Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

1:22 PM, Monday March 30th 2020

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OOOH man! it was a tough lesson, specially that form intersection exercise! >.< but no doubt i learned a lot, thanks a lot. I'm looking forward for the critique.

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7:55 PM, Monday March 30th 2020

Alrighty. So, starting with your arrows, these are flowing quite nicely through space and across the page. One thing to keep in mind though is that as we look farther back, the spacing between the zigzagging sections will compress. This means that if you have a smaller gap, then behind it a larger gap, that's going to throw the viewer off (like in the top right corner of the first page). Always get that gap to get narrower, and don't be afraid to let the sections overlap.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you're definitely making an effort to stick to simpler sausage forms (as mentionde in the instructions). There is some deviation from this here and there, with some having ends of different sizes, but all in all you're doing pretty well on this front. One area that is somewhat inconsistent is where the degree of your ellipses/curves should shift in a fairly consistent manner as we slide along a given form, as shown here. Right now most of yours remain the same width, or have arbitrary changes that jump around a little bit. Definitely something to keep in mind as you continue to move forwards.

You've got a good start on your texture analyses, though it's very clear that you're still very much focusing on lines as your starting point. You generally still think in terms of enclosing each textural form in a line of its own - establishing each one explicitly. Then you go on to push some shadow shapes, or fill in gaps between your forms, but this leaves you with a difficult situation when it comes to actually transitioning from a very dense texture to a much sparser texture on the opposite end.

The key to this is to not draw in line at all for these textures. Instead, you work entirely in shadow shapes - thinking in terms of the shadows that a given form will cast on its surroundings, and only drawing those shadows, not the outline of the form itself. By doing this, we imply the presence of the textural form without ever actually drawing it directly, as explained in this section. To this point, your shadow shapes are each directly related to the form that casts them. You're not simply filling the gaps between forms in, but rather thinking about how a given form will block the light source from reaching a certain area on the surfaces surrounding it.

Now, this obviously takes a good deal of practice to get your head around, and you've got a good start on it. This exercise is really just meant to be an introduction to the concept. You're also continuing to show progress through your dissections. I do however strongly recommend that after a week or so, you revisit the Lesson 2 texture notes just to go through them again after having given your time a little time to process what you understood the first time around. Downtime can often help to give us a little distance and perspective before revisiting the same material.

Moving onto your form intersections, you're doing a solid job on drawing these forms such that they feel consistent and cohesive within the same space. You did miss one thing however - in the instructions, I stated that you should avoid any forms that aren't roughly equilateral - that is, the same size in all three dimensions. This includes longer cylinders, since they bring a lot of additional foreshortening to complicate an already difficult problem.

For the intersections themselves, this exercise is intended to just be an introduction to the concept, a starting point as you work to develop your understanding of spatial relationships. Spatial reasoning is at the core of the course as a whole, and is something we will continue to develop throughout lessons 3-7. That said, while some of your intersections are a little hit or miss, you are showing a great start with them, and are exploring them quite well.

Lastly, for your organic intersections, I think you're somewhat falling into the trap of thinking about those sausage forms more as 2D shapes as you draw them on the page, then thinking about them as 3D forms more in isolation afterwards, as you add contour lines and cast shadows. As a result, we don't get any sense of how they actually slump and sag against one another. The forms end up feeling three dimensional on their own, but don't actually give a good impression of how they interact with one another.

Now, all in all I am pleased with your work, but I think it is your organic intersections that will require your greatest focus as you continue to move forwards. I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but I would like you to review the instructions for this exercise, and when picking exercises for your daily warmups, definitely give them a little more of your time.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 3, but as I mentioned, give the organic intersections a little more attention when picking exercises for your daily warmups.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:06 AM, Tuesday March 31st 2020

Great. I'll be sure to put all your notes in practice, that was very helpful, thanks a lot.

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