Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
1:55 PM, Tuesday June 1st 2021
Lesson completed
You've done a very good job overall. Your organic dissections & intersections came out particularly well.
While the arrows in your arrows exercise do get bigger, the spacing between the parts of each arrow does not get bigger as they get closer. This is another aspect of perspective that is important to keep in mind.
Organic forms are good overall. I personally think that you could have pushed the changes in degrees of the ellipses more to help sell how the forms move through space, and a couple of the forms change width.
The texture analysis is pretty good. Your gradients are very good, especially the one for crumpled paper. On the other two, the black bar is very obvious and the textures don't end up transitioning to completely white space at the end. Aside from that, the shift is executed very well.
You did very well on the organic forms dissection exercise. The textures are all clear, adhere to the forms, and break silhouette when appropriate. I don't have much to say here; good work.
The forms intersection exercise is good. A couple of the forms feel a little off, but the vast majority of them do feel like they belong together. The actual intersections are executed very well; you've put some good thought into how these shapes fit together. I do also want to mention the line confidence here; it feels like you lost a bit of your confidence in this exercise specifically. It may not apply to the whole lesson, but still, continue to hone your line confidence and ghosting ability.
The organic intersections are quite good. The shadows adhere to the forms they are cast onto and the actual forms rest on each other in a way that is believable. This is another one where I don't have much to say.
Next Steps:
You've done a fine job with this lesson, and you are certainly ready to move on to lesson 3, in my opinion. You should be able to improve your arrows when you revisit the exercise in lesson 3.
Good work!
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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.
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