Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

2:31 PM, Tuesday July 6th 2021

Seth Lynch - Drawabox Lesson 2 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/IBnMyq4.jpg

Find, rate and share the best memes and images. Discover the magic of th...

Lesson 2 let Me know what you think! Definitely struggled a bit with the 3D geometry intersections haha.

2 users agree
10:18 AM, Wednesday July 28th 2021

Hello Sethlynch, I hope that you're still here with us. I have checked your work on lesson 2 and I will give you my thoughts on it. I also noticed that your 250 boxes haven't been critiqued yet, I have taken a look at them and can tell that you need some more mileage with drawing boxes. I'll leave a critique on them in your 250 boxes post soon after I finish this and tell you what I think you need to do about that. Overall, it hasn't really impacted your ability to do lesson 2 apart from the form intersections exercise where the convergences of the boxes are really off which destroys the illusion of perspective. I think you're okay on Lesson 2 but you really need more mileage on the boxes.

Now for the critique:

Arrows : You did a good job with exploring the 3d space with the arrows. They have a good sense of depth to them. The first page had more wobbly lines, which was almost to be expected giving that this is the first time in the course you draw freely flowing curved lines. It's a daunting task to draw them the way you want to. You do get very comfortable in the second page which was impressive to see. So overall, excellent job!

Contour lines and ellipses: You did a generally good job with the contour ellipses. The axes of the ellipses line up pretty well in most cases with the flow of the form. You change the degree of them pretty nicely too. So good job with that. In the contour lines however, you seem to have had issues, which is understandable. Drawing contour lines can be very disorienting in the start, so its understandable that you didn't have the confidence tp align the contour lines properly. You seem to have done a much better job with the contour lines at the end, in the organic intersections exercise, which is impressive. So good job on these!

Texture analysis: You have some issues here but all of them are understandable for a first attempt. I'll leave some pointers for what I think you can do to improve these. Starting out with the paper texture, the stexture transition into pure black is too sudden. The cast shadows are too small on the darker end, The shadows should be more or less an inch long at the last edge before the fully dark end. The only white spots should be like the top most peaks of the paper crumbles at that point. It sounds extreme but that's how it should be, a region in pitch black is pretty extreme too after all. You have a similar problem with the leaf texture at the end. The cast shadows by the veins are too small in my opinion. Now coming to the sting ray skin texture, I see that you have only paid attention to the shadows in the crevices between the spheres of the skin completely neglecting the cast shadows the spheres themselves would cast. In the darkest region, you've drawn what would be more appropriate for the middle region. And the middle region has without would work for the brightest region where the light starts to fill in some of the shadow in the space between two spheres. In the dark region what starts to happen is that the spheres before a sphere also cast a shadow on it, leaving only the top most parts visible. The side away from the light is also dark as effectively no light reaches it in the dark region, which it would have in the medium and bright zones because of the light bouncing off of the spheres around them.

Dissections : These look nice. You take a lot of effort in pushing the silhouette which is nice. There are some instances where I see you drawing outlines instead of shadows. The snake belly is a good example. The long fat lines in the middle of the texture do a good job looking like cast shadows,but what broke the texture is the fact that the last fold also had a line of the same thickness. If you used a thin line for the silhouette, you could have sold the actual cast shadows in the middle much better,but seeing the sillhouette with that thick of a line broke the illusion.

Form intersections : This is really the only exercise of yours that I think you need to do better. The intersections themselves being off is okay. [https://images-ext-2.discordapp.net/external/rvDOEpSWih7FLx8dG3CuHwqB1Utj_HS5k0HCJD8dH2k/%3Fwidth%3D480%26height%3D473/https/media.discordapp.net/attachments/368871002584907776/382605790869061664/Demo.png?width=381&height=375](Here's am image that might help you with that.) What I really need is for the scene to feel coherent in perspective. You take the easy road out with all surfaces being completely flat in perspective, which is fine. You have put in thought about the relationships between the forms which is what the point was. Keep practicing this exercise. I'd suggest you to join the drawabox discord server, if you wanted a critique on a particular attempt of yours on the form intersections.

Organic Intersections : These came out really well. The pile of the forms feels stable like it should. The contour lines are drawn nicely and the cast shadows work. Solid attempt

Next Steps:

Do the revisions on the 250 box challenge before progressing to lesson 3.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
1:04 PM, Tuesday August 3rd 2021

Holy crap! Thank you for taking the time to write out such an in depth critique! I will definitely work on the areas you mentioned. The link to the photo isn't working for me but I think I understand what you mean, i'm gonna do some work on that one. Thank again for taking the time to write this out I really appreciate it!

7:31 PM, Tuesday August 3rd 2021

Oh hey, I think I formatted the link incorrectly. The word Here's got added to the link, kek. Here's the actual link, without any attempts at fancy formatting

https://images-ext-2.discordapp.net/external/rvDOEpSWih7FLx8dG3CuHwqB1Utj_HS5k0HCJD8dH2k/%3Fwidth%3D480%26height%3D473/https/media.discordapp.net/attachments/368871002584907776/382605790869061664/Demo.png?width=381&height=375

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
The Art of Brom

The Art of Brom

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.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.