Sorry for the wait - the usual TA who critiques Lesson 2 is a little under the weather, so I'm grabbing this before it gets unreasonably delayed.
Starting with your arrows, the arrows themselves flow smoothly and confidently through space until you start applying line weight. That's ultimately where the problem arises. Your line weight is applied hesitantly, tracing back over the existing lines rather than drawing those additional strokes with the same methodology you used for the original marks, and as a result they wobble a lot. Line weight should not be applied through tracing, which is a process that focuses too much on how the existing lines sit on the 2D page, rather than how they flow through 3D space. Instead, it should use the ghosting method, same as the original, and should be focused on local areas rather than trying to reinforce along the entirety of an existing line. Line weight is, after all, just for clarifying specific overlaps between forms. While this should make it easier, you may still run into little hiccups where your accuracy fails, but that's fine. Accuracy will improve with practice, not by changing your overall markmaking approach.
Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you're generally doing a pretty decent job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausage forms, and you're also showing a good grasp of how the contour lines' degrees change as we slide along the length of a given form, depending on how it's turning in space. There are however a few issues at play here:
First and foremost, your ellipses are drawn hesitantly - again, like the line weight, you're not executing with a confident stroke. Remember that the ghosting method - which is what you should be using for each and every mark you draw - hinges on the idea of separating the mark making process into a series of steps, each with their own responsibilities. The final step (the execution of the mark) only has one responsibility: to do so confidently, without hesitation, to produce a smooth, even stroke. When we hesitate, our line wobbles, and in this case it throws off the elliptical shape. Drawing through our ellipses also helps with this, but only when we're willing to lean into that confidence. If we hesitate, it becomes something of a moot point.
It does look like when you draw your contour lines, you press pretty hard on the pen, resulting in really heavy strokes. Applying too much pressure is a bad idea. Not only will it damage the pen tip, but it'll also rob any nuance from your pen, causing the lines you produce to appear overly uniform and stiff.
Your contour curves, in some cases, have you going over them with multiple passes. You may be confusing this with the fact that we insist upon you drawing through your ellipses. Since these are not ellipses, that does not apply here. Drawing through ellipses specifically means going around the shape two full times before lifting your pen up off the page. It's a process that helps us gravitate more towards even, elliptical shapes (when done so with confidence), and its entire purpose becomes moot once you lift your pen in between passes. Of course, if you're going back over your strokes to correct mistakes, remember that doing so is a bad habit that only draws attention to the blunders.
Keep an eye on the alignment of your contour curves. Be sure to rotate the page to find the most comfortable angle of approach, and focus on aligning your contour curves and ellipses to the flow of the sausage form, represented by that central minor axis line.
Continuing onto your texture analyses, yeah - you definitely did go overboard here. You were on the right track to start with the paper texture, but when you got beyond that, you largely forgot about the focus of the exercise being on capturing the shadows cast by the textural forms present along our object's surface, and using those shadows to create our gradient. What you did here was essentially to use hatching lines to draw what you saw in your reference - not to analyze and apply information pertaining to the actual 3D form information.
Of course, you did a lovely job of using that hatching, but it was decidedly not what was being asked of you. You will definitely need to review the instructions for this exercise, and watch the demo video, to refresh your memory on what the instructions actually were.
Your work in your dissections was definitely more in the direction of what we're after, so that's good, but it is a bit of a mixed bag. There are definitely areas where you still rely very heavily on outlines (as explained here) to pin down the specific position of your textural forms before worrying about the shadows they might cast. In that sense, you are still relying very heavily on observation (which is good), but not coupling it with enough time spent analyzing the forms you're observing, and determining the nature of the shadows that would be cast to imply those forms' presence in your drawing.
I don't doubt for a second that you're capable of this, but I suspect that since you obviously have considerable experience with this kind of drawing, you may have allowed it to cloud your judgment when it comes to how you were going to approach this lesson. When we already feel confident in our abilities in an area, it can cause us to focus on demonstrating that fact. This in turn can become a distraction, getting so caught up in showing what we can do, and ultimately paying less attention to what you were asked to do.
Moving onto your form intersections, I do have a few concerns here as well:
You're not drawing through your ellipses, and your linework with them is very hesitant and uncertain. Apply the ghosting method (finishing with a confident execution), draw from your shoulder, and complete two full circuits of each ellipse before lifting your pen.
