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5:28 PM, Wednesday July 1st 2020
Starting with your arrows, you're drawing them such that they flow smoothly and confidently through space. One thing that I think you can do to continue improving upon these however is to keep exaggerating the rate at which the gaps between the zigzagging sections compress and tighten up - this will help convey a stronger sense of depth in the scene.
Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, the first thing that jumps out at me is that while you're clearly putting effort into keeping your sausages simple as described in the instructions for this exercise, you pretty consistently end up having the midsection swell up instead of maintaining a consistent width, and you tend to have the ends appear more stretched rather than properly circular/spherical. There's definitely room for improvement there, and working to squish that midsection down and keep it consistent throughout its length will definitely help.
The contour lines themselves are coming along pretty well - your contour ellipses are smooth and confidently drawn, and your contour curves wrap around the sausages quite well. The only other issue is that the degree of your contour lines tend to be really consistent as we slide along the length of each form. 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.
Looking at your work on the texture analyses, you're really showing excellent growth in the right direction. You're focusing on working with clear shadow shapes instead of outlining your textural forms, and you're doing a pretty great job of achieving smooth transitions from dark to light. You're also demonstrating pretty solid observational skills.
Moving onto your dissections, you continue showing most of these good habits, although there are a few places where the textures feature more distinct, separated textural forms (like scales for instance) where you fall back into outlining those textural forms and limiting your ability to actually control the density of the marks you're using. I explain this issue in these notes.
Throughout your form intersections, you're doing a pretty solid job of drawing the forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space. I can also see that you've made a solid effort at tackling the intersections between those forms - this is something I fully expect students to have trouble with, as you haven't had any prior experience with it. All we're doing here is providing an initial introduction to the challenge of defining how those forms relate to one another in 3D space, and you're off to a great start. This is something we're going to continue exploring quite a but throughout the rest of the course.
Lastly, your organic intersections are solidly done. They establish a clear sense of how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, rather than as flat shapes on a page, and you've established a good illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another. The top form on the first page is the only issue I can see - specifically the fact that it appears to have a bit of a "belly" that spills out from nowhere. It was just a one-time mistake, and you rolled with it quite well however. I'm also pretty pleased with the sausage forms themselves - they're looking a fair bit better than the organic forms with contour lines exercise.
So! All in all, your work here is looking good. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 3.
Cottonwood Arts Sketchbooks
These are my favourite sketchbooks, hands down. Move aside Moleskine, you overpriced gimmick. These sketchbooks are made by entertainment industry professionals down in Los Angeles, with concept artists in mind. They have a wide variety of sketchbooks, such as toned sketchbooks that let you work both towards light and towards dark values, as well as books where every second sheet is a semitransparent vellum.