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. You're doing a good job maintaining a consistent width as your arrows widen while moving closer to the viewer and with more mileage you'll become more consistent. 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. At times you don't overlap your edges when you should, this results in your arrows flattening out as you can see here. 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 your forms are getting a bit too complex. We want to create our forms with both ends being the same size and to avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as discussed here. Some of your line work here shows a lack of confidence, remember that our first priority is that we want all of our linework/ellipses/contours to be drawn confidently and mileage will improve our accuracy. 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 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 in some places 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.
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 appear a bit hastily done (and you don't always draw through them), it looks like you needed more time planning them before drawing them. Remember that whether our goal is to draw 1 form or 100, we want to be giving each line the same amount of time planning/ghosting before drawing it.
While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you show that you need a bit more time becoming comfortable with thinking of how these forms interact in 3D space and how they'd wrap around one another. I recommend trying to stack your forms perpendicularly rather than trying to keep them headed in the same direction to help make wrapping them around one another a smoother task. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. When drawing your shadows you don't push them far enough to cast, instead they mostly hug the form creating them, try pushing them further. Your shadows appear to be following a consistent light source, be sure to experiment with different angles and intensities when trying this exercise again in the future. 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.
I won't be moving you on to the next lesson just yet, each lesson builds upon each other and I'd like to make sure you understand a few of these concepts a bit more before potentially creating more problems down the road.
With that being said I'd like you to please re-read and complete:
1 page of the organic forms with contours exercise
2 page of form intersections
Once you've completed the pages mentioned above reply to this critique with a link to them, I'll go over them and address anything that needs to be worked on and once you've shown you're ready for the next lesson I'll move you on.
I look forward to seeing your work.
Next Steps:
Please re-read and complete:
1 page of the organic forms with contours exercise
2 page of form intersections
Hello , Thanks for your critique,
you are right i kinda gave up really fast with form intersection that's why they look very bad, anyway i did everything you told me and i can feel improvement ! here is the extra homework.
Your form intersections are a huge improvement, good job. Your hatching does get a bit odd and messy at times, check here to see how it should be applied to different forms.
Your organic intersections still have room for improvement but are looking more confident. Keep practicing this exercise and really think about how these forms would wrap around one another if they were placed in front of you, currently they kind of float against each other. You pushed your shadows further but are kind of going from one extreme to another, before you shadows were hugging the form and not really being cast on to the forms below and now you've filled huge spaces with shadow but don't really give yourself any room to shape your shadows as if they were casting. Check here to see an example of what we're trying to do here.
I'm going to be moving you on to the next lesson but it's with the hope that you'll continue to work on these criticisms I've mentioned, remember that each lesson builds upon one another so if you have gaps in your abilities it will just make things more difficult when you try to build upon these ideas.
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3.
Next Steps:
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
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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