Your straight lines do show varying levels of confidence, suggesting that you are indeed applying the ghosting method in many cases, but perhaps not always as fastidiously. In case you're not entirely grasping the principles behind this technique, I explain in detail the mindset of how it's like a production line, each individual phase with its own focuses and responsibilities here in this explanation to another student.
In the instructions here, I mentioned that you should avoid forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension. You have a lot of elongated cylinders included here.
In later pages like this one, there are definitely instances of more gratuitous line weight, where it seems pretty clear you've maybe tried to add line weight, ended up with a gap in between the strokes, and then filled it in. That's really not a good idea. Line weight itself should never be allowed to get very thick - it's a subtle whisper to the viewer's subconscious, and should rely primarily on relative changes in thickness, nothing so obvious that it'll stand out to our conscious minds.
Do not rely on any dashed or broken lines in your form intersections, or really anywhere in this course. Every time a line is broken, its trajectory shifts and can no longer be trusted. I understand that dashed lines are easier to understand in this context, but for the purposes of what we're learning in this course, avoid their use.
As you progress through the set, you seem to stop constructing your cylinders and cones around central minor axis lines. Using the minor axis line to help align any ellipses is very useful, so I strongly recommend you do so here and in the future.
When it comes to the intersections and relationships defined between the forms, your work is coming along nicely. The key here is that there are a lot of instructions both in this exercise and in relation to concepts introduced previously that you're forgetting or skipping. This suggests that you may be getting rusty in these areas (perhaps not being as fastidious in keeping up with older exercises as part of a regular warmup routine as discussed back in Lesson 0), and that you may not be reading the instructions as carefully as you should.
This largely continues with the organic intersections, where at face value you've done an excellent job in demonstrating how the forms interact with one another as they get stacked up, but you've totally neglected to draw each and every sausage in its entirety (especially in the second page), instead choosing to focus on keeping the end result clean.
These are exercises. That means that the process of how we approach the drawing matters infinitely more than the end result. By drawing our forms in their entirety, we can establish a much better grasp of how they exist in space, and how they relate to one another. You clearly have a reasonably well developed grasp of spatial relationships already, but you're going through this course to take them further. In order to do so, this is going to be extremely important - especially as we get into later lessons where we end up with drawings full of overlapping forms and entities.
Now, because of the looseness with which you've followed the instructions, this critique has gotten exceptionally lengthy. I am going to be assigning revisions - not because I'm not confident in your ability to do these exercises correctly, but because it is by certain choices you've made that you did not deliver what was requested.
You are not alone in that - it happens every now and then, and for those who have prior experience it is even more common, simply because of how the human brain tends to work. With these revisions, you'll have the opportunity to better demonstrate that you can sit down and follow everything to the letter - both in the instructions presented here, and in how other concepts have been explained in previous lessons. And of course, if you haven't been doing your previous exercises as part of a regular warmup routine, now is a good time to start.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
1 page of organic forms with contour lines, split between ellipses and curves
1 page of texture analyses
2 pages of form intersections
1 page of organic intersections
And of course, reread the instructions of each exercise in full immediately before doing them.
Hi! Thank you for taking care of this review and I hope that the other person feels better soon.
-----ORGANIC ARROWS-----
Applying the right line weight with a Sharpie (Ultra Fine Point) is not easy at all—thin lines, at least. The reason why is because the ink leaks out very easily, which is why I later switched to a Staedtler fineliner. From what you are telling me, it seems that it would be okay to go through the motion of ghosting original lines to add weight, even though it means that I will inevitably draw new lines next to the original ones, in which case it wouldn't add weight to them at all... Also, what if I tried to add weight to only a tiny portion of a line that appears closer? Would I still have to use my entire arm or would it suffice to just use my wrist and trace over that little portion? (I would assume that I shouldn't do that.)
I'm asking for clarification because this is not the first time someone has told me that my lines are too thick and wobbly, so here is what I understand:
-----ORGANIC FORMS WITH CONTOUR LINES-----
As for my ellipses in the organic forms, all I am trying to do is commit to the marks that I make, sometimes at the price of confidence, I admit.
