Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
3:51 PM, Thursday October 8th 2020
Looking forward to your feedback :)
Hey there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.
You're making good progress here but I do notice a few spots you can improve, I'll be listing those below.
Your arrows are off to a good start, I can tell that you're trying to apply proper foreshortening to make them appear 3D. The only real spot I can see where improvement is needed here is that your arrows don't always flow smoothly, sometimes they bulge, pinch or turn very sharply at the end. I notice you point it out as well on your pages which shows you're aware it's an issue and that's great, keep practicing these as a warm up and with enough mileage your consistency and quality will go up.
The majority of your organic forms with contours are looking nice and simple as they should be, a few do suffer from different sized ends or a bit of pinching or bloating but again this shows you have a grasp of what's being asked of you and you just need more mileage to even things out. My only suggestion here would be that you should push your contours a bit 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. You left your contours fairly even throughout your forms, by pushing the degree further when appropriate you'll help sell the fact that these forms appear 3D. As a final reminder you can look here for what our goals are when creating a simple sausage.
When it comes to the texture exercises I can see that you brain is wrestling with itself to try and grasp the concepts, in some places it succeeds and in some it doesn't and that's ok. This is a difficult exercise and it's one that requires a lot of mistakes to be made so you can fully grasp what you're aiming to do. I will say that in a lot of your exercises you tend to focus on outlines and negative space rather than trying to focus on the cast shadows created by the forms of the texture. This makes it difficult to create a proper gradient as well because you're attempting to explicitly state all of your detail rather than imply it. You can read more about these concepts here.
In the form intersections exercise your forms are appearing solid and well constructed and you attempted to draw the intersections themselves, this is a great attempt. A lot of people struggle with intersections in the beginning and like textures this exercise serves as an introduction to the concept we'll be going over them in the upcoming material. 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.
As for your organic intersections I can see that your grasp of 3D space is improving because you laid these forms on top of each other quite well, the only real issue I see here is your shadows are inconsistent (some are cast to the left, others to the right, suggesting different light sources) and hugging the form rather than being cast on to one another in a way that makes sense. You can read about this mistake here.
Overall your submission was solid and once you obtain some more mileage by doing these exercises as warm ups and iron out a few mistakes I have no doubt your quality of work will improve. WIth that being said I think you demonstrated a good understanding of the core concepts being introduced here so I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to lesson 3. Remember to practice all your previous exercises as warm ups and give some extra attention to the texture exercises to gain a better grasp of focusing on the cast shadows.
Good luck in lesson 3.
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 3.
Keep doing previous exercises as warm ups and give some extra attention to the texture exercises.
Hey,
thanks for the critique.
I was planning on doing the 25 Texture Challenge concurrently to the next few lessons, which should be enough time to work on the cast shadows only xD.
And about the organic forms with contour curves: totally true. I wasn't even thinking about bending them more as they move away, which they, of course, should do.
Thank you for pointing all of that out.
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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