Thinking in 3D

your organic arrows i feel are your weakest submissions but it's hard to say why exactly. there are some good overlapping arrows in there but there are also plenty that don't feel they recede into space but just go from side to side like they lay on a table. i guess i would say to overlap and exaggerate scale change even more. it will feel uncomfortable to draw. Also try to gradate your shading more like his example shows-- tighter where the form first turns and less as it gets further from the turn.

your org forms with contours look really good. there are a few ellipses that still dont quite reach your outer edges but it will get better with more practice. sometimes your degrees are still too similar within one sausage form. i feel your sausages get a bit long which is not bad for the texture dissection exercise but i would focus on Uncomfortables instructions about keeping 2 spheres on the edges of a tube idea. the ones with just the contours instead of ellipses has better sausage forms though that are not as long.

Texture and Detail

i think you have excellent observation skills and skills of drawing what you see. i think your coral study in the middle row is excellent and professional. all 3 texture analyses are really excellent. your dissections are really successful as well and you disperse the density of the textures really well. Raspberry and dragon fruit didnt show much of a highlight/dispersement but corn texture looks so good, i also tried to do corn and yours is lot more successful than mine. you did the avocado multiple times for the center dissection which is kinda cheating but I accept it. this one took forever because just finding the references takes so long. i appreciate that you did this over more than 2 years. i did this lesson over 1 year and felt i am so slow.

Construction

i think the one with so many forms is so ambitious and great! i think you have a great sense of form, shallow perspective, and good line quality. i like that you chose to draw through the form intersection as well which i was surprised was not in the instructions for this assignment as it seems so necessary to really understand form but it is challenging. your forms are drawn well but some of your intersections do confuse me for example in img_0008, in the lower left corner it is not clear to me how that top plane intersects the box on top of it. and just to the right of that is a box with its lower left corner showing a dissection that should really be obscured by the form in front of it. maybe that's the page you did a long time ago though. in img_10 the lower left sphere and cone intersect but i feel the intersection line should bend the other way following the contours of the sphere, but it's hard to tell because you didnt shade it. Same with the pyramid above that. the pramid on the lower right corner is really hard to understand in img10 too because there is no shading or line weight to help make it clear and as a result the intersection on it doesnt make sense to me. the cone above that pyramid on the right side of img10 is trying to intersect a sphere and cylinder but it isnt complete or successful and needed more time. i think your box forms on this page look excellent but the page would have benefited from shading. img11 as well i can see there are 2 intersection lines on the sphere towards the center that should be convex instead of concave i think so the intersection follows the contours of the sphere. the pyramid in the right corner intersects the cylinder in a way that doesnt make sense to me. it seems like 2 flat side faces of the pyramid intersect the rounded side face of the cylinder and that is all we should see because the back right face of the cylinder is turned away from us, however you have an intersection line on the far right face of the pyramid where it intersects nothing. the point of this exercise was to make forms that look like they have similar levels of perspective and with good line quality and i think you achieved this very well.

Hi Kittensmittens, congrats on completing lesson 2! I will handle your critique by dividing it in sections for each exercise.

Organic arrows

Your arrows look generally fluid and confident, flowing well through space. Most of them have also a clear sense of perspective and directionality. However, I noticed that in all of your arrows limited yourself quite a bit in the amount of apparent extension of your arrows: most of them indeed appear to flow towards or away from the viewer, but the perspective shrinking is consistently quite subtle, meaning that the width of your ribbons doesn't change that much. Also, many of your arrows show little change in curvature going towards the viewer, and the curves remain narrow. As a result, most of your arrows, while looking indeed 3-dimensional, look rather short or at least with their entire length being contained in a volume of space very close towards the viewer, as if the ribbon is being folded. To show some concrete examples of this we can look for instance at the 2 arrows on the left in the second page, which look a bit flat. Some arrows also tend do grow in width advancing but then shrinking again after a certain point, as if the ribbon was curving away from the viewer (like the central diagonal arrow in the first page and the second from the top on the left in the second page). A thing that you could have done, and should do in your future exercises, is experimenting more with radical perspective. Try to do more arrows like the biggest one in the first page and the one on the bottom left in the second but push things even further: make the farthest end even smaller and the nearest end even bigger, and make the curves wider and wider the further you go towards the viewer. To make myself clear, I'm not saying that what you did here is wrong, just that you could have tried to do arrows with more depth.

