Hi, I'll be the TA handling your Lesson 2 critique.
You're making progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson and hopefully this critique will help you in your future attempts.
Before getting started one thing I notice is you don't always make the best use of your page. Drawing along with most other skills tend to require a lot of mileage to improve, and only making 4 or 5 small attempts (in the case of your organic forms with contours) doesn't give you much time to absorb what concepts you're learning. If you do decide to draw 4 or 5 attempts, then be sure to draw large as it has the benefit of helping you become more comfortable using your shoulder as well as allowing you to see your mistakes more clearly. I mention this as a few of your pages give the impression that you may be trying to race to the next task when in reality each tasks builds upon one another. Ultimately just remember that you're obviously here to learn, this isn't meant to shame you but just point out that you're making things more difficult for yourself in the long run needlessly.
Starting off in the arrows section your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. There are spots where your arrows bulge/narrow suddenly, this is an issue because it gives the impression that your arrows are stretching which hurts their solidity. Remember that as our arrows move closer to the viewer we want them to widen consistently. This is a good exercise to experiment with line weight but when applying it we want to make sure we do subtly to key areas like overlaps to give clarity to our forms. Here are some things to look out for when applying line weight, and here are some reminders on how to apply it subtly. I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.
Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise your forms are getting just a bit too complex at times or are too simple to the point they're nearly ovals. We want to create our forms with both ends being the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. Some of your line work here shows a lack of confidence, (mainly your contour curves and ellipses) remember that our first priority is that we want all of our linework/ellipses/contours to be drawn confidently and mileage will improve our accuracy. Speaking of contours I'd like you to try and shift the degree of your contours 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.
In the texture exercises (more so in the dissections) there are times where you're focusing on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself (cobblestone is an example of this). This makes it difficult to create gradients with implied information which we could then use to create focal points in more complex pieces, by doing so we can prevent our viewers from being visually overwhelmed with too much detail. There's also room for improvement in your gradients in terms of how you think about light, currently they don't really transition from dark to light much. For more on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here. I'd also like to quickly direct you to this image which shows that when we're working with thin line like textures if we outline and fill the shadow we will create a much more dynamic texture than simply drawing lines.
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 here appear a bit hastily done, it looks like you needed more time planning them before drawing them. Remember that whether our goal is to draw 1 form or 100, we want to be giving each line the same amount of time planning/ghosting before drawing it. This is another example of your page space could be utilized a bit more as well.
While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise 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, but I'd like you to draw through your forms in the future. Drawing through our forms helps us deepen our understanding of the 3D space we're attempting to construct, much like how it helped us with our boxes. When drawing your shadows you don't push them far enough to cast, instead they mostly hug the form creating them, try pushing them further. It appears like your shadows aren't following a consistent light source, I recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page to start with, it's easier than working with a light directly above your form pile.
Overall this was a solid submission, while you may have some things to work on I have no doubt you will improve with more mileage. I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to the next lesson.
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!
Next Steps:
Keep practicing previous exercise as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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