Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

3:08 AM, Saturday December 6th 2025

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7:27 PM, Monday December 8th 2025

Jumping right in with the arrows, you've done a good job of executing your side edges confidently, so as to lean into the fluidity with which they move through space. I can also see that you're taking into consideration the impacts of foreshortening on the positive space of your arrow structures, through the generous size differential between the opposite ends, and there are numerous cases where you're conveying a great deal of depth through allowing the gaps between the zigzagging sections of certain arrows to overlap one another, conveying a good sense of how foreshortening impacts the negative space. All in all, your work here is looking solid.

Looking at your sausages with contour lines,

  • Nice work sticking largely to the characteristics of simple sausages. There are some small discrepancies here and there, but that's normal, and will improve with practice so long as you keep those characteristics in mind as the goal you're trying to achieve.

  • You're drawing your contour ellipses and curves with confidence, which helps keep them evenly shaped and appropriately curved to wrap around the surface of each given sausage form.

  • When it comes to the degree you're choosing for each contour line, there are a lot of cases that clearly show an awareness of how the degree should shift wider as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of the form (this being a great example of this), but there are also other cases where, in examples like this one, the contour lines' degree shrinks up to the middle, then widens again without inverting. Based on how the sausage is bending, it appears that your intent here might be to have the sausage bend so both ends are turned towards the viewer, but this would require the contour curves to invert as shown here. While it is not at all abnormal for students to have issues relating to the degree of their contour lines (it's something that will improve as they continue moving forwards and continue applying the exercises), I would recommend reviewing the material that discusses the degree - both in what's covered in this exercise's material (here in the written content as well as in the video), and from Lesson 1's ellipses section.

Continuing onto the texture section, one thing to keep in mind is that the concepts we introduce relating to texture rely on skills our students generally don't have right now - because they're the skills this entire course is designed to develop. That is, spatial reasoning. Understanding how the textural forms sit on a given surface, and how they relate to the surfaces around them (which is necessary to design the shadow they would cast) is a matter of understanding 3D spatial relationships. The reason we introduce it here is to provide context and direction for what we'll explore later - similarly to the rotated boxes/organic perspective boxes in Lesson 1 introducing a problem we engage with more thoroughly in the box challenge. Ultimately my concern right now is just how closely you're adhering to the underlying steps and procedure we prescribe (especially those in these reminders).

As a whole I can see that you have made a concerted effort to stick to the use of this methodology, of first outlining/designing your shadow shapes, then filling them in, and while there are just a few spots where you employ one-off strokes (the sort that don't involve planning out the shape, and are therefore less controlled) in cases like this and this, you are sticking to the methodology we recommend far moreso than the majority of students at this stage - so good on you for that.

I will however still share with you the explanation I provide to those other students, so you aren't denied extra information just for having done the work well:

While it's true that there are certainly going to be shadows that are cast that are so small they can't reasonably be executed using our two step methodology, in such cases it's better to actually leave them out, for the following reasons:

  • A designed shape, despite not being something we can create quite as small as a one-off stroke, tapers in a more nuanced, delicate fashion, whereas a one-off stroke is more likely to end in a manner that feels more sudden. Thus, the shapes lean better into our goal of creating a gradient that transitions from black to white (and ultimately we have to pick a point for the shadows to drop off altogether anyway, so pushing a little farther with singular strokes isn't strictly necessary).

  • Drawing in one-off strokes allows us to lean more into drawing directly from observation (as opposed to observing, understanding the forms that we see as they exist in 3D space, then creating shadows based on that understanding), which can be very tempting as it can allow us to create more visually pleasing things without all of the extra baggage of thinking in 3D. But of course, 3D spatial reasoning is the purpose of this course.

Moving onto the form intersections, this exercise serves two main purposes:

  • Similarly to the textures, it introduces the problem of the intersection lines themselves, which students are not expected to understand how to apply successfully, but rather just make an attempt at - this will continue to be developed from lessons 3-7, and this exercise will return in the homework in lessons 6 and 7 for additional analysis, and advice where it is deemed to be necessary). The way in which you're approaching your intersection lines clearly demonstrates that you're thinking about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space, which is exactly what we hope to see at this stage.

  • The other, far more important use of this exercise (at least in the context of this stage in the course) is that it is essentially a combination of everything we've introduced thus far. The principles of linework, the use of the ghosting method, the concepts surrounding ellipses along with their axes/degrees, perspective, foreshortening, convergence, the Y method, and so forth - all of it is present in this exercise. Where we've already confirmed your general grasp of these concepts in isolation in previous exercises, it is in presenting it all together that can really challenge a student's patience and discipline, and so it allows us to catch any issues that might interfere with their ability to continue forward as meaningfully as we intend.

As to this latter point, you're similarly demonstrating that you're clearly taking the time and care to apply the methodologies introduced earlier in the course, and to great effect. Very nicely done.

And lastly, your organic intersections show that you're thinking about how these forms drape over one another under the influence of gravity, and you're making good use of your cast shadows to further emphasize those relationships.

All in all, your work throughout this lesson is quite solid. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto Lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
1:47 AM, Tuesday December 9th 2025

Thank you for pointing out and explaining the contour line issue that helped a lot!

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