Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

10:54 PM, Tuesday March 3rd 2020

Lesson 2 - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/3OTuEX9

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I'm happy to have completed this lesson, though it took me longer than I expected. The texture and intersection parts were quite hard for me.

One comment on the texture part: I didn't notice that the first texture should be crumpled paper, so I made an extra one to include this texture. I realize that submitting extra material is asking the reviewer to do extra work, so please, feel free to ignore one of the first three textures.

I also made my notes on that exercise on a different page. I wrote a lot and it wouldn't fit the box.

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8:32 PM, Wednesday March 4th 2020

Starting with your arrows, these are flowing very well, and you've captured an excellent sense of fluidity in how they move through space. You're also doing a good job of applying perspective to the negative space in between the zigzagging sections, though don't be afraid to let those sections overlap as they get farther away from the viewer, as this is inevitably going to happen as that spacing collapses. This is something some students tend to be a little hesitant to do, and it does hurt the sense of depth in the scene.

Moving onto your sausage forms, I can definitely see that you're making an effort to focus on simple sausage forms, though there is definitely still room for improvement there. Ideally we want each sausage to be two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Watch out for any pinching through the midsection, any odd swelling, or ends that are either of different sizes, or stretched out (rather than properly spherical).

Another thing to keep in mind is that the degree of your ellipses and contour curves shouldn't remain consistent throughout the length of each sausage. As shown here, your contour ellipses will widen or narrow as their orientation in relation to the viewer changes.

Moving onto your texture analyses, you probably missed the crumpled paper thing because it's actually quite new - if you read through that assignment before February, it wouldn't have been there at the time. As such, I do have some leeway for students forgetting to include it. The reason it's assigned now is because it generally forces students to think more about the shadow shapes without approaching things in terms of outlining the textural forms. This is something that you already demonstratedo n your own quite well in your tree-bark texture, so that's great to see.

Now, you do still approach the smaller cracks more as lines, so there's a pretty big jump from the big, bold shadow shapes to these smaller cracks - remember that everything is a shadow, so even if you perceive something as being a line, don't think in terms of actually drawing it as a line.

Moving onto the other two textures though, I do feel that here you fell afoul of the no scribbling rule. When drawing texture, it's very important that you get used to drawing exactly what you see - that means fighting the urge to identify a repeatable pattern and go into autopilot, and instead zeroing in on little bits of information at a time, carrying them over into your drawing and then returning to your reference.

This issue with observation is present in your crumpled paper as well, though to a lesser extent. While you clearly identified elements and features in your reference, you stylized it to be more graphic, rather than focusing on exactly what your shadows are meant to imply about the forms present in your object.

Now, you did a much better job on your dissections. You studied your references much more closely here ,and leveraged shadows instead of line more similarly to how you did it in your tree bark, so it looks like the scribbles were just an unpleasant detour.

Finally, moving onto your form and organic intersections, you're doing a pretty great job in drawing these forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space. Your form intersections are maintaining a consistent sense of scale as they interact, and your organic intersections do a good job of resting atop one another in a natural fashion.

For the form intersections, the intersections themselves will be something that you'll continue to improve upon throughout the entirety of the course, as understanding these spatial relationships between forms is at the very core of Drawabox itself. In this exercise, we're merely introducing the concept, so you start thinking about how it all works.

In the organic intersections, just one minor point - when drawing the cast shadows, keep in mind that they're cast upon the surface beneath them - so if that surface pulls away (like if a sausage is laid across two beneath it, and a shadow is cast into the valley between them), the shadow will plunge in after it.

All in all, you're doing pretty well. A few things to keep in mind, but I'm confident in marking this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 3

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:27 PM, Thursday March 5th 2020

Thanks for the review, Umconfortable! It was helpful :)

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