusing on the cast shadows we're able to imply detail and create a gradient, this is extremely important when working on larger pieces because if we try to explicitly draw every detail the image will become visually overwhelming and lack focal points. You can read more about the importance of not focusing on outlines here.
I'm glad to see you attempted to draw the intersections in the form intersections exercises, if you found it difficult and don't fully grasp it just yet don't worry, right now 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 upcoming material, my only complaint here is you did go a bit crazy drawing through your ellipses in places, remember you only need to draw through them 2 or 3 times.
Lastly we have your organic intersections, they are wrapping around one another fairly well but you like in the previous exercises you drew your forms too complicated. In the future when you do this exercise again I'd recommend making sure you draw through all your forms, like when we drew the rear edge of boxes to help build our understanding of 3D space we can do the same thing here, it'll help you wrap these forms around one another easier and also benefit you when working with light and shadow. Speaking of shadow you played it a bit too safe here and your shadows mostly just hug your forms rather than being cast on the forms below, try and keep a consistent light source and mind and push the shadows further, using simple forms like this will help you build a stronger understanding of how they should behave which will translate to more complicated forms later on. You can find a bit more info on this idea here.
Overall this was a solid submission, you do have a few things you can work on but I have no doubt that with some more mileage you'll improve in no time. With that said I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to lesson 3.
Good work so far and good luck in the future!
Next Steps:
Keep doing previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
Thank you Nihlex for this detailed critique and the encouragement! Also: the links you added to highlighted specific guidance are really helpful to point out the specific sections where the relevant text is. Thanks for that!
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