I'm confused as to how you would be able to see confidence either way in lines that are not committed and go all over the local areas as you call them. What if I did so, only then for me to be told that I have to work yet again on line weight? Which one do you want? – Motion? Weight that commits to original or "local area" lines? Is it just a matter of letting my accuracy improve over time and that I simply can't do anything about having both confident motion and good line weight for the time being?
Again, the Sharpie that I used up to the texture analyses is very sensitive to pressure, so most lines were done with the least amount of pressure possible. I would say they were done with a range of small to medium pressure.
I think I did make multiple passes with contour curves. I will do them with only one pass in the future.
-----TEXTURE ANALYSIS-----
Some textures seem indistinguishable if I don't focus on the more particular elements. How could I make wood fibers pop if they do not even protrude? You would only get a rectangular plank or a flat surface if it is processed wood like the one I used as reference.
Instead of hatching lines, would you say it would be better for me to think of 3D gradients as solid shadow shapes created by the bigger bumps on the surface? Since I was looking at a wood plank, there was not much difference on the surface at all—only the numerous fibers that didn't protrude seemed to qualify as "texture"—, so it may have been a bad choice of reference. I did the same thing with the strawberry, but at least now the solution here is easier for me to grasp... However...
-----DISSECTIONS-----
... I have seen how you depict alluminium, meat, kiwi, beetle shell and chrome in some homework examples, which are "flat" textures like the two last ones I made in the previous analysis exercise.
I suppose I will have to exaggerate the lighting to push some shadows and make one side really dark instead of relying too much on outlines like I did... Still, it's very much a case by case study, so I'm not so sure.
I do have the tendency to observe a lot, to a fault. What ends up happening is that I try to emphasize as many little shapes as I can to make the subject obvious, which sacrifices some emphasis on shadows because of the shapes that I see in them and resorting to hatching instead, but that appears to not be the point of the exercise. I think I understand what was asked of me, but I will check the instructions once more to make sure. I will try to not get carried away next time.
When looking back at the homework examples, I notice that they are much lighter and less clogged than mine. Still, were it not for the words you've attached next to them, I wouldn't be able to identify some of them (like the hairy arm, bark or concrete). Perhaps even this is not something that I should focus on.
-----FORM INTERSECTIONS-----
What to keep in mind: ghosting method; executing confident lines and not lifting the pen until I have done 2 circuits of an ellipse; drawing from the shoulder.
So when you say that the third step of ghosting takes care of execution in making a confident stroke, you are essentially saying that what the third step accomplishes is out of my control, except for the fact that I choose to be either hesitant or confident in whatever stroke is produced and that it can still, regardless of any effort, turn out to be a mistake and that this is the type of mistake that you want to see instead of having students try to cover them up by choosing to be "hesitant" (tracing the lines or slowing down when they feel that they are making a bad stroke). Thus, accuracy is left up to the previous two steps, but the third one—the actual markmaking—only serves to deliver something "confident". But then, it gets very confusing to me as to what qualifies as something that actually passes the exercice or what confidence actually is and what you mean by it. Do I just make a mark and leave it all up to luck after having determined the type of line and required motion needed to make it? Is this not recklessness? Oh, but wait, it can't be reckless because I have already tried the best I could to approximate the type and motion of the stroke in the first two steps. That said, what if I did a line confidently, with my shoulder, but it appears to be too thick or wobbly nonetheless? What if the resulting accuracy, that I have tried to calculate in my mind in the first two steps of ghosting, does not add any weight to any line? I guess I would just have to redo every exercice that demands ghosting lines until, somehow, I happen to get it "right" by pure luck, and I use the word "luck" because that's how it feels regardless of the first two steps.
---> "Confidence" now means "choosing to accept that the second your pen touches the page, any opportunity to avoid a mistake that may or may not happen has now passed".
"Finally, the third in the line is responsible for making a single, smooth, confident stroke. They're not responsible for accuracy, for how closely you reproduce that planned, prepared motion. It's just to make a simple stroke - and you know you can make a smooth stroke because if you go to a page and draw them as quickly as you can without even thinking about which stroke you want to make, they'll come out smoothly. Their job is just to make the mark with no hesitation, because they have nothing to hesitate about."
I will remind myself of that.
I admit that I have not been doing regular warmups with exercices introduced in lesson 1. I will be sure to do more of them.
I will also be sure to make shorter cylinders, boxes and pyramids.
