1:52 PM, Wednesday December 7th 2022
Hello again, Piapal! I'm Keisari42, and perhaps you'll remember me as the one who critiqued your Lesson 1 submission. Well, I'm back for more and I'll be the one to critique your Lesson 2 submission this time around! Before getting into it, congratulations on going through Lesson 2!
Thinking in 3D
Your organic forms are pretty good. Overall, your strokes are pretty confident and you've done well capturing the shape of the sausages, however, I'd like to note you shouldn't be doing waves for your minor axes and they should have a consistent width. You should also probably work on more confident ellipses -- remember, confidence over accuracy -- and varying their degrees more. Keep that in mind for your future warmups.
Your organic arrows, however, are extremely confusing. They loop and bend around themselves and seem not to follow any rules nor to be moving through 3D space, and your lines are wobbly, unconfident and don't seem to flow. Here's some comments on one of your arrows citing a few of its mistakes. You don't seem to have quite understood the exercise itself nor what it's supposed to teach you. I'll ask you to redo this exercise; make sure to read through the exercise page and watch Uncomfortable's video again. Be patient and follow the instructions the best you can.
Texture and Detail
You've done fantastic in this section of the Lesson. Your texture analysis exercise is specially impressive. You're doing amazing in capturing the cast shadows rather than outlines and drawing implicitly rather than explicitly. For dissections, you did well with wrapping the texture around the form and made good use of breaking the sillhouetes to better convey it. I truly do not have much to point out, but if I am to nitpick, you seem to have done form shading on this and this -- there is nothing casting a shadow upon the surface of the scales, so they themselves should not get darker as they get further away but rather the shadows they're casting upon each other, so the 'crevices' inbetween one scale and the next, should get bigger. The same is true for the water, although there's not much about the texture of water you can convey using only cast shadows, so I'd generally stay away from that kind of texture in Drawabox's approach.
Construction
The main objective of the Form Intersections exercise is to make all the forms on the page appear as if they're on the same scene, through the use of consistent, shallow foreshortening. In that regard, you did well. Your main issue lies within the hatching, which is pretty inconsistent. Avoid hatching lines that stop at arbitrary distances and do not curve them. The intersections themselves are not as important, but you did relatively well; if you wish to understand them better in the next times you do this exercise, I'd recommend checking out the Form Intersections First Aid Pack and this interactive website.
As for your Organic Intersections, you did good making them stable, obeying gravity and conveying weight; they're generally pretty convincing. That being said, there are two main issues I'd like to point out; firstly, they seem to sometimes cut into one another and not respect each other's boundaries. Despite the name of this exercise, that is not one of its objectives. Rather than thinking about how they'd intersect each other, you are to think about how they'd conform to one another's weight, slumping and sagging where it'd make sense for them to do so with their volume in mind. Secondly, it looks like you didn't think too much about the cast shadows, how they should be placed and interact with the surfaces they're being cast upon, rather simply adding them near points of contact between the forms. You also seem to have used a brush pen or something similar in order to fill in the shadows, and while it's perfectly fine to do so, it shouldn't be used to apply line weight and I don't see why you would use it on the ellipses, either. I'll also be asking for revisions here -- make sure to to go through the exercise page and Uncomfortable's demo again.
Next Steps:
One page of the Organic Arrows exercise.
One page of the Organic Intersections exercise.