Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

4:25 PM, Tuesday August 18th 2020

Lesson 2 homework - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/g7FGLKt.jpg

Post with 21 views. Lesson 2 homework

Hello, this is my submission for Lesson 2 homework. To be honest, texture analysis and dissection exercises were quite tedious, because of the amount of detail needed. However, I finally did the homework. Kindly critique it. Thanks!

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7:04 PM, Thursday August 20th 2020

Starting with your arrows, these are looking decently done, in terms of having the arrows flow smoothly and confidently through space. Your linework does however appear somewhat hesitant in places, causing slight wobbles here and there. Additionally, it's important that as the arrow moves away from the viewer, the gaps between the zigzagging sections get smaller due to foreshortening and perspective. Right now you have those gaps remaining the same size, even as the ribbon itself gets narrower, which undermines the sense of depth in the scene.

That hesitation I mentioned continues to appear in your organic forms with contour lines - specifically the ellipses. This all strongly suggests that you're likely drawing more from your wrist than you intend to, so it's very important that you pay closer attention to how you're making your marks. Drawing ellipses from your shoulder, using the ghosting method are integral to help keep the ellipses tight, smooth and controlled. You're more successful in some cases than others, and I suspect that it may be the orientation of the ellipses that is causing you trouble, which in turn suggests that you're not rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach.

As a whole, the sausage forms themselves on the first page are okay - there's room for improvement of course in making the ends a little more circular/spherical, but all in all they're coming along decently. On your second page (the contour curves one) however, you tend to end up with vastly more stretched out ends, as well as ends on the sausage forms that are not equal in size to one another. As a whole, it's pretty clear that you put vastly more time into the contour ellipses page rather than the contour curves page, and this second one seems to be quite rushed.

On top of that, your contour curves aren't wrapping properly around the organic forms, as explained in these notes. This is making the forms feel very flat, rather than reinforcing the sense that they're solid and three dimensional.

Continuing onto your texture analyses, for the most part these are quite well done, save for a couple minor issues. You're clearly focusing on cast shadows, which is correct - the issues come down to how you actually approach drawing them. When drawing your textural marks, it is best to first outline the shape you intend to add, then fill it in. The shape should be initially outlined using your 0.5 fineliner, and then you're free to use whatever you wish (thicker pen, brush pen, etc.) to fill it in - but you need to take care to fill it in cleanly, not leaving gaps or rough edges. You can see this process demonstrated here.

Now, while you demonstrated a solid approach for the texture analyses, overall, your dissections take a bit of a step back. There are some areas (the strawberry texture for instance) where your texture gets vastly oversimplified, and where you need to take greater care to look at your reference frequently in order to avoid working from memory as explained here. Other textures show stronger observational skills, although you do tend to rely heavily on outlining a lot of your forms here instead of working strictly with cast shadow shapes as you did in the texture analyses. I go into greater detail with this issue here.

That's not to say you aren't making good progress with some of these. The frozen sand for example is an example of better use of shadow shapes to control the density of your textures, although some of the marks do still feel drawn a little sloppily.

As a whole, up to this point in the lesson, I'm getting a strong impression that you could be yielding far better results, but you may find yourself getting tired or bored, and instead of taking a break, you push on by rushing more quickly. Breaks are important, and you by no means have to force yourself to complete an exercise in one sitting, or for any other artificial deadline. All that matters is that you strive to do the best of what you are currently capable. That basically means doing everything you can to avoid rushing. After all, if there are certain mistakes made as a result of rushing, my critiques are going to focus on that, rather than where you can really stand to improve.

Moving on, the linework in your form intersections is noticeably wobbly. While I can see signs that you're attempting to use the ghosting method, your execution is really lacking the confidence that the methodology demands. The ghosting method basically exists to help separate the mark making process into a series of steps, each with their own responsibilities, so that the student can ultimately execute their marks without hesitation or fear of making a mistake. It's not that mistakes don't happen - it's that it's dealt with in an earlier step, and by the time you go to execute your mark, it's no longer a concern whether your mark hits its intended goal or not. Just that the mark is smooth and consistent. I explain this in greater detail to another student here, and I highly recommend you read through that.

Secondly, I see several cases where you're ignoring the instruction of sticking to forms that are roughly the same size in all three dimensions.

