Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
10:48 PM, Tuesday March 2nd 2021
The folder contains all exercises.
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3:22 AM, Sunday March 7th 2021
Hey there, I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique. Thank you for your patience, we tend to get an influx of critiques at the start of the month.
You're making good progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, below I'll be listing some things that will hopefully help you in your future attempts at these exercises.
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Your arrows are off to a really good start, I don't have any major complaints here. You'll become more consistent with more mileage but I'd also like you to work on utilizing foreshortening more. By implementing it in the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between your arrow's curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as you can see demonstrated here.
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In the organic forms with contours exercise some of your forms get a bit too complex but you're not too far off and mostly moving in the right direction. Our goal when creating these forms is to have both ends be the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. One thing I'd like you to work on is shifting the degree of your contours more. 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.
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In the texture exercises you're focusing largely on outlines 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.
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If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, you're on the right track but right now 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 here are looking solid, well thought out and like they belong in a cohesive 3D space, great work.
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Just a few quick notes for you in the organic intersections section. You drew a lot smaller here than in the previous exercises, I'm not sure if this was due to uncertainty in the exercise or just trying to speed up to get to the end of the lesson but drawing large is beneficial so we can see our mistakes and more clearly. Overall these are solid attempts, I'd like you to draw through your forms when doing this exercise again in the future however. By drawing through our forms we develop a better understanding of how these forms rest in 3D space, much like how we did when drawing boxes previously. Some of your forms flatten out a bit, working on shifting the degree of their contours well help quite a bit. Your shadows are mostly hugging the form creating them rather than being cast on to the form/ground below. I recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page and trying to push your shadows further to start off with. This is a great exercise to build up your comfort working with organic forms as well as light and shadow so be sure to experiment with it in your warm ups.
Overall this was a really solid submission, I don't have any major complaints and believe you'll become more consistent when working on these concepts in your warm ups. I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to the next lesson.
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups, give some extra attention to texture and good luck in lesson 3!
Next Steps:
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
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