Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

10:23 PM, Friday July 2nd 2021

Lesson 2: Organic Forms, Dissections and Form Intersections - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/cWx8OmE.jpg

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Finally! The form intersections were pretty difficult. Sometimes in the Organic Intersections it looks like I scribbled the lines, but I didn't, I just wasn't very accurate with the line weight. Also the notes in the Texture Analyses are in Spanish, I left the translation at the bottom of the images, as well as the names for the Dissections.

I think that's it. All critiques and suggestions are welcome. Thanks!

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10:58 PM, Sunday July 4th 2021

Hi, let me give you some critique. Hope this helps!

For your arrows, they give a good impression of flowing through space, getting smaller as they go off into the distance. For the most part, they are of a consistently increasing width as they get towards the viewer, though there are some sudden bulging areas, especially towards the viewer. One thing you want to watch out for is the negative space between the lengths decreasing as they head towards the distance, it should be decreasing, compressing the arrow as it goes. A good thing to keep in mind here is that even if you are decreasing the distance between the lengths, the arrow is also getting thinner, this means that you really have to exaggerate the shrinking distance. It is good to see that you are trying to apply line weight and hatching, hatching looks good but line weight is a bit wobbly in some parts. It is completely normal for line weight to be inaccurate here, key is to prioritize line confidence over accuracy, even on curved lines.

Your organic forms are close to being simple sausages and are drawn with confidence. Quite a few of them are pinching in the middle, careful that you don't make the inner curve too large when drawing. There are also a few that have different sized ends, and a few where the ends are not rounded (so you would be able to fit spheres in them). For the contour ellipses, keep in mind that you want to align their minor axis to the center of the sausage form, ideally this would be the center line, but if the center line isn't centered properly, you can try getting them to be perpendicular to the sides of the sausage form. They shouldn't look slanted relative to the sausage form. I see you are trying to shift the degrees of the ellipses and the contour lines (though some of the contour line organic forms should have their degrees shifted a bit more). Keep in mind that the little contour ellipse at the end is still a contour ellipse, and therefore make sure its degree is similar to the contour ellipse/curve beside it.

For your texture exercises, you do a good job capturing shadow shapes in the texture analysis. Your gradients do make a sudden jump, having a pretty visible black bar at the left (especially the rocks). If you take a look at the amount of black on the right side, that's roughly the amount of white that should be close to the black bar on the left side. For the dissections, there's quite a few cases in which you are focusing on forms, and form outlines. Remember to capture the cast shadows, and only the cast shadows, of the forms you see (even if you don't see the cast shadows in the reference). For cracks, like the soil texture, the best way to capture this is to have a hard edge on one side of the crack, and a soft edge on the other.

For the form intersections, overall, solid work. The various forms do believably exist in the same place, and you made a pretty good attempt at the intersections. A few things to point out, the intersection marks are still marks, therefore they should be made like any other marks in this course (through the ghosting method, and only a single mark). The little contour ellipses on the spheres should be contour ellipses, this means that they should represent a straight line running across the surface of the sphere.

For the organic intersections, overall the organic forms interact with each other pretty well. There's a few cases in which they interact in a way that makes one of them look flat, for example, the top one on page 1, or the left one on page 2. As with above exercises, the contour ellipses at the ends sometimes aren't proper contour ellipses. For the line weight, keep in mind that they should only be used locally to clarify overlap and to draw only one line for the line weight, even if inaccurate (this should make things less scratchy). The last thing I want to talk about here is the cast shadows, right now you have a light source above the pile of forms, which makes it hard to really push the cast shadows in one direction. The cases in which the shadows are pushed suggest a light source either to the left or the right of the pile, causing a bit of a contradiction when you have both, for example in the top two forms on page 1. Some of the cast shadows also hug the form instead of casting onto the surface beneath them, making the surface look flat, like in the top right form on page 1. Page 2 is better in this regard, though there are still some small inconsistencies. Make sure you are taking into account the contour of the lower form when casting a shadow onto it.

Overall, very solid work. A few things to work on, but there's plenty of later exercises and warm-ups to help with them. Feel free to move on to lesson 3!

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4:46 AM, Monday July 5th 2021

This is an awesome critique, thank you very much! I agree with pretty much everything you said. I have to say that I only got to "believe" in the ellipses of the organic forms once I got to the organic intersections, and even then, as you said, the "orientation" ellipses got away.

I have a couple of questions though.

"For cracks, like the soil texture, the best way to capture this is to have a hard edge on one side of the crack, and a soft edge on the other."

I can't really picture this. Could you elaborate further?

"The little contour ellipses on the spheres should be contour ellipses, this means that they should represent a straight line running across the surface of the sphere."

This means that the contour ellipses should work like the upper parallels on a globe, right?

That's it for questions. Thanks again!

2:27 PM, Monday July 5th 2021

Regarding the texture question:

I saw a picture demonstrating shadows for a crack, but unfortunately it's somewhere lost in my browsing history so I can't find it. But I did find this demonstration of a soft shadow from the texture analysis exercise video: https://imgur.com/6ATRuJ0. The solid line at the top would represent the side of the crack facing the sun, while the "bumpier", softer side would stop at the other side of the crack. This creates a gradient so it wouldn't be so close to outlining forms. That being said texture is something I'm still trying to figure out myself, and I think there is a threshold at which the crack becomes too thin and it's only really worth representing with hard edges on both sides.

Regarding the contour ellipses:

Yeah, they should work like the upper parallels of a globe. One way that helps me think of them correctly is to draw them like ellipses, but treat them like lines. Straight lines that run across the surface of the object. It just so happens that on a curved surface, that straight line curves back on itself. And if the end of the curved surface is pointed towards the viewer, then we see both sides of the curve, making an ellipse.

12:08 AM, Tuesday July 6th 2021

Great! That clarifies things. Thank you.

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