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Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

2:52 PM, Sunday October 15th 2023

Lesson 2 completed! - Album on Imgur

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Hello everyone again! I managed to finish the second lesson! I have to admit, it was rather difficult in it's entirety, but I feel I have managed to understand and draw roughly what I had to do. The texture analysis could of gone slightly better, same goes with the organic arrows and organic contours. Had some trouble with form intersections, but I think I understood once I reached the forth page. The organic forms really kicked my butt, and I hope those are alright. Overall, I think it was actually kind of fun getting out of my comfort zone cause I don't usually draw textures.

Either way, thank you for your time and I hope to learn more about drawing because I ain't stopping!

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10:29 AM, Sunday October 22nd 2023

Hello Ironskeleton99, good job on tackling lesson 2! My name is Finch and I will be critiquing your submission today.

Thinking in 3D

2 pages of Organic Arrows: your arrows are confidently drawn and flow nicely. You sometimes have a tendency to correct lines that you see as mistakes here, try not to do that. A big part of the learning process is to learn to accept your mistakes, it can be very frustrating at first when a line isn’t as pictured, but you’ll gradually learn to accept it if you ignore the mistake and move on. What I have also noticed in your arrows is that you don’t compress them enough. Objects become smaller when they’re further back in perspective, the same applies to arrows. https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/4/perspective

2 pages of Organic Forms with Contour Lines: once again, some great linework on these! The ellipses and contours fit nicely in the sausage forms. One thing to keep in mind when using this exercise as a warm up is that the contours and ellipses change degrees if they’re farther away or closer to the viewer: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/degree

Texture and Detail

1 page of Texture Analysis: you’ve chosen some good textures, made all of the lines purposefully and carefully examined your references. However, you forgot to use crumbled paper as your first texture, this was mentioned in the bold text in this section: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/6/step2. One other thing to look out for is that you don’t really focus on the cast shadows enough, which makes your textures feel flat: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/6/drawingforms. You can solve this by forcing yourself to draw shapes instead of lines: https://i.imgur.com/M9JJfr4.png.

2 pages of Dissections: your textures are nicely drawn. In most textures, you forget to wrap them around the form, this is quite tricky to do but should still be attempted: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/7/curvature.

The mistake about cast shadows also applies here, mainly in the tapered feather texture. If you look closely at this image, you will see that the feathers leave cast shadows on the feathers below them: https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-closeup-of-rhea-feathers-grey-plumage-greater-rhea-gray-background-165115596.html.

Construction

4 pages of Form Intersections: Your forms are nicely ghosted and feel like they’re part of the same scene, which is the main focus of the exercise. Two things to look out for is to make sure that you don’t correct your lines and that you don’t make them intersect. I’ve already noted some tips for unlearning the habit of correcting lines but I will also tell you that taking breaks is very important. I suggest taking a short break every hour or when you feel frustrated/tired. By taking breaks, you allow your brain to rest for a bit so that you can come back to the exercise with a clear mind, it’s not only healthy to do, but it will also improve your drawings. Do not be afraid of actually letting your forms intersect, you tend to add line weight to the outline of a form, making it look like they’re overlapping instead of intersecting right now. Take a look at this image, you can see that the red lines indicate where they intersect, it actually “breaks” the form of the two shapes that are intersecting: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/8d4a68c8.jpg. Play around with this concept when you do these as warm-ups, don’t be afraid make mistakes with these intersections, you will eventually get a good grasp on how it’s done.

2 pages of Organic Forms: nice job on making the sausages fold over each other. Make sure that your cast shadows follow the form that’s under them: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/9/shadows

I suggest playing around with line weight when doing the organic forms as a warm-up exercise. Line weight is usually applied to forms that overlap, as little as one extra line can be enough.

All in all, you have a good grasp of the concepts explained in this submission, but I will have to request some revisions in order to make sure that you understand all of it. You can reply to this comment with a link to your revisions once you’re done.

Next Steps:

Half a page of arrows, try to really push the perspective here by making them gradually thinner when the part of the arrow goes more into the background.

One row of Texture Analysis where you draw crumpled paper. Make sure that you draw shapes instead of lines, like explained before.

One sausage of dissections: you can choose any texture here, but try to focus on form contours and drawing the cast shadows.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:08 PM, Sunday October 22nd 2023
edited at 1:17 PM, Oct 22nd 2023

Updated revisions

  • Half a page of Arrows, try to push the perspective with these.

  • One form with Dissections, try to focus on getting the texture to adhere to the form and using shapes for cast shadows.

After some thinking, I've decided to remove the texture analysis revision. It's quite a time consuming exercise. I cannot update the revisions so I have to reply instead, sorry for the inconvenience.

edited at 1:17 PM, Oct 22nd 2023
10:00 AM, Tuesday October 24th 2023

Hello! No worries about it, thank you so much for the time you put into checking my progress. Everything you commented on was on point, some of them were things I thought about myself, but so many others were things that didn't cross my mind! I'm sorry for not making the paper texture analysis, I really just forgot about it.

The organic arrows are a little tricky for me, because I often concentrate too much on making it big or small, but not make it into a smooth transition. I'll definitely think about it more as I do exercises like this one.

As for the dissection exercises, shadows are something I struggle with, same with the texture going around the form, but same as before, I hope I did a better job than before. I hope to hear from you again, and once again, thank you for checking my progress on the lesson. Have a wonderful day!

https://imgur.com/a/BHZOl6D

9:57 AM, Wednesday October 25th 2023
edited at 10:02 AM, Oct 25th 2023

Hi! I’m glad that my critique was helpful to you. Don’t worry about forgetting the paper texture, I totally understand that you forgot it. The texture analysis exercise introduces a lot of new concepts so it’s easy to forget some things while your brain is processing all of the new information.

Organic arrows

There’s a clear effort to use more perspective this time and it paid off very well. I don’t have any further tips on these, good job.

You can try to do this exercise more often in your warm-ups if you notice that you’re still struggling a bit, but make sure that you’re not grinding the exercise.

Dissections

You’ve adhered to the form very nicely, especially with the alligator scales. The cast shadows are also drawn very nicely. The only critique I have is to try to keep your lines confident. You're allowed to use your wrist with textures since you need to make such delicate lines in many of them: https://drawabox.com/lesson/1/2/wrist

I think that you’re ready to move on to lesson 3 now since you have a good understanding of the topics discussed in lesson 2, good luck and I hope that you have a wonderful day as well!

Next Steps:

Lesson 3.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
edited at 10:02 AM, Oct 25th 2023
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