Lastly, it appears that you've made no actual attempt to draw the intersections between the forms themselves. All I'm seeing is that you shaded in the portions where the silhouettes of different forms overlap - these are not intersections as demonstrated in the instructions, and it seems to me you weren't comfortable approaching it the way the exercise asked (out of fear of doing it wrong), so you decided to do your own thing.

This portion of the exercise is expected to be hard, and I fully expect students to make all kinds of mistakes with it. Its purpose however is to get students to think about how their forms relate to one another in 3D space, and how those relationships can be defined on the page. It is at the core of this course, and by introducing it here, students can start to think about it as they move forwards. It doesn't matter if you get it wrong - all that matters is that you try.

Lastly, your organic forms with contour lines are coming along decently - you're establishing how they interact with one another in 3D space, and are conveying an illusion of gravity in how they slump over one another. There are however places where you're neglecting to draw each sausage form in its entirety (especially along the left and right sides of both pages, although in other places as well). This exercise relies heavily on drawing each form in its entirety, so we can understand how they actually relate to one another in space. Just because we're not able to see a certain portion of a form does not mean it ceases to exist - understanding everything we're drawing not just as a flat drawing on a flat page, but rather as a series of real, 3D forms, is precisely what we're pursuing throughout this entire course. Make sure you draw through all of your forms in the future.

I think it's clear that what you've done here is not your best, and there are a number of places where you've missed important instructions, or have skipped key parts of exercises. As such, I'm going to assign additional revisions below.

Next Steps:

I'd like you to do the following:

  • 1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses. Make sure you apply the ghosting method to your ellipses, and draw from your shoulder.

  • 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves. As mentioned in the notes I linked to you in that part of the critique, make sure you're "overshooting" your curves to get the proper roundedness, and to get the curves to hook around properly as they continue on along the opposite side of the form.

  • 4 pages of form intersections. I recommend that you make a point of drawing your forms to be larger. Drawing small can impede our ability to think through spatial problems. Also make sure you're drawing every single mark with the ghosting method, making a point to execute each stroke with confidence, and without any hesitation.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:38 PM, Tuesday August 25th 2020

Hello, and thanks for the kind critique!

I admit that I have trouble with making straight lines, but I have tried to fix it by rotating my paper to only draw from certain angle, which is quite narrow.

I also tried to not rush things and made several attempts until I find the result satisfactory.

Here I attached my album with homework revision as instructed. Please critique it.

https://imgur.com/a/GjhtgqV

Thanks!

5:35 PM, Thursday August 27th 2020

This is getting better - there is certainly room for continued improvement and growth, but you're headed in the right direction and I'm pleased to see that you tried your hand at the intersections. I do have a few things for you to keep in mind however:

  • When drawing your contour lines, you're keeping to the same consistent degree throughout the entire length of the form. 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.

  • When drawing boxes as part of the form intersections, avoid really dramatic foreshortening. When you have a bunch of forms together with dramatic foreshortening, it can rather easily throw off the sense of scale, as explained here in lesson 1.

  • Make sure you draw through your boxes - you appear to have neglected to do this throughout the form intersections. It's important specifically because it helps us better understand how the form as a whole sits in 3D space, rather than just as a collection of lines on the page, and also helps us better grasp how the forms relate to one another.

  • One thing that may help reduce the confusion with the intersection lines themselves, is to just draw the portion of the intersection line that would be visible for the viewer. While usually drawing "through" things is good, in this case I do think it can make things more confusing. You'll notice that in the instructions for this exercise I did not draw the contour lines all the way around.

  • Of course, keep working on your use of the ghosting method. There's improvement here, but if you take a look at the 'stages' of this technique listed here you'll see that you're currently at Level 2. The next step is to get the mark to top at the end point, without losing the smooth, consistent execution of the mark.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Be sure to continue practicing the exercises from this lesson and from all previous lessons (including the box challenge) as part of your regular warmup routine. In case you haven't been doing warmups, I explain how to approach them back here in lesson 0.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:09 PM, Friday August 28th 2020

Thanks for the kind critique!

I was so focused on one instruction and forgot to remember the others. And yes, I'll keep in mind of stuffs on foreshortening, ghosting, and degree of contour lines.

Thanks again!

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