So, line weight again... I think the same problem you've mentioned happened here too (sphere and cone): https://i.imgur.com/OY7ZcEC.png
From what I understand, line weight should never do a big "jump" in thickness from the rest of its length—only just enough for it to be noticeable, yet not outright conspicuous. It's especially obivous if I merge a new stroke with an old one to make it look as if I intentionally wanted to make it thicker, only for the purpose of making the shapes look more accurate than those initial lines that I've made. Once again, this goes back into the issue of how I think of the ghosting process. If I had been more accepting of my initial lines, there would be much less thickness in the ones shown here... There would be, however, a lot more diverging lines in "local areas"... in which case, would thickness of a line rely more on the number of lines that I make while following the same approximate motion of an original one? I would imagine that it would look smoother, but perhaps less accurate.
I read all the written instructions and watch the videos linked to them at least once before doing the exercices—that is, until I have a pretty good idea of what I should do. They are quite lengthy, so I do happen to forget some details as time goes on.
I will take some time to review not just the exercices that you've assigned for me, but also everything up to this point. I'll see how it turns out.
Questions are absolutely fine, but in the future, please stick to bullet points. Reading through your 1500 word response is no small task. Keeping your questions concise would help me save a great deal of time. I totally get that a good bit of this is reiteration and self-reflection, and that's great - but you really should do that on your own, rather than having me spend half an hour to hunt down each bit that actually pertains to me.
Arrows
From what you are telling me, it seems that it would be okay to go through the motion of ghosting original lines to add weight, even though it means that I will inevitably draw new lines next to the original ones, in which case it wouldn't add weight to them at all...
Every single drawing in this course is an exercise, and the process itself and what it helps us learn and develop in our skills is infinitely more important than the end result. If you end up with two lines sitting next to one another with a gap between them, instead of a single line that reads as being a bit thicker, that's perfectly fine because it is one stroke of thousands you'll be drawing.
Conversely, if you focus on what gets you accuracy now (tracing slowly, using your wrist, etc.) that wobbling won't decrease nearly as reliably, given practice and time, in the way that accuracy does improve with practice.
Would I still have to use my entire arm or would it suffice to just use my wrist and trace over that little portion?
Use your entire arm.
Contour Lines
I'm confused as to how you would be able to see confidence either way in lines that are not committed
I don't really know what you're referring to here, in regards to "committed" marks. If a mark exists on the page, and is visible, then we can assess whether or not it maintains a purely consistent trajectory, or if it wobbles with a lack of confidence.
What if I did so, only then for me to be told that I have to work yet again on line weight? Which one do you want? – Motion? Weight that commits to original or "local area" lines?
Again, I'm kind of confused - this exercise has nothing to do with line weight. At no point in the instructions are you requested to add line weight. It is only about drawing simple sausage forms and wrapping contour lines around their surfaces.
Is it just a matter of letting my accuracy improve over time and that I simply can't do anything about having both confident motion and good line weight for the time being?
As explained in the production-line analogy you've since read, the ghosting method exists to split the process of mark making into three distinct phases. The first two are where we invest our time, and how we can effectively do our best to improve our chances of accuracy. That doesn't guarantee perfect accuracy, but it makes a difference. Beyond that, yes - we have to accept that our mechanical skill, which will improve with practice, will only allow for a certain degree of accuracy and control right now.
Texture Analyses
How could I make wood fibers pop if they do not even protrude?
Here it comes down to a matter of resolution - or you could think of it as how closely you are zoomed into the surface. Wood is an exceptionally smooth surface, and only when we look at it REALLY closely does the magnitude of its unevenness become more apparent. If you want to capture it as anything other than smooth, you'll need to do your study from that close up.
would you say it would be better for me to think of 3D gradients as solid shadow shapes created by the bigger bumps on the surface? Since I was looking at a wood plank, there was not much difference on the surface at all—only the numerous fibers that didn't protrude seemed to qualify as "texture"—, so it may have been a bad choice of reference.
Correct!
Still, were it not for the words you've attached next to them, I wouldn't be able to identify some of them (like the hairy arm, bark or concrete). Perhaps even this is not something that I should focus on.
