6:16 PM, Thursday June 11th 2020
Starting with your arrows, you're doing a great job of capturing a sense of fluidity and motion to them. Keep in mind though that as the arrow moves away from the viewer, you want to be applying perspective to both positive and negative space. That means making the ribbon itself narrower as it moves away, and tightening up the distances between the zigzagging sections. This will help capture a great sense of depth in your scene.
Moving onto the organic forms with contour lines, there are a few points from the instructions that you appear to have missed.
First and foremost is the importance of sticking to the characteristics of a 'simple sausage'. As explained here, your sausages should have two circular/spherical ends, and maintain a consistent width throughout their length with no swelling or pinching through the midsection. This is an important part of making the form feel solid and three dimensional, as it eliminates unnecessary complexity. When we get into using these kinds of forms as critical elements when constructing more complex objects later on, this will play a big role.
Secondly, while you're doing a good job of drawing your ellipses to be smooth and evenly shaped (aside from some of the bigger ones), but you're not putting much into ensuring that they're aligned to the central minor axis line of your sausage forms (as explained here). Proper use of the ghosting method - which means planning (finding a comfortable angle of approach, identifying what exactly you need a given mark to be, and then ghosting through the motion several times prior to drawing it) will help you improve on this, and also tighten up your ellipses as a whole.
Lastly, your contour lines all tend to maintain the same degree across the entire length of a given form. The degree of a contour line basically represents the orientation of that cross-section in space, relative to the viewer, and as we slide along the sausage form, the cross section is either going to open up (allowing us to see more of it) or turn away from the viewer (allowing us to see less), as shown here.
Your work on the texture analyses has a lot of definite strengths to it. To start, it's clear that you've done a pretty good job overall of transitioning from a reliance on outlines to define the textural forms explicitly to implying their presence by relying more on cast shadows. I'm especially pleased with the cauliflower, though in particular I felt the direct study (on the left side) was especially well done. The right side was a little more vague, with the lines less reflecting what was actually present in your reference image and more working off your memory. Either way, it's clear that you're definitely capable of paying careful, close attention to your reference image - just keep pushing yourself to rely less on memory, and to spend most of your time looking at and studying the reference. You should only be taking a moment to put down a specific shadow shape before looking back at your reference to find the next form you want to imply.
When you get to the far right extreme of your gradient, you are definitely moving in the right direction in terms of achieving a sparser texture. That said, as you allow some of your edges to vanish as the light source blasts them away, you appear to be picking which shadows last longer at random, rather than determining this logically. As explained in the diagram in this section (specifically at the bottom of the diagram), you'll see how the part of the shadows that lasts longest is where multiple forms come together to create deeper cracks, where the light is less able to penetrate. So when you've got forms meeting together, the shadows will last longer, and where the shadows are more "out in the open", they'll disappear much sooner.
Moving onto your dissections, you're doing pretty well here, though I think there are definitely a number of cases here where you're relying more on memory rather than direct observation of your reference, as I mentioned before. It's not that you're not studying your reference, it's that you're giving yourself too much time looking away from your reference when you go to draw your marks. As explained here, our brain will toss away a lot of information the moment we look away, so we can only really retain a very small amount before even it disappears, leaving us to draw things that are oversimplified.
Don't get me wrong here - your work on the texture exercises is very well done. These exercises are an introduction to the concept, not a test. What you're doing here is moving in the right direction, and you're making good headway.
Moving onto your form intersections, there's a bit of a mix here. You're doing an okay job of drawing the forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space, but your linework overall has a tendency to be a little stiff. It seems to me that you may not be applying the ghosting method entirely correctly. Remember that the whole technique exists to ensure that you can ultimately execute your marks confidently, without hesitation, fear or guilt. If you go through the planning and preparation phases, but still hesitate when you execute your mark out of the fear of making a mistake, then it's still going to waver. I go over this in greater depth in this response to another student.
As for the intersection component to this exercise, I'm not seeing a whole lot of attempts. There are a few intersections, but for the most part you've neglected to draw how various forms cut into one another, and haven't established their relationships in 3D space. It's important that I emphasize that this is just an introduction to the concept of spatial relationships. I don't expect students to have any prior experience with it - all I want is for a solid attempt to be made, even if they all come out wrong. By attempting it here, we plant a seed that will continue to develop as we explore these principles throughout the rest of this course.
Lastly, your organic intersections do a good job of establishing how the forms interact with one another in 3D space, and you're making progress in selling the illusion of gravity in how they slump over one another. I do have two recommendations however: firstly, try laying your sausages across one another, instead of having them run parallel. This will make the pile more stable, as right now it feels like the pile is about to fall apart, as those sausages roll off one another. Secondly, when drawing your cast shadows, try to outline the shadow shape first, then fill it in. Some of your shadows are a bit scratchy and messy.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, there are a few exercises I'd like you to revisit. I'll list them below.
Next Steps:
I'd like you to submit the following:
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1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses
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1 page of organic forms with contour curves
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1 page of form intersections - make sure you apply the ghosting method, along with a confident execution for every mark you draw (straight lines, ellipses, etc.) and also be sure to make thorough attempts at determining the intersections between all your forms.