Organic forms

The organic forms look quite confident and fluid, and remain simple. There is some wobbling here and there, probably caused by an attempt to be precise in making a closed form. Remember that you should always put confidence over accuracy, even if you sausage shape ends up being not perfectly closed. If that happens you can always unite the disjointed curves with a ghosted curve. Regarding your ellipses, they look smooth and are correctly drawn through 2 times. The precision could be improved a bit, but the mostly deviate quite little from the bounds of the sausage. Their orientation follows quite well the "spine" of the sausage (which sometimes shows wobbling however: the previous point about confidence still stands, when in doubt ghost more instead of trying to consciously adjust your lines while you are tracing them). A thing to note is that your ellipses do change in degree of foreshortening, but it's a subtle change that doesn't convey the idea of 3d space as well as using a range of degree that is a bit wider could: remember that when we view even a simple cylinder from the side in space the degree of observation increases the farther the cylinder gets from our eyes, resulting in wider apparent dimension of its circular cross-sections (visual explanation from https://imgur.com/rXLBxSg). Similar points apply to your contour lines.

Texture analysis

You did a very good job here. Your textures are very detailed and manage to convey well the structures of the objects you have studies with the limitation of using only cast shadows. I particularly like what you did with the coral texture: instead of trying to cram a larger chunk of the "coral labyrinth" in the limited space of the panel you decided to "zoom in" and replicate from observation the finer structure of the coral, which helps the viewer to get a better idea of how the surface looks. In all of your textures in general you handled well the shade gradient.

Dissections

As in the texture analysis, the level of detail is good. You break the silhouette of the form depending on the composition of the material of the texture, which helps giving the form a solid consistency and making the textures feel more like actual details of a shape rather than mere lines on the paper. A difficulty I think you have here, however, is wrapping the textures around the forms. As an effect of the curvature of the sausage, details near the silhouette of the shape should look more "compressed" and crammed, and this effect become less and less pronounced flowing down the contour of the shape (example: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/e58b7887.jpg) . In some of your textures, the bricks and fish scales for instance, this effect isn't really visible, and as a result the texture ends up feeling a bit flat despite the amount of detail. Remember also that for textures we should use cast shadows and not form shadows, which you used in the olive texture. As a general rule for this course we should not use form shading unless stated, and when we choose a texture to reproduce we should always try to pick something that we can indeed convey through cast shadows only, and if not pick another texture.

Form intersections

The main objective of the exercise is to create a group of forms that look like they belong in the same scene, and I think you managed to do that quite well. The foreshortening is consistent both in your page of boxes only and in the pages with mixed shapes. You also made good use of the space if the page and didn't shy away from piling them close together. As this is your first introduction in the course to intersecting shapes, the accuracy of the intersection is a secondary point and I won't spend much time talking about them. I will only say that you boxes intersections are quite believable, and, with a bit more uncertainties, the same can be said for the mixed-shape pages. If you want to know more about how shapes intersects, there are several softwares and online tools that could help you. Aside from the usual reliables like Blender, I think that the 3D calculator of Geogebra can prove very useful for quickly visualizing simple overlapping shapes.

Organic intersections

Your organic forms keep looking fairly confident and they stack neatly on top of each other. I think you handled very well the way the shapes sag on one another following the curvature of the ones below, giving a nice sense of weight to your shapes. However, the shadows that they cast could have been handled better and in many cases they do not follow the curvature of the shape below or behind it, but follow the curve of the shape that is casting the shadow instead, almost making it look like there is a black halo surrounding the figure instead of a proper shade. This subtracts from the otherwise good sense of solidity of your collection of shapes.

Conclusion

Overall I think you have understood the main objectives of the lesson, with some caveats and things to improve, and that you are ready for lesson 3. Remember to keep repeating these exercises by incorporating them in your warmup routines, especially the ones with more uncertainties. Good luck and stay motivated!