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10:41 PM, Saturday July 9th 2022

I'll be the TA handling your Lesson 2 critique.

You're making progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson and hopefully this critique will help you in your future attempts.

  • Starting off in the arrows section your lines are looking smoothly and confidently drawn. There are spots where your arrows bulge/narrow suddenly, this is an issue because it gives the impression that your arrows are stretching which hurts their solidity. Remember that as our arrows move closer to the viewer we want them to widen consistently. It's good to see that you're trying to implement line weight, just remember that you want to keep your applications subtle and you'll become consistent with mileage. here are some things to look out for when applying it. I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.

  • Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise you're doing a good job keeping your forms simple, plenty of people tend to over-complicate them. You're keeping your line work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress with more mileage it'll become more natural. Speaking of contours I'd like you to try and shift 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.

  • In the texture exercises (more so in your dissections) 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. You also show that you're drawing from memory at times rather than giving yourself enough time to focus on your reference. Most of our time when doing exercises like this will be spent observing our reference and looking away for a quick second to add something to our page. 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.

  • It's quite common for people to feel like they don't fully grasp the form intersections exercise, if you feel like you may fall into this category try not to stress too much. 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 are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work.

  • While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you do a great job demonstrating that your sense of 3D space is developing as your forms begin to wrap around each other believably. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. I'd like you to draw through all of your forms when tackling this exercise again in the future. Drawing through your forms will help reinforce your understanding of 3D space. At times your shadows are hugging the form creating them rather than being cast on to another surface believably. It appears like your shadows aren't following a consistent light source, I recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page to start with, it's easier than working with a light directly above your form pile.

Overall this was a solid submission, while you may have some things to work on I have no doubt you will improve with more mileage. I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to the next lesson.

Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!

Next Steps:

Keep practicing previous exercise as warm ups.

Move on to lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:20 AM, Monday July 11th 2022

Thank you so much for the critique!

I do however have some questions,

-Arrows Section-

There are spots where your arrows bulge/narrow suddenly, this is an issue because it gives the impression that your arrows are stretching which hurts their solidity.

Could you please show an example of this? Because sometimes i put the arrow head away from the viewer, so thats why some arrow heads look tinier than others (and narrow suddenly), althrough i might be misunderstanding the point here, so an example would be neat.

I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space

Is there a specific type of foreshortening that i tend to do in my arrows? i try to vary the foreshortening of them, but maybe i ended up creating a very similar type of foreshortening for all of them.

Also, I know that it says "experiment more" but like i said, i tried to vary it in the arrows and the space between the curves, so is this on the lines of "i don't see much foreshortening being applied" or more like "you need to focus on trying more foreshortening" or is something else completely?

by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves

If i remember, negative space is something that was briefly mentioned in Texture and detail, so i am not too familiar with the term, is this an example of negative space?.

-Organic Forms with contours-

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.

This is something that i have a lot of trouble understanding, for example [here] (https://imgur.com/vg0vy0v) i understand the degree shift, but, what happens for example, when we have a sausage like this ? in this case, i see the majority of my contour lines being very wide, having almost no difference, are these cases ok? i ask because Uncomfortable always shows the same example when it comes to the degree shift of an ellipse (or contour line in this case) which is an horizontal sausage laying perfectly in front of us, which lead me to question how to handle forms that are rotated.

-Texture Exercises-

you're focusing largely on outlines and negative space rather than cast shadows created by forms along the texture itself

Could you show an example of this?, i do fully enclose some forms because, to my analysis of those forms, i thought some of them where in a position where the light did not vanish the shadow of the form, but neither were they obscured by shadow.

Or for example in some scenarios where they were behind a form, and had a full outlined shadow, but i guess i was wrong.

I do not understand "you're focusing on negative space" however.

-General Question-

Now that i need to do warm-ups for lesson 2, i wanted to ask how to handle them, and i know that is kinda tricky to answer because everyone has a different way to handle warm-ups.

For example, i tend to do 3 exercises from lesson 1 every session (of course, only taking 15-20 min), each one containing an important exercise from each section of lesson 1, for example, one day i'll do Superimposed Lines, Tables of ellipses and Rough perspective, the other day i'll do a different set and so on, i have improved a lot following this system and i do plan to do the same with lesson 2.

However, has you may understand, "Texture and Detail" is an extremely time consuming section, that requires total attention and no rushing.

So i wanted to ask, Its ok if i only do only one exercise of Texture and Detail for the warm-up section of my session? Because i think doing more exercises would take me more time and missing the point of a warm-up.

And also, what is the most optimal way to do them? like, for dissections, it is better to do a fully textured sausage, or only half of the sausage? And in texture analysis, is it better to do a single square of texture analysis with no gradient (black to white), or is it better to do a rectangle with gradient (black to white)?.

Thank you once again for the critique!.

3:25 PM, Monday July 11th 2022

I'll be jumping in to answer these. In the future, it's best to try to keep your questions as concise as possible - we certainly allow for students to ask questions, but TAs are paid primarily for the work on the original critique (and any revisions they choose to assign), so anything additional should be kept as brief as possible. Also, anything that isn't directly related to the critique (like the general question) is best posed in the Questions/Discussions section of the website, or on our discord chat server as there are many people in the community who are equipped to answer them.

Arrows

  • The bulging/narrowing refers to the inconsistency in your arrows' widths on the page. This is present in most of yours, with some cases like this (where the ribbon goes from quite narrow to extremely wide then narrows a little as it comes towards us) and this (where you follow a pattern of narrowing in the midsection and widening at the ends) being quite prominent. Try to maintain a more consistent shift from narrow farther away from the viewer and wider as it comes towards us.

  • By experimenting with foreshortening, we to try and exaggerate the scale shift more - get even bigger as the arrow comes towards the viewer. You definitely have foreshortening here, but it can be pushed and exaggerated further.

  • The negative space is what I've marked out here in red. You're on the right track, but it is strictly the space in between the physical ribbon itself. Mainly note how the section farthest to the back does not have any negative space because it's shrunk to the point of allowing the ribbon to overlap itself on the page. Most of your arrows tend to avoid that kind of overlap - partially this is impacted by the widening/narrowing of the ribbon, but it is not uncommon for students to actively hesitate to let things overlap.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines

  • As discussed in the Lesson 1 ellipses video, the cross-sections of a basic, straight cylinder will widen as we slide further away from the viewer along the length of the form. You mentioned you understand this, which is good. When the tube form is able to bend and turn however, this also impacts the degree shift (since the degree shift occurs due to the way in which each slice is oriented relative to the viewer's position as shown here), so with sausages that are more flexible, we start with the "farther = wider" thing as a rule of thumb, but then also factor in the bending of the form on top of that.

Texture Exercises

  • This issue comes up across a lot of your work, but a prominent example is your 3rd texture analysis, where you appear to have filled in the cracks and gaps, primarily working from direct observation. Cracks and gaps like this are in effect, negative space - like the space between the arrow's ribbon sections, here it's the space between the physical forms that actually make up the texture itself. When we jump straight into drawing these from observation, we tend to think less about what's a form and what's not a form, but rather focus only on the shapes that we see without fully understanding them. You can read more about this in these notes from Lesson 2.

General Question

Your question is actually addressed here in Lesson 0 (in the last paragraph):

Keep in mind that in that 10-15 minutes, you don't need to do a whole page of the given exercise - you merely do what you can in that time period. You can also choose to spread a page across multiple sittings, picking the same exercise across a few sittings until the page is done. All that matters is that you continue practicing regularly, and that none of the exercises get abandoned.

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