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7:41 PM, Thursday July 9th 2020

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a decent job of drawing them so they flow smoothly and fluidly, although you really need to push the sense of foreshortening. You've got some shift in the size of the arrow (getting smaller as it moves away from the viewer), but you're not compressing the spacing between the zigzagging sections in the same way. This diagram shows what I mean.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you're making some attempt to stick to simple sausage forms, but a number of these still stray pretty far from the characteristics listed in the instructions. That is, drawing sausages with circular/spherical ends connected by a tube of consistent width. A number of yours have ends of totally different sizes, and have to taper as we move through their length. You're also neglecting to draw through your ellipses altogether, which you should be doing for every single ellipse you draw for these lessons. The result is that they're a little stiffer than they should be, and tend to be a little uneven, with slightly pointed ends.

Aside from that, you are doing a good job of fitting the contour ellipses and curves snugly between the edges of the form, and your contour curves wrap nicely along the surface of the rounded sausage. You're also showing a decent grasp of how the degree of those contour lines ought to shift as we slide along the length of a given form.

For your texture analyses, you're definitely moving in the right direction, and are clearly focusing a lot more on clearly defined shadow shapes rather than outlining your individual textural forms. There are some issues however that I want to point out, though I frankly think you improve upon these a great deal throughout your dissections.

The first issue that jumps out is that you still tend to rely on hatching lines. Sometimes it kind of makes sense (with the feathers, since the feathers are made up of individual fibers and have those kinds of striations. The thing to keep in mind here however is that you're basically achieving the transition from sparse to dense by infinitely increasing the number of lines along the surface of your feathers. Feathers only have a certain number of individual fibers - therefore beyond a certain point, you're starting to make up information that is not actually present. Instead, think of it this way - each fiber casts a little shadow on its neighbours. Those shadows always exist, but all the way at the right side of the gradient, they all basically have a width of 0, having been shrunk down to nothing. But they're still there.

As you transition over to the left, where things get darker and denser, more and more of those shadows are starting to increase in width, starting to grow and expand. This results in some of them becoming more visible as we slide in that direction. Those shadows are however going to continue expanding, eventually merging into one another and creating more continuous solid black shapes rather than just more individual shadows.

For the rocky texture at the bottom there, you're running into an issue where you're not just altering the shadows and how heavy they are, but rather you're placing larger chunks out to the right side, and smaller chunks towards the left (resulting in more cracks/gaps between them, increasing their density). What we want to do here is to keep the same density of the texture itself, but change the density of the marks used to capture it. Same thing - gradually expand those cast shadow shapes, making them bigger until they all fuse together. Also, leave the hatching lines out - what we're doing here, creating patterns of alternating dark and white marks, is to actually replace what hatching is usually used for. So including it here kind of defeats its purpose.

As I said before, you improve on these points I've raised throughout your dissections, and you really make excellent progress there. I just wanted to be as clear as possible as you move forwards.

Moving onto your form intersections, these are quite well done. The forms are drawn to be cohesive and consistent within the same space, and you've got an excellent start on those intersections - which are really just meant to be an introduction to a concept so students can start thinking about how their forms relate to one another in space as we continue to explore it throughout the rest of the course. The only issue I have is very, very minor - be more careful with your hatching. Ensure it stretches from edge to edge as much as you can, rather than having the lines floating on their own. Also, on some of the later pages you end up getting a little too heavy with your line weight, in a way that suggests you switched up the type of pen. Line weight should always be subtle. You're speaking to the viewer's subconscious through relative changes in thickness, rather than trying to shout at the viewer "THIS IS DEFINITELY IN FRONT OF THIS OTHER THING".

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along pretty well. You're establishing how the forms interact with one another in 3D space, rather than as flat shapes on a flat page, and are capturing a good sense of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another.

So! Overall you're doing really well, but I do want to get the organic forms with contour lines exercises sorted out, so I'm going to ask you to do them again.

Next Steps:

Please submit 1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses, and 1 page of organic forms with contour curves. Stick to simple sausage forms as mentioned in the instructions and be sure to draw through your contour ellipses.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
1:28 AM, Friday July 10th 2020
4:30 AM, Friday July 10th 2020

This is looking much better. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
9:49 AM, Friday July 10th 2020

Hey Uncomfortable,

Can I ask you a question about the 250 ellipse challenge? It is regarding the minor axis correction as stated here: https://imgur.com/a/CNS74JH

I understand that the corrections should be exactly 1/2 of the ellipse length, but how did you figure out how to draw the angle of the correction line? Is it arbitrary?

(I know i'm on lesson 3, but I've been going through them during the 2 week buffer between submissions given i've just been at home heh)

Thanks for your time!

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