Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

9:34 PM, Wednesday May 13th 2020

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Had a little trouble with form intersections. Loved the texture analysis. As always thank you for all the help and feedback!

Alan

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4:42 AM, Thursday May 14th 2020

Starting with your arrows, these are looking great. You've got an excellent sense of flow and motion to them, and you're not only applying foreshortening to the positive space (the width of the ribbon) but also to the negative space (the distances between the zigzagging sections). In doing so, you're demonstrating an excellent sense of depth to your scenes.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you're doing a great job of sticking to simple sausage forms as mentioned in the instructions. You're also doing a great job of drawing the ellipses to be smooth, confident and evenly shaped, while also keeping them snug between the edges of the forms. There is one shortcoming however - you don't appear to entirely understand how the degree of those contour ellipses reflect the orientation of the individual cross-sections at each individual point. While yours aren't of a consistent degree throughout most of these (a common mistake), the shift in degree seems to be somewhat reversed. The way the degree should vary is illustrated here. One thing that helps to understand this is this explanation of how the degree of the ends of a cylinder work. The end farther from the viewer will always be narrower than the farther end. Now, a cylinder is straight, and a sausage form can bend and twist, so this does factor into how the orientation of that cross-section might change (and therefore the degree would change too) but it helps provide a baseline for how this behaves.

Moving onto your texture analyses, I feel like these were largely well done. You've demonstrated a great deal of care and patience in the observation of your reference images, and by the end of the last row you are demonstrating an understanding of how the marks you're drawing are shadow shapes rather than actual lines - and you continue to demonstrate this throughout your dissections, which contain a considerable amount of detail, and clearly took a lot of time and patience to pull off.

Now, keep in mind that our primary focus across all of this is the ability to control the density of our textures - and in a number of these, you do still struggle with that concept to a point. This is totally normal and expected, but when you've got textures like scales, corn, etc. with a lot of individual textural forms, you're going to feel compelled to draw their outlines before figuring out your shadows. Don't. Leave the outlines out completely. This is because as soon as you enclose a form with an outline, it's locked in, and has been defined explicitly. This means you cannot suggest that certain forms exist without actually drawing them in such an explicit manner, since you've already made a contract with the viewer that you're approaching things in this explicit manner. If you're going to work implicitly, then that means relying on only drawing the shadows these forms cast on their surrounding surfaces - not drawing the forms themselves. I go into much more detail back in the lesson notes for this here, so be sure to review them again. You're getting there, but this can take a while to really click with these kinds of textures that are made up of all these tiny individual pieces.

With your form intersections, I think you've done a really good job of drawing your forms in such a way that they feel cohesive and consistent. Your shortcoming here however is that while you've got a handful of attempts at figuring out how the forms themselves intersect, you've not really tackled the vast majority of these. The intersections are themselves an introduction to the concept of spatial relationships - they define how the forms relate to one another in 3D space. This is not something I expect you to understand how to do, nor do I expect you to be able to do it well. All I ask is that, despite this discomfort with an entirely foreign concept, you make the attempt anyway, and do so throughout the entire exercise. This will lay the groundwork as we further explore spatial relationships throughout the rest of this course, as it is one of the bedrock principles of Drawabox as a whole.

Lastly, your organic intersections are looking good. You've captured how the forms interact with one another, along with a clearly established sense of gravity that causes the forms to slump and sag over one another.

So! All in all you've done a great job, but since you only did a fairly minimal attempt at figuring out your intersections, I'm going to have to give you another opportunity to do that more thoroughly with an additional page of that exercise.

Next Steps:

Do one more page of form intersections.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:48 PM, Thursday May 14th 2020

Additional page of form intersections located here: https://imgur.com/a/1rMORjn

Took a little more time with this one specifically focusing on intersections. I think this is going to be my new go to for practice for awhile. That said, some of the intersections are starting to feel more natural. Need more practice with sphere intersections though.

Thanks again for your feedback and help.

Alan

4:05 AM, Friday May 15th 2020

Much better. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

One minor point though - since you're scanning in your work, you're probably using the "drawing" preset which has a tendency to ramp up your contrast, eliminating the nuance and subtle elements of your linework. Try scanning it under the 'photo' presets to capture your work as accurately as possible.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:24 AM, Friday May 15th 2020

Will do I think the only setting i have adjusted is 300dpi. Thanks for the tip!

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