Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

7:25 PM, Tuesday March 17th 2020

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Hello, here's my submission for lesson 2.

It was far more challenging than I imagined it'd be.

All feedback is appreciated.

The exercise I struggled the most on is the form intersection exercise. I honestly had not a single clue on how to make the forms intersect for most of them. I tried some guesswork but it was as good as throwing random ideas.

All of this made me aware that I tend to become sloppy when I get too frustrated, which is something I'm going to work on.

Anyways, if I understand it correctly, unless the submission is not satisfying enough and I am to redo part of it, I can jump onto lesson 3 while doing a little bit of the texture challenge. The cylinders challenge is to be held off until lesson 5, right?

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3:09 AM, Wednesday March 18th 2020

Starting with your arrows, very nice work. You've got them flowing fluidly through space, and have captured the impact of perspective on both the width of the ribbon (the positive space) and the distances between the zigzagging sections (negative space) to show a good sense of depth in the scene.

You're also doing a pretty good job with your organic forms with contour ellipses - your sausages are mostly kept to the properties of simple sausage forms as requested in the instructions. There are a couple places where the ends are of different sizes, but mostly these are well done. One thing to watch out for however is that your contour ellipses seem to be of roughly the same degree. The degree of your ellipses should instead be shifting naturally along the length of the form, as demonstrated here. This applies to the organic forms with contour curves as well. Other than that, nice work.

Moving onto your texture analyses, these are mostly well done, with a clear focus on shadow shapes to imply the presence of textural forms, rather than separating each individual form using outlines. Through the first two rows, I think you did a very good job of capturing a good, gradual shift from darks to lights, though your last texture still has a very prominent jump from very dark to much lighter and more sparse.

I do think that you're still utilizing a fair amount of outline through many of your dissections, you are indeed still working with a lot of clear shadow shapes. Keep working on reducing the reliance on those outlines, more as you've done towards the bottom left of the second page (the something ripples texture).

Moving onto your form intersections, I think you're doing a pretty great job here. Your forms feel solid and cohesive within the same space, and your linework is confidently drawn with a fair bit of control and a great use of the ghosting method. As far as the actual intersections go, you've got a good start in exploring how those forms actually relate to one another in space. This is something we'll continue to develop throughout the entirety of the course, as spatial reasoning is one of the fundamental pillars of Drawabox, and you're at a strong starting position already.

Lastly, your organic intersections are generally looking good. You're capturing a sense of how they slump and sag over one another, and how they interact in space. You've got varying degrees of success when it comes to projecting the cast shadows onto the underlying surfaces, though understanding how those shadows wrap around those surfaces is something you can certainly improve upon with additional practice.

All in all, your work here is looking good. I'll happily mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:48 AM, Wednesday March 18th 2020

Thank you, it's appreciated.

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