Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
2:12 PM, Wednesday September 14th 2022
I did L2 exercises, any criticism would be appreciated!
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5:55 PM, Wednesday October 12th 2022
Hello ZNorb, hope you are well.
Starting with your Arrows, your lines are flowing pretty smoothly and confidently and you’ve done a good job of having the width of your arrows steadily decrease as they get further from the viewer, well done. Something else you can do to give even more illusion of depth is to also decrease space between different lengths of the arrow as shown in the example here https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/011d064f.jpg You’ve got your hatching in the correct places, just remember to do it carefully, using the ghosting method in future. And if I'm getting nitpicky, remember to take your time to use the ghosting method for the little straight lines of the arrow heads too, some of them are a bit wobbly and I can see from your form intersections that you're capable of really really good lines when you're on the ball.
Moving on to your organic forms I can see you’re working towards keeping your sausages simple, there are a couple of cases where you have one end slightly larger than the other, or the middle is ever so slightly pinched, but you’re doing a pretty good job, I can see you’re on the right track. Your contour ellipses are smooth, confident and you’ve drawn through most of them two full times. They’re pretty well aligned, and you’ve been mindful to change their degree too, nice work. The contour curves look good too, but remember the little contour ellipse on some of the ends? The thing about that is we can see the entirety of this ellipse because it's facing towards us - this also happens to serve as a very effective visual cue. The contour ellipse will inform the direction of the contour curve next to it, as seen in this image https://imgur.com/a/yDBbayD so keep that in mind moving forward.
Looking at your texture analysis, I can see you were being observant of your reference, thinking about the light source and focusing on drawing cast shadow shapes, well done! You’ve been careful to avoid outlining the forms themselves (drawing explicitly) and I can’t see any evidence of resorting to randomness, your shapes look clearly and thoughtfully designed. Something that could be improved is the transition between the black bar and the dark end of your gradients. Ideally we want the two to merge together seamlessly, your transitions are a bit abrupt, so don’t be afraid to be more bold about making larger deeper shadows on the left of your gradients.
Your dissections look good too. You’ve wrapped your textures around the forms and broken the silhouette too well done. Something you could work on is being mindful of the lighting direction on these, if you look at Comfy’s demo image here https://imgur.com/qWwH4tc you’ll see that as the sausage turns away from the light, the shadows in the texture get deeper. You’re doing a good job already, that’s just an optional extra.
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.Your forms are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work. Your intersections show a good deal of improvement as you worked through them (I’m assuming they’re in order) A minor nitpick- when you draw a cylinder in perspective, you want to make sure the sides taper slightly, so that the far end is smaller than the near end.
Finishing off with your Organic Intersections, you do a great job demonstrating that your sense of 3D space is developing as your forms begin to wrap around each other believably. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. Your cast shadows are a little bit tentative, but showing improvements on the second page, https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/9/shadows you can really emphasise how they project onto the form and sort of wrap around the curved surface a bit more. And don’t forget that your pile of sausages will also cast shadows onto the surface they’re resting on. Doing this will make them appear much more grounded. Please no more flying or floating sausage stacks.
Overall this was a solid submission, you’re showing a good understanding of all these exercises so I think you should feel free to move on to lesson 3. Congratulations!
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Feel free to move on to lesson 3.
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