Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

11:09 PM, Tuesday February 4th 2020

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I think the texture assignment was updated the day after I finished it. There was a chunk here I didn't really 'get' as well.

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11:09 PM, Wednesday February 5th 2020

Starting with your arrows, these definitely flow quite nicely across the page, though one thing you need to keep in mind is perspective. Perspective applies to both the positive space (the width of the arrow's ribbon) as well as to the negative space (the distances between the zigzagging sections). It compresses both of these to make that ribbon narrower as it moves farther away from the viewer, and to make the spacing tighten, causing more and more overlap the further back we look. Keeping this in mind will help to convey the depth of the scene.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, what stands out to me most is that you appear to have missed the part of the instructions that talks about sticking to a simple sausage form. This means that every sausage must essentially look as though it were made up of two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You've got plenty of cases where they swell up or pinch through their midsections, which adds complexity to the form and underminese the illusion of its solidity. Additionally, I'm noticing that the degree of your contour ellipses appears to remain pretty consistent throughout the length of the form. The degree of the ellipse basically represents the orientation of the circular cross-section it represents, relative to the viewer's own orientation.

You can demonstrate this concept by doing the following exercise: take something flat and circular like a CD or a large coin, and hold it out in front of yourself, in between your eyes, so you're staring at its edge and unable to see its face on either side. Then move it left or right, straight across your field of view. You'll notice that even though the object is not turning, you'll be able to see more and more of either of the faces - that ellipse's degree will effectively increase. This is because the orientation of that surface relative to the direction in which we're facing changes, even as it simply moves straight across. Similarly, each of your contour ellipses or contour curves captures a cross-section just like this object in different positions.

Lastly, many of your contour curves look somewhat too uniform to me (in terms of their line weight). Not all of them have this quality, but many do, which suggests that those were drawn either more slowly, or with a heavier hand. Make sure you're always drawing with confidence, applying the ghosting method, and avoid applying too much pressure to the pen. Not only does it obliterate that nice, natural tapering that strokes have on either end, it can also damage your pens.

Looking at your texture analyses, I can clearly see that you're definitely trying to apply the focus on cast shadows and bold, black shadow shapes. Along with this however, you are still getting distracted by applying a lot of shading-for-shading's-own-sake, using generic hatching lines. This is something that I've actually addressed recently, when rewriting the texture section of lesson 2. This was released along with the new community platform, and so you likely haven't seen it. The bulk of the section was rewritten and a number of new videos were recorded, which I highly recommend you go back and read/watch. I also redid the demonstration for this particular exercise, so be sure to watch that too.

Your dissections definitely show a more consistent focus on only capturing shadow shapes (although you went back into hatching/shading on your octopus tentacle). I am definitely seeing in places like your snake scales that you're having difficulty with relying too much on outline and making it impossible to actually transition smoothly from one level of density to another - this is something the new material will help with.

Moving onto the form intersections, I'm noticing another instruction that you definitely missed - I mention in the instructions that you should avoid any forms that are overly stretched in one dimension, sticking to those that are more equilateral (roughly the same size in all 3 dimensions). You've got a lot of stretched boxes, cones and cylinders here that definitely introduce a lot more complexity to an already difficult exercise. Additionally, I'm seeing a fair bit of struggling with your boxes - it's easy to lose track of the things we learned during the box challenge once we start introducing many different forms together, but at the end of the day, it's important that you step back and approach every form with focus, applying all that you have already covered. Here, you need to always be mindful when drawing any line, of which lines it is meant to run parallel with, and how they will ultimately converge towards a shared vanishing point.

You've got a good start on the intersections themselves - plenty of room for improvement there, but this is entirely normal. This portion relies heavily on developing one's understanding of the relationships between forms in space, and this is one of the fundamental concepts of Drawabox as a whole, something we continue to work on through all the lessons. This exercise is merely meant to be a general introduction to this concept, so you're about where you ought to be on that front.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along decently, in terms of how you capture the interactions between the forms. One thing that I noticed however was that the little contour ellipses you draw at the tips of those forms (which itself is a great thing to do) seem to be entirely different in their degree from their closest contour lines. You have a tendency to jump from a relatively narrow contour curve to a full circle, and that is quite jarring to the eye. Remember that contour curves are just the visible portion of a full contour ellipse, and the reason we can see the full ellipse at the tip is just because that surface is turned enough towards us for us to be able to see the whole thing. It should still follow the same gradual degree shift as the rest of the contour lines.

All in all you're doing okay, but I think that your organic forms with contour lines require some additional work before I mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

I'd like to see:

  • 2 pages of organic forms with contour ellipses

  • 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves

Focus on drawing simple sausage forms, and be mindful of how the degree of the contour lines shift as we slide along the length of the sausage forms.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
4:41 AM, Thursday February 6th 2020

Thanks! If I decide to continue with drawabox in the future, I'll consider doing those extra assignments. Unfortunately, the former texture lesson was so frustrating in how it was presented, alomg with that I don't enjoy constantly being thrown into the deepend of things, that I don't feel this program is a good fit for me to continue and am going to check out some other programs.

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