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2:58 AM, Sunday June 12th 2022

No problem at all, I hope the adjustments are going as smoothly as they can.

I'm happy to see that your organic forms are looking more confident than they originally were. There's always room to grow of course but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Your contour curves while a bit stiff are looking much more confident than they originally were, great work.

When it comes to the contour ellipses they're still wobblier than I'd expect.

I think that the stiffness of your curves and the wobbliness of your ellipses are ultimately tied to the same issue which is that you're worrying about your accuracy and it's causing you to hesitate.

2 things lead me to believe this:

  • First being that you've proven that you can draw smooth ellipses based on the first pages I asked of you.

  • The second is the placement of both your contour curves and your ellipses, they rarely overextend past the form you've created and if they do it's not by much, and don't end up floating in the middle of your form from undershooting either. You're doing a good job keeping them in the form which in this instance is actually the problem to a degree (and one that many people face).

I do want you to feel like you're making progress (because you are), rather than being stuck here. So I'm going to say we move a step forward while addressing some of the issues present as well.

For this set of revisions I'm going to ask for another 2 pages.

The first page is of organic forms with contour ellipses. The forms themselves are on the right track, just less worrying about the ellipses fitting neatly in the form this time around, confidence is the priority. Once you can do them confidently you'll build up muscle memory and you'll find that you'll slowly be able to get them more and more accurate.

The second page I'd like you to complete is a page of Organic Intersections (it's been a bit so I recommend reading through the instructions and watching the videos again if need be as well as reading your original critique on this section).

I had mentioned that I'd give you some pointers for each new exercise as we faced them again so here are the ones I have for you at the moment.

You had asked how you should wrap them around each other this time.

Looking back on your prevous attempt I think you were on the right track in terms of how you wanted to wrap them around one another but I do have some tips to make it a bit smoother.

  • Draw through all of your forms, this will help reinforce your understanding of the 3D space you're trying to create and result in less pinching when you try to hide forms behind one another.

  • Stack forms so that they lay across one another perpendicularly rather than parallel/ with their ends heading in the same direction. This tends to make it easier to believably wrap them around one another rather than have them kind of just floating in front of/on top of another form.

  • Push your shadows so that they cast and wrap around one another (I'm less worried about shadows than the forms themselves but they can help make it easier to keep track of which form is where while drawing.)

  • Limit yourself to fewer but larger forms. You added a number of smaller forms to your attempts and I think they just make it more difficult for you currently, they're more likely to be drawn from the wrist and in a hurry and any potential messiness will just lead to confusion and hurt the overall attempt. Stick to maybe 4-6 larger forms and try to stack upwards rather than drawing forms in front of one another.

  • Try to have the edges of your forms overlap rather than creating a large gap between them, this can help reduce the feeling of forms floating in front of one another as demonstrated here. This may be tricky at the moment so don't focus on it because accuracy will cause you to hesitate more.

  • Ultimately remember line confidence is the top priority

I believe that's all I have for you based on these current exercises. If you have any questions then feel free to ask of course and I'll do my best to help.

I look forward to seeing your work.

Next Steps:

1 page of Organic Forms with Contour Ellipses.

1 page of Organic Intersections

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:04 AM, Thursday June 16th 2022

https://www.flickr.com/photos/195850875@N06/albums/72177720299831862

I feel like the ellipses definitely went better, but there's so many steps to the organic intersections that my brain is a bit blocked and is probably just overthinking it. I also included an extra page of organic ellipses from my practice and my regular freehand ellipses.

Your advice is really helping me shine through! I still made today's practice very very focused on confidence. I even forced my elbow out of acting so just my shoulder c ould draw ellipses.

3:45 AM, Thursday June 16th 2022

These are huge improvement, great job!

While there is still work to do, I don't need to tell you that your situation is unique. You're showing a much better understanding of what's being asked of you in the course material now and I think you've seen that despite your tremor there's potential to draw more confidently as well.

I'm going to be marking your submission complete and move you on to the next lesson. Texture revisions aren't super common unless the person doesn't try at all so I don't feel they'll be beneficial here. I'll be including my texture explanation write up that I promised you shortly but it's quite lengthy so I'll wrap this up first.