I'm actually planning on doing a pretty heavy revision as soon as I have the time of a lot of the video material throughout all the lessons (they're getting kind of old at this point), and I do want to try to re-explore how to communicate certain matters regarding this exercise. So your uncertainty and confusion here is understandable.
This exercise really is, again, just about thinking about forms on surfaces. Recognizability isn't actually all that important, and you'll find that even when dealing with actual illustrations and finished works, there will be so much information providing context to a given texture. The texture itself will never be alone in conveying the identity of an object or surface, and in circumstances where it might, you'll find that were you to take a picture of a surface without any other context, you may find it equally difficult to identify.
These lessons will, time and time again, demand that you focus only on the narrow scope of information presented to you and not to introduce your own concerns to it. That is where a lot of your issues seem to be arising:
We stress the use of the ghosting method, executing our marks with confidence to maintain our first priority of smooth strokes (remember that this priority was stated back in Lesson 1 - flow is always more important than accuracy). But because you're concerned with your accuracy now, you distract yourself from that goal and deviate from the instructions.
In the organic forms with contour lines, you worry about the use of line weight, when this exercise never asks for line weight to be applied at all. It addresses a limited set of problems in order to provide a more refined focus, and to be more effective as an exercise.
Long story short, don't treat every exercise as being intended to help you with develop every skill. Each exercise has its purpose, and it should only be concerned with that limited purpose. Nothing more.
Form Intersections
what the third step accomplishes is out of my control, except for the fact that I choose to be either hesitant or confident
Yes.
turn out to be a mistake and that this is the type of mistake that you want to see instead of having students try to cover them up by choosing to be "hesitant"
Correct!
Thus, accuracy is left up to the previous two steps, but the third one—the actual markmaking—only serves to deliver something "confident".
Exactly!
I guess I would just have to redo every exercice that demands ghosting lines until, somehow, I happen to get it "right" by pure luck, and I use the word "luck" because that's how it feels regardless of the first two steps.
As discussed back in Lesson 0:
Yes, I know - you will not likely feel satisfied with your results on this first-ever attempt at the exercises. You will feel inclined to try them again. Don't. The focus here is not on impressing someone - not me, not the community, not even yourself. There is no expectation that you will be able to do these exercises perfectly, and some of them are specifically designed to be an introduction to a concept where you will fall flat on your face. Accept this now, and it will save you a lot of grief in the future.
You appear to be under the impression that you are expected to demonstrate your ability to do the exercises perfectly (or even correctly) in order to have the lesson marked as complete. This is incorrect. You will not be able to do the work perfectly, which is precisely why you are expected to continue to practice those exercises as part of a regular warmup routine.
The homework you are assigned is simply to create a body of work that helps us assess whether you do or do not understand the concepts conveyed in the lesson (understanding something is entirely different from being able to apply it in practice), and whether you understand the goals you should be aiming for.
By the very instructions, you are not allowed to keep redoing the work over and over until you're satisfied, because your own satisfaction is irrelevant. All that is asked of you is that you follow the instructions to the best of your ability (they are dense, one can certainly forget things, and I understand this happens even with the best of intentions), and that you invest the time necessary to execute the marks to the best of your ability. If your capacity for accuracy and control (while maintaining appropriate confidence) simply isn't there yet, that's entirely normal. You have your limits, and all I ask is that you not rush through the work so I can see what they are.
I read all the written instructions and watch the videos linked to them at least once before doing the exercices—that is, until I have a pretty good idea of what I should do. They are quite lengthy, so I do happen to forget some details as time goes on.
As I mentioned before, I totally understand this. Students make mistakes, they miss things, even when they're trying their best. Reading through the instructions multiple times is often necessary, because it is dense. It's dense because the material is complicated, and it's dense because frankly I'm a very wordy person and am continually trying to find ways to be more concise (which is why I rewrite the material periodically - we're likely on the third or fourth version of the course at this point).
Just to reiterate, and I'm not saying this to be mean - in the future, if you have questions, keep them short and keep them to the point. You apparently share in my own weakness for long, drawn out explanations, and unfortunately I only have so much time.
At the end of the day, you've expressed, to a point, that you understand the material, but words aren't worth much. We'll see that understanding reflected in your revisions, where my past six years of critiquing thousands of homework submissions will come to bear. One's lines speak volumes of their own, and they often speak truths of which the student themselves may be unaware.
Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.
The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.
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