7:22 PM, Wednesday November 16th 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.
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Starting off in the arrows section your lines are mostly looking smoothly and confidently drawn. You're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. 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. 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.
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Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise you're doing a good job keeping your forms simple, plenty of people tend to over-complicate them. At least in this section you're redrawing your organic forms rather than just creating a single smooth mark, this causes them to be messier than they need to be so I'd ask that you not do this in the future. There are moments where your lines could be more confident as well, there's some wobbling in your contour curves. Remember that accuracy will improve with mileage so be sure to try and draw as smoothly and confidently as you can. Remember to draw through all of your ellipses including the small contour ones on the end of your organic forms as well. 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.
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In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines, colour shifts and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself (colour shifts are tied to patterns not texture, texture requires a change in the form's surface). 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. 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.
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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. When you're not redrawing your forms are looking pretty solid here, though you are skipping a step in your cylinders and cones, as mentioned here you should be drawing the minor axis.
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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. I recommend trying to stack your forms perpendicularly rather than trying to keep them headed in the same direction to help make wrapping them around one another a smoother task. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. Your shadows are hugging the form creating them rather than being cast on to another surface believably. It appears like your shadows aren't following a consistent light source, 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.
I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds upon each other and I'd like to make sure you understand a few of these concepts a bit more before potentially creating more problems down the road.
With that being said I'd like you to please re-read and complete:
- 1 page of the organic intersections exercise
If you need more of an explanation in regards to your texture question let me know when you hand in your revisions and I'll give you a more in-depth explanation. Ut's quite large so I don't want to bloat this critique more than necessary with something only directed towards a single section. Texture is also an introduction to the concept and not as important as organic intersections at the moment so I don't want to distract you from that.
Once you've completed the pages mentioned above reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll go over them and address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready for the next lesson I'll move you on.
I look forward to seeing your work.
Next Steps:
- 1 page of the organic intersections exercise