Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

6:02 PM, Friday May 15th 2020

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8:26 PM, Friday May 15th 2020

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a great job of demonstrating a sense of flow and motion as they move through space. One thing that is missing however is that while you're applying perspective to the positive space (the width of the ribbons as they move away from us), you are not applying it to the negative space (the distances between the zigzagging sections). These should be compressing as we look farther away.

Your work on the organic forms with contour lines is mostly pretty well done. You've got a few that seem to zigzag a little, which should be avoided, but other than that you've done a good job of maintaining the kind of simple sausage forms described in the instructions. Your contour lines also drawn confidently to maintain smooth, even shapes, while keeping them snug between the edges of the forms. The only issue right now is that the degree of your contour lines does not seem to reflect the orientation of that particular cross-section in space. As shown here, the degree of your contour lines should be shifting naturally either wider or narrower as we move along the length of a given sausage form.

Your work on the texture analyses is really well done. You've clearly accepted the importance of employing shadow shapes instead of lines and outlines, and in doing so have mostly been able to control the density of your texture gradients as you move from left to right. There are still places in the second and third rows where that black bar along the left side of the gradient is still entirely visible and distinguishable (in the exercise you were to essentially blend it into your texture gradient so you could not tell where it stops and the texture begins), but I suspect you just forgot about this as a requirement. You continue to do good work through your dissections, though I think here you're relying more on actual outlines, and as a result you end up closing things off and limiting how much you can actually change the density of your textures without sudden jumps. For example, with the scales, each one is enclosed from its neighbours, because you're outlining each individual scale. Instead, you should be drawing the shadows those scales cast on one another, allowing for the shapes to remain open. This would allow you to transition from a denser concentration of marks to a much sparser area without changing the nature of the scales that are being presented to the viewer.

Moving onto your form intersections, these are a good start. I do think your linework does have room for improvement - specifically it appears that you're not applying the ghosting method as consistently across each and every line you draw, resulting in a bit more hesitation in certain areas. The forms however are being constructed in a manner that feels cohesive and consistent across the whole set, making them appear as 3D forms that exist together instead of as 2D shapes pasted on top of one another on a page.

You did seem to miss the instruction on avoiding forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension though - I recommended that you stay away from things like long cylinders and stick instead to forms that are equilateral (roughly the same size in all three dimensions) so as to avoid bringing more foreshortening in to complicate an already difficult exercise.

As far as the intersections themselves go, you've got a great start. I don't expect students to have any experience with these just yet, and this is only to serve as an introduction to the idea of spatial relationships between forms. This is a concept that is at the core of Drawabox as a whole, and is something we will continue to explore throughout this entire course.

Lastly, your organic intersections are looking good. You're doing well to establish how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, and in many areas, are selling the illusion of gravity as it makes them slump and sag against one another. There are a few areas where you're contradicting gravity a little - for example, gaps between forms where there's nothing to support the form above it, or places where a sausage sticks out with nothing beneath to hold it up (like the far right of the first page of this exercise), so keep an eye on that. These kinds of things can undermine the overall success and believability of an arrangement of forms.

All in all, you're doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so keep up the good work.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
6:01 PM, Monday May 18th 2020

Thanks a lot for the detailed correction and the overall review! I did notice once i finished the disecciones that the page overall was really dense and black but it was to late haha. Thanks again

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