This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
9:17 PM, Saturday April 6th 2024
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.
-
Starting off in the arrows section your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. You're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. You're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. At times you don't overlap your edges when you should, this results in your arrows flattening out as you can see here. 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 you're doing a good job keeping your forms simple, plenty of people tend to over-complicate them. You're keeping your line work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. 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. Quick reminder before moving on that you should be drawing through all of your ellipses, including the small ones on the ends of your forms.
-
In the texture exercises (more so in your dissections) you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself. 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. 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 are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work.
-
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. I'd like you to draw through all of your forms when attempting this exercise again in the future, it will help reinforce your understanding of the 3D space you're creating. Your shadows are hugging the form creating them at times rather than being cast on to another surface believably. Your shadows appear to be following a consistent light source, be sure to experiment with different angles and intensities when trying this exercise again in the future. 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 move you on to the next lesson.
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!
Next Steps:
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
Sketching: The Basics
A lot of folks have heard about Scott Robertson's "How to Draw" - it's basically a classic at this point, and deservedly so. It's also a book that a lot of people struggle with, for the simple reason that they expect it to be a manual or a lesson plan explaining, well... how to draw. It's a reasonable assumption, but I've found that book to be more of a reference book - like an encyclopedia for perspective problems, more useful to people who already have a good basis in perspective.
Sketching: The Basics is a far better choice for beginners. It's more digestible, and while it introduces a lot of similar concepts, it does so in a manner more suited to those earlier in their studies.