Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

5:19 AM, Friday May 1st 2020

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Please review my homework for Lesson 2.

Thanks in advance,

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6:23 PM, Friday May 1st 2020

Starting with your arrows, these are looking really great - and I'm pretty sure it's not just because they're all kinds of different colours. I see what you're doing, trying to dazzle me with rainbows into looking past your flaws. I know your games.

The arrows flow quite nicely and confidently through space. One thing you need to be a little more aware of though is how the spacing between the zigzagging sections will compress consistently with the narrowing of the ribbon itself (due to perspective). The black one in the upper left of the first page for example gets narrower more quickly than the spacing itself compresses, so keep an eye on that. It'll help you capture a greater sense of depth.

For your organic forms with contour lines, you've done a good job of sticking to fairly simple sausages, your contour ellipses are well rounded and evenly shaped, and you're doing a good job of squeezing them in between the edges of the silhouette. There's one issue though - for the most part you seem to be keeping the degree of your contour ellipses and curves the same throughout the entirety of a given sausage form. As shown here, the degree of a contour curve tells us of the orientation of that specific cross-section of the form, relative to the viewer. As we sample along different points, the relationship between that slice's orientation and the angle at which the viewer is looking changes, causing it to "open up" more, the further off it goes.

Your work on the texture analyses is spot on. You've done an excellent job of focusing on the use of shadow shapes rather than any lines or outlines, and have employed them very effectively to control the density throughout your gradients. You then go on to apply that quite well throughout your dissections, exploring a wide variety of textures. The only one that stood out to me as a bit off was the gator skin. More specifically, you appear to have relied a bit on some haphazard, scribbly marks here, rather than transferring information directly from your reference image onto the page.

Your form intersections are coming along very well. Not only are you demonstrating a good grasp of how to draw these forms consistently and cohesively such that they feel like they exist within the same three dimensional scene, but you're also demonstrating an excellent start on the intersections themselves. This exercise is only intended to serve as an introduction to how the forms relate to one another in space (something we define explicitly through the intersection lines), and spatial reasoning as a whole is a concept we explore more thoroughly throughout the entirety of the course. You're definitely sitting at an advantage here, as I don't at all expect students to be able to wrap their heads around how to capture the intersections correctly.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a good job of establishing how these forms interact with one another, slumping and sagging as they find a state of equilibrium. Probably wasn't a great idea to draw these in different colours though, they tend to look much better as a single colour, especially in how the cast shadows help marry them together. Of course, the exercises aren't really about how things look at the end, so it's not a big deal.

All in all, fantastic work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:20 PM, Friday May 1st 2020

First, thanks so much for the critique and sorry about the rainbow of colors. xD

The fineliner pens I found all came in packs of colors. And I'd rather use all of them up at once, rather than using just black until it's empty.

With the arrows I kinda have a tough time trying to control the spacing of the zigzaging. I kinda though I was compressing the spacing as I went further back, but it turns out I didn't once the arrow was done.

With the organic forms I did try to change the degree of the contours but perhaps I was a bit too shy with it.

As for the gator skin, I also realized it was probably the weakest one. The reference image had a lot of contrast in local color with a lot of patterns. It was just too much information for me to handle.

And in the organic intersections, yeah the colors didn't really help this one. I noticed that some pen colors are just way dimmer than others, which made it difficult to make some forms to appear in front of others. I ordered the second page with the lighter colors at the bottom of the stack which helped a bit.

Again, thanks for the critique and looking forward to what lesson 3 will bring. :-)

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Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.

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