Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

5:54 AM, Thursday February 6th 2020

Drawabox - Lesson 2 - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/YlGZiAm.jpg

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I had so much fun with the texture exercises. I try to do one of these weekly now. As always feedback is most welcome.

After looking these over I feel like I still have really "hairy" comps. Any feedback I can get in how to fix this would be really helpful.

Alan

4 users agree
12:06 AM, Friday February 7th 2020

Hi there!

Starting with your arrows they flow nicely, but they got a few issues:

First one, is that the arrows themselves, and the space of the folds between the arrows should get bigger as they come towards the viewer, as they do here

In red, you can see how the space between folds gets bigger and bigger as it comes towards the viewer (As something gets closer, because of perspective it will look bigger). And in blue you can see the arrow itself getting bigger. And the growth could be even bigger. In general, try to exaggerate this growth as much as you can to show the 3d illusion better.

Remember as well, that you can add lineweight to the overlapping parts of the arrows with a superimposed line to clarify the relationship on them.

On your organic forms your marks are pretty confident, and the same goes for your ellipses, good job on that! Only problem you got, is that you aren't adhering to simple forms as you should. Remember that a sausage is 2 balls connected with a tube of consistent width, and you got there. And in your homework, you got some that get smaller in one ends that another, other ones bulging, and other irregularities, so try to stick to the simple forms describe here.

You are also not shifting the degrees of your ellipses much, so be careful with that as well.

In your textures you've done a really good job, I can see you are observing your references and focusing on the cast shadows. On one of them you've relied quite a bit on hatching though, and this is something you want to avoid for this exercise, try to stick to fill cast shadows with zones of black. On the scales you've focused a little bit too much on the contours so be careful there too. Try to copy only shadows, and try to take in mind that shadows merge, as the transitions on this texture are a bit rough.

Try to be wary with the gradients as well, you've done a pretty good job on it on the second texture for example, but you are going away too fast from the complete black on most of them. Try to make the transition smoother, both from complete black, and from complete white.

Dissections look pretty good, you're making use of the silhouette to show the textures, and your textures are wrapping nicely around the forms of the sausages.

Now into your form interections you've got a few problems here:

-First one, is that you are repeating lines; no matter how wrong a line is, don't repeat it, keep going as if it was correct. And though it gets better as you do more pages, you still got some lines repeated by the end of them, so be sure you don't do it again.

-I can see as well you are making use of a marker, don't do that. When doing a drawabox exercise, stick to the same tool through the whole drawing. You can mix fineliner and brush pen, but nothing else.

Your forms are mostly having a consistent foreshortening, good job! Only problem on this I can see is that you got some pretty long forms (cylinders), so try to avoid them.

Finally, on your organic intersections, you aren't making them relate them to each other much. Remember that those forms share the same space and that they are solid. So you shouldn't have any floating forms, like the top right sausage on your second page. Remember as well that the shadows should follow the form they are being casted on, yours are mostly sticking to the forms.

And try to avoid parallel sausages. When doing them mostly paralell, it's harder to show interaction between them, so it's something we want to avoid.

Here as well you should stick to simple sausage forms, so take it in mind on the next exercises you do.

I think you've done a good job, but you have some issues I want to make sure you get solved, so I'm going to make you do a few pages more to make sure you are understanding those issues I talked about.

Next Steps:

So, I want you to do a few things:

-1 page of arrows, 1 page of sausage with contours and 1 page of sausage with ellipses

-1 page of form intersections

-and 1 page of organic intersections.

Take in mind all I said, and do your best, keep it up, and good luck!

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
7:45 PM, Friday February 7th 2020

Thank you so much for taking the time to provide this feedback. I have been so hungry for this. The ambiguity of knowing whether you are doing good or not can be frustrating at times.

This weekend I am going to do the recommended exercises and will resubmit next week. So awesome to have a lens (i.e. your feedback) in which to improve now.

Thank you again.

6:10 AM, Saturday February 8th 2020

Here are the requested revisions.

https://imgur.com/a/Vv1rSXt

2 users agree
12:07 PM, Saturday February 8th 2020
edited at 12:08 PM, Feb 8th 2020

Hi again!

Pretty good improvement overall!

In your arrows I can see that you are already thinking on making them bigger as they come towards the viewer, some of there are still not there yet, like the top left arrow, but as long as you are consciously trying to do it, that's okay!

One thing you aren't doing in your arrows is adding lineweight. It helps a lot to clarify the arrows, and you can do it like this those red lines are the added lineweight. Remember that you should do them, just like every other line, ghosted, and with a confident stroke

For your organic forms you are mostly accomplishing the sausage forms, though there are some that are pinching a bit at the end, remember that the end should be a ball, so it should be quite rounded.

In your form intersections you still got some repeated lines, as you can see here, so keep trying to be aware as much as you can of it. I know it's hard to resist the urge to correct lines, but it's very important not to do it.

And lastly on your organic intersections they look much more believable as 3d forms interacting with each other, only problem you have is that some of them still are quite complex. Here the organic forms should be just like on the organic forms exercises you did before, so draw them just like you would draw them there. Corrected a few here, so you can see what I'm talking about, some of those are bulging, some are more like stretched ellipses etc.

I think It'd be pretty helpful for you if you rewatched the organic intersections video on the website, it's explained there pretty nicely.

Remember as well that you need to do 10-15 minutes of warmups before starting every drawabox session. In those 10-15 minutes, you should pick 2-3 exercises between all the exercises of lesson 1-2, boxes and the technical exercises on lesson 3, and work on them in that time.

Next Steps:

Overall I can see a good deal of improvement over what I told you, and though you got some repeated lines, and your organic intersections need a bit more of polish, I'm gonna mark this as complete.

Try to focus on the organic intersections exercises on your warmups for now.

Keep up the good work and good luck on your next lesson! Which should be lesson 3, though I'm seeing on your submissions you've already submitted it. Wait until it gets critiqued to go on to the next lessons, so you can apply what you are told on next lessons

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
edited at 12:08 PM, Feb 8th 2020
2:11 PM, Monday February 17th 2020
edited at 11:45 PM, Feb 17th 2020

Elodin, any ideas how I can get more visibility on the second submission to get Lesson 2 badge?

edited at 11:45 PM, Feb 17th 2020
8:03 PM, Monday February 17th 2020

Posted it on the discord to see if someone takes a look at it

11:46 PM, Monday February 17th 2020

Thanks so much man.

2:30 PM, Saturday February 8th 2020

Will do. Starting to understand the process more. I am gonna go back and resubmit Lesson 3, there is copic marker use on some of them. Before this feature I was getting feedback from an Industrial Designer at work and he was pushing me to think about light and shadow. Thank you again for your time and feedback. The community here is incredible.

Alan

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