Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

9:04 PM, Tuesday December 8th 2020

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Hi everyone! I finished the lesson 2. Feel like i need more practice with textures.

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8:21 AM, Friday December 11th 2020

Hey there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.

You're making good progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson. I'll be listing some things below that will hopefully help you in your future attempts of these exercises.

  • Your arrows are off to a good start, the first thing I notice here is line quality. I'm not sure if your pen is dieing or if you're attempting to use under-drawings but a lot of your lines through this entire lesson become quite faint. If possible try and make sure your lines are nice and clear, it helps you so you don't have to redraw lines or create a mess and the person critiquing you. (Of course if it's a pen situation and you can't get any right this second it's understandable) There are a few spots where you could overlap your curves so that your arrows flow better and some wobbly sections that show you're not drawing as confidently as you could be. Largely these issues should clear up with more mileage, but one thing I would like you to work on is I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening. As discussed here by utilizing foreshortening in not only the arrow itself but the space between your arrow's curves we can really sell the illusion that something is moving through 3D space.

  • In the organic forms with contours exercise your forms are looking nice and simple, good job a lot of people struggle with this and end up over-complicating them. It does appear like you're trying to shift the degree of your contours which is also great to see, there ar ea few spots where they could be pushed further however. 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.

  • If possible investing in a brush pen is a really helpful tool when dealing with shadows like in the texture and later exercises involving shadows. Your texture results are a bit mixed, in some spots you're focusing on shadows but in others like your lace plant attempt you're focused on outlines and negative space. 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.

  • If you feel like you don't fully grasp form intersections just yet don't worry, 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.

  • As for your organic intersections there are a lot of faint sketchy lines that aren't helping your attempts here, I do get the impression that there may have been more of an attempt at under-drawing here, which as discussed here is discouraged. Every line should be planned and confidently executed, we may then apply some line weight to make things clearer. Your forms for the most part are wrapping around one another nicely here, just issues with line quality and wobbling make things appear less solid than they could. Be sure to experiment with moving your light source around in the future as well, simple sets of forms like this are useful practice for developing our understanding of shadows before moving on to more complex pieces.

Overall this was a solid submission, you do have a few things to work on but I believe you can improve these issues with more mileage. I'll be marking your submission as complete and moving you on to the next lesson.

Keep doing previous exercises as warm ups, remember to draw confidently and good luck in lesson 3!

Next Steps:

Do previous exercises as warm ups.

Move on to lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:36 PM, Friday December 11th 2020

TOFU, thank you for your critique. )

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Sakura Pigma Microns

Sakura Pigma Microns

A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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