5:06 PM, Friday March 6th 2020
Texture may be tough, but I think you definitely took on that new manner of thinking and knocked it out of the park - but we'll get to that in a second.
Starting with your arrows, these are flowing pretty nicely through space, though one thing that stood out to me was that when you go back over your marks to add line weight, there's a visible scratchiness to it. Remember that every mark we put down - even to add line weight - should be drawn with confidence, applying the ghosting method. This may throw off your control early on, but these are simply exercises where we build up the skills we can apply later on. Taking steps like slowing down and tracing carefully may feel like they're improving your results, but they're really reducing how much you grow from the exercises themselves, so keep that in mind for the future. A slip-up now means more experience by which to do things "correctly" later.
Moving onto your organic forms with contour ellipses, one thing that caught my eye was that in all cases except the top right of the page, you appeared to keep the degree of your ellipses pretty consistent. This is actually incorrect - we want the degree to shift naturally as that cross section's orientation relationship with the viewer's orientation changes as we slide along the length of the form. Take a look at this diagram explaining the concept. Other than that, you're sticking well to proper sausage forms, and doing a good job of achieving evenly shaped ellipses that fit snugly within the bounds of the form. Same goes for your contour curves.
As I said before, you really did a great job with your textures. In the fact of thinking in a manner so different from the way you may be used to, you didn't hesitate and try to cling to the bits you could relate to, and instead dove into the deep end. That kind of boldness and bravery is certainly rewarded - you've done an excellent job of focusing on cast shadows instead of outlines when implying the presence of each little textural form, rather than drawing them explicitly. This has allowed you to achieve considerable control over the density of your textures, so you've been able to shift from dark to light seamlessly both in your texture analyses and in your dissections. This work is spectacular, and you should be proud of yourself.
Moving onto your form intersections, you've done a good job of capturing how the forms exist together within the same space, and your actual intersections are coming along well (despite this element merely being introduced here, and being something that we'll continue to develop and explore throughout the entirety of the course). Again, your use of line weight is a bit of a concern though - it's definitely better than with your arrows for the most part (with the straighter lines you're much more confident with your strokes), but the main issue Is that I think you're overusing it. Line weight should be reserved primarily for clarifying how different forms overlap - this means we use it in limited places, not applying it consistently to an entire edge, but allowing it to blend into a stroke, getting thicker and then thinner again, where a form passes in front of another. The issue is simply that you've been too eager to apply it all over the place. It's not a huge problem or anything, but you will benefit from thinking more in terms of a subtler use of line weight, rather than being so general and heavy-handed.
Lastly, your organic intersections are looking good. You've done a solid job of capturing how the forms slump and sag against one another as they attempt to resolve their balancing conundrum. In doing so, you've pushed the illusion that they clearly exist in 3D space, rather than as simple shapes pasted on top of one another on the page.
All in all, you're doing great. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the good work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 3.