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2:14 AM, Sunday June 28th 2020
Starting with your arrows, you've done a great job of capturing how these flow fluidly through space in a convincing and believable manner. You're doing a decent job of compressing the gaps between the zigzagging sections as we look farther back in space as well, so perspective is being applied pretty nicely, though I think this compression of space can be exaggerated even further to get a stronger sense of depth.
Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you've clearly been mindful of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages as explained in the instructions. You're also largely doing a pretty good job of drawing your contour ellipses confidently (they're a touch stiff in a couple places but mostly well drawn, and so they maintain a pretty even shape). They're also pretty accurate in that they fit snugly between the edges of the forms. You're having more trouble in drawing the contour curves however - they wrap around the sausage form believably, but they're considerably more stiff and show difficulty in fitting where they need to. One thing you may be doing is drawing more from your wrist rather than from your shoulder - a more limited radius might contribute to ending up having to mix up your arm pivots and lose consistency in the motion. This can throw off your accuracy and the flow of the stroke.
Towards the bottom of the page, you do get better at this, but it's definitely something you'll want to focus on.
Moving onto your texture analyses and your dissections, these are looking very well done. You're clearly focusing a great deal on employing shadow shapes instead of outlining your textural forms, and this allows you to achieve good transitions from dark to light and dense to sparse. This carries over into the dissections nicely where you continue to respect the importance of leaving outlines aside and focusing only on shadow shapes - this is something students often forget when tackling a wider variety of textures, so I'm glad to see that you're still working in the density shifting.
Your form intersections are largely looking well done, though I think one thing that would help make the boxes in particular feel more cohesive and consistent with one another is to avoid more dramatic foreshortening. Pushing those vanishing points farther away and reducing the rate at which they converge will help keep the sense of scale over the whole set of forms more consistent. Also, don't forget to construct your cylinders around a central minor axis line as shown here (in the diagram for that step).
As far as the intersections are going, you've got a lot of solid swings, and some solid results. This exercise focuses on exposing students and introducing them to the concept of defining the spatial relationships between their forms. I don't expect perfection or even success - I'm just interested in providing an exposure to the challenge at this point, as it is something we'll continue to explore throughout the course. That said, you are showing a good start, and I'm pleased with your results.
Lastly, your organic intersections certainly do a good job of establishing how these forms interact with one another in 3D space. Your first page doesn't quite give a sense of gravity however, due to how the forms appear to be floating more loosely above one another. The second page is a little better in this regard, though there's still a sense of weightlessness due to the physical gaps between the forms. When doing this exercise in the future, strive to think about how the forms would press down upon one another, how they'd slump and sag under the forces of gravity to really sell the impression that everything is solid and real.
So! Overall, you've got a few things to keep an eye on (mostly those contour curves), but I'm pleased with your progress. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 3.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.