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7:55 PM, Friday May 13th 2022

No problem at all, hopefully the critique as well as the process we're currently going through helps.

I have read your questions, and I'm going to answer them but it's not going to be right this second. You have your own challenges with drawing of course but the pages you have shown show you're capable of doing this. While you may have some physical challenges there are also mental ones that I think will be more difficult if I threw too much information at you too quickly. So for now I just ask that you be patient, and let's tackle things one at a time.

Looking at your pages of curves we can see that they're looking much smoother than the contour curves in your submission, and your ellipses compared to your submission are like night and day, they look much more confident on this new page.

With your curves you do get some squared edges at times which shows you may still be slowing down. The fact that this occurs more often on smaller curves reinforces that idea as well and shows that you may be using your wrist more than your shoulder at times.

As for your ellipses some of them may have some hard edges or wobbling at times but for the most part they look much better and some of them in particular are really well done (the vertical ones along the left side of the page for example). If you aren't doing it already I recommend rotating your page to allow yourself to draw at the most comfortable angle you can.

The good news is that you've shown that while you may have a tremor, you are able to draw confidently and eliminate your wobbling. It may mean that you struggle with accuracy to start out with but that is something that everyone struggles with and improves as they build up more mileage.

I think tackling these exercises one at a time will help so there will be more revisions after these but for now I think you should start out with:

  • 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves

  • 2 pages of organic forms with contour ellipses

Remember to ghost using your shoulder, figure out how you want to draw your mark and then as soon as your pen touches the paper it's 1 smooth non-stop confident motion.

Once you've completed those pages I'll take a look, we can re-evaluate if there's maybe something that can be done to make it easier or if maybe there's something happening that makes your results different than expected. And then we'll address some of the other exercises.

WIth all of that said I'm confident that you can achieve solid results on these pages, and I hope that you can look at the newest pages you've completed, compare them to your original submission and feel more confident as well.

Next Steps:

  • 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves

  • 2 pages of organic forms with contour ellipses

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:36 PM, Saturday June 11th 2022

TOFU,

Apologies for taking so long. New move + Job gave me a hard time getting into the swing of things. Any other revisions will definitely be less late and I've kept up my practice. Really focusing on nailing confident ellipses and curves down in practice more.

https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjzTU9L

Please let me know if you need anything else. Looking forward to hearing back from you!

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.

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