Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
12:27 AM, Wednesday August 24th 2022
Finally finished Lesson 2 Ive still got a long way to go on this journey.
Hi,
So this is my first critique and I'm going to try my best based on the official critique I received for this lesson.
On the arrows ribbons, the shading at the curves looks nice to me. One thing to note is the ribbon/arrow is supposed to get smaller as it goes further back in space, helping the illusion of 3D space. The ones that bend over themselves look really nice and I think give the impression of going back into space. The ones that didn't quite give the illusion were the ones that didn't bend over themselves. Also, something to consider is instead of going over the lines more than once, try to just get one fluid line for each mark you make and leave it at that.
The organic forms with the contour elipses and curves look really nice, especially the second one. You seem to have really understood that concept and in my opinion you've done super well on making them feel like they have mass.
The texture exercise looks good too. The only thing is that from the lesson he talked about implying the texture, which you did really well on the first page of texture, where it goes from dark to light, but on the organic forms I only see you using that technique a few times. Other than that, I think they do look accurate to the texture they are supposed to represent.
The form intersections look good. One thing I found helpful was when adding the line that shows where the intersection happens, make sure that line goes with the other lines on that plane/side of the box, as if it would lead to the same vanishing point. Most of them look great, but the one on the bottom right of the box intersections is a bit off on that.
The other form intersection pages look great. It seems you have really gotten the concept down. The only thing I would recommend is trying to have just one confident mark for each line you want to make, instead of going over it a few times. When adding line weight to make the intersection clear, use it subtly.
The organic intersection looks good, again, you really showed the objects having mass, which is great. The shadows also make sense and look great. The lines are a bit messy, but I already mentioned that before.
Great job!
Next Steps:
For the next steps, maybe go over the mark making portions of the first lesson.
After that, I would recommend moving on to the next lesson.
Thanks for the critique.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.