Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
1:49 PM, Sunday November 15th 2020
Dear team, thank you very much for reviewing my homework, need your help.
Hey there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.
You're making good progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, below I'll be listing some things you can work on to hopefully achieve better results in your future attempts.
Your arrows are looking good, my only real suggestion here would be to experiment more with foreshortening. By utilizing foreshortening on the arrow and the space in between curves of the arrow you can really sell the illusion of an arrow moving through 3D space. For more info on this concept you can read here.
The majority of your organic forms with contours are looking well done, there's a few spots where you get too complex. Just remember that our goal in this exercise is to keep both ends of the form roughly the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form as discussed here. Good job shifting the degree of your contour ellipses, just don't be afraid to push your contour lines further.
When it comes to texture you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows. This makes it difficult to use implied information and create gradients, this is important because gradients allow us to create focal points in more complex pieces that would overwhelm the viewer if we explicitly drew every detail. You can read more on these ideas here.
If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, 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, we'll be going over them more in the upcoming lessons.
When attempting the organic intersections exercise again, I'd suggest trying to create a simpler pile of forms. You do go a bit complex and your forms could wrap around one another in a way that makes more sense, right now some of them are just kind of floating. I'd also like you to pick a consistent light source and push your shadows further as well, right now they kind of just hug the form creating them.
Overall this was a really solid submission, you have some things to work on but you showed that you understand a lot of what this lesson is trying to teach. I'll be marking your submission as complete because I think with some extra mileage you'll have a better understanding of these exercises.
Keep doing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!
Next Steps:
Do previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
On the flipside, they tend to be on the cheaper side of things, so if you're just getting started (beginners tend to have poor pressure control), you're probably going to destroy a few pens - going cheaper in that case is not a bad idea.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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