From here on be sure to keep practicing these exercises in your warm ups, you're definitely headed in the right direction as long as you can continue to keep drawing confidently.

I'm happy to see how much you've managed to progress, and I hope you continue to press forward to the best of your abilities.

Be proud of what you have and do accomplish.

Best of luck in lesson 3!

Texture wall of text

Rather than being able to give you just one or two pointers about things to work on, texture is often a case of people trying to simplify the steps too much and it's easier for me to just explain the entire process.

First things first, open up this leaf texture picture, I find leaves are a good example and a texture that people are often drawn to and do incorrectly.

The first thing you may notice is that this image isn't in colour and instead in black and white, this is helpful because people often get distracted by shifts in colour and will try to darken an area in their drawing if the colour happens to be darker. We shouldn't rely on converting images to black and white but it is helpful and something you may want to consider when practicing.

Now if I handed a student this image and told them to use it for their texture exercises there are two typical outcomes I would expect.

The first is that they would draw all of the veins (or many of them if they aren't extremely patient), and this would be an example of focusing on outlines.

The second result that I would expect is that instead of drawing the veins themselves they would either fill the veins in completely with black or they would fill in everything but the veins completely with ink, and this would be them focusing on negative space.

This is where students get a bit confused at the start, they feel like they're looking at the image and drawing what they see but it comes out wrong. I should clarify that it's not necessarily incorrect, there is a time and place when obsessing over small details can be helpful but this is largely an exercise about learning how to imply information and thinking in 3D space. Remember that what we're learning here isn't observational drawing, it's constructional and while observation is definitely a part of the construction method there's an extra step that people tend to neglect in the beginning.

With that in mind let's go over the correct way to tackle these problems, bring up the leaf image (it's here if you closed it) and let's break down what we're working with. What people tend to neglect is that we're trying to think about the 3D space of the image we're observing and drawing. If we look at this leaf the veins are really just long organic forms, or cylinders if they're particularly rigid. The fleshy bit of the leaf could be thought of as either a plane or a thin box, and due to gravity's effect it will likely curve a bit (we don't need to think too much about it curving in this case because we're working so close up, but it's good to think of how the environment can have an effect).

To put it simply, a leaf is just organic forms that are intersecting with each other and a plane/box, just like the forms we practiced with in the form intersections exercise. With all of these forms in mind we can place a light source and depending on it's position and intensity we can create cast shadows much like we did in the organic intersections exercise.

An example of this can actually be seen in the picture itself. Let's just focus on the large main vein as well as the branching vein on the left. You'll notice that if you look along the bottom edge of the main vein there's a cast shadow, and on the right of the branching vein there's a shadow. From this information we can assume that the light affecting the leaf the most is somewhere to the upper left of the image and it's creating the cast shadows we want to draw.

This is an example of what drawing cast shadows might look like, it comes up early on in lesson 3 when Uncomfortable shows the process of drawing a leaf. You can see that he's not actually drawing the veins themselves, and instead just implying that they exist by creating cast shadows. Keep in mind that this leaf is fairly evenly lit and the point of the texture exercise is to work with light gradients but regardless it's a good example of what we're trying to achieve. There are times where capturing shadows doesn't immediately give the impression of what you're attempting to draw but it's just a single tool that you can use. You may not think that drawn leaf looks like a leaf, but if it was green, had a stem, and was attached to something that resembled a plant your brain would begin fill in the gaps until it goes "oh that's a leaf".

Implying information helps both the creator as well as the viewer, it saves the creator time from having to obsessively capture every tiny detail and it prevents the image from becoming too visually noisy and overwhelming for the viewer.

Craig Mullins is a painter whose work I appreciate a lot and I feel does an amazing job of implying information through shadow, colour and brush strokes. I highly recommend looking up some of his work if you'd like some examples of just how powerful implied information can be.

I hope that this texture explanation was helpful and once again I wish you the best of luck!

Next Steps:

Move on to lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.

Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.

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