Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
9:07 PM, Thursday April 11th 2024
I submitted accidently without selecting OFFICIAL CRITIQUE. My bad.
Josh
I'll be the TA handling your Lesson 2 critique.
I've removed your other submission to tidy up your sketchbook and hope you're feeling better health wise.
You're making progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson and hopefully this critique will help you in your future attempts.
Starting off in the arrows section your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. You're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. It's good to see that you're trying to implement line weight, just remember that you want to keep your applications subtle and you'll become consistent with mileage. here are some things to look out for when applying it. I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.
Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise some of your forms are getting a bit too complex. We want to create our forms with both ends being the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. You're keeping your line work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. Speaking of contours, be sure to draw through all of your ellipses including your small contour ellipses on the ends of your forms. You're also placing these small ellipses on the opposite ends of your forms at times (if your ellipse is this O and your curves are this C, you want the ellipse to be on the open end of your ellipse like so CO rather than the closed end OC). You're doing a good job trying to shift the degree of your contours so far, be sure to keep experimenting. 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.
In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines, form shadows, and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself. This makes it difficult to create gradients with implied information which we could then use to create focal points in more complex pieces, by doing so we can prevent our viewers from being visually overwhelmed with too much detail. For more on the importance of focusing on cast shadows read here. I'd also like to quickly direct you to this image which shows that when we're working with thin line like textures if we outline and fill the shadow we will create a much more dynamic texture than simply drawing lines.
It's quite common for people to feel like they don't fully grasp the form intersections exercise, if you feel like you may fall into this category try not to stress too much. This exercise is just meant to get students to start thinking about how their forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how to define those relationships on the page. We'll be going over them more in the upcoming lessons.Your forms are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work.
While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you do a great job demonstrating that your sense of 3D space is developing as your forms begin to wrap around each other believably. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. I'd like you to draw through all of your forms when attempting this exercise again in the future, it will help reinforce your understanding of the 3D space you're creating. When it comes to your shadows you're pushing them enough so that they cast rather than just hugging the form that creates them which is a great start. Your shadows appear to be following a consistent light source, be sure to experiment with different angles and intensities when trying this exercise again in the future. I recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page to start with, it's easier than working with a light directly above your form pile.
Overall this was a solid submission, while you may have some things to work on I have no doubt you will improve with more mileage. I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to the next lesson.
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!
Next Steps:
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
Thanks!
I see what you mean about the intersections. Ironically, I have a good idea of what the intersections will be like as I have done engineering drafting, which is part of the problem: overthinking. I'm not worried about it but will keep practicing and simplifying.
Best,
Josh
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).
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