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9:42 PM, Monday January 9th 2023

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!

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Lesson 3

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4:16 PM, Wednesday January 11th 2023

Thank you so much for the thorough feedback! I'll keep in mind to bring some more sausages and cylinder-adjacent forms into my warmups.

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