Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

1:32 AM, Thursday December 17th 2020

Lesson 2 DAB - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/9GuFcv1

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Textures! This was a great exercise in observation. I couldn't quite get the gradients down on all of the Dissection exercise, and the intersections were rough.... By the end I felt like I was understanding the concept more, and have since done the exercise much more successfully. For the texture analysis I missed the part about doing the crumpled paper first, so if you would like me to still do that, I can certainly go back and make that happen.

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3:37 AM, Friday December 18th 2020

Hi there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique. Before I actually critique your work though I'd like to ask for a possible favour.

If possible are you able to retake pictures of your exercises and create a new album? The angle at which you took all these pictures makes it a bit of a headache to have to try and discern some of the concepts.

If you can take pictures from straight above, create an album and reply to this comment with it that would be ideal, if for some reason you're unable to we'll manage and I'll go over what's presented.

Regardless thank you in advance and I look forward to critiquing your work as soon as I can.

Next Steps:

Please take easier to work with pictures if possible.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
2:50 AM, Saturday January 2nd 2021

https://imgur.com/gallery/TuD1lEd

Finally got back to this and retook some new photos. I hope these are better for you, and thanks!

11:42 AM, Saturday January 2nd 2021

Awesome these are much better, thank you.

You're making good progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson, below I'll be listing some things that will hopefully help you in your future attempts at these exercises.

  • Your arrows are off to a good start, there's two suggestions I have for you here. The first is there are some cases where your arrows don't always flow smoothly, they widen or narrow inconsistently. This is largely a mileage thing but remember that you want to make sure the width of your arrow remains consistent as well as widens/narrows consistently as it gets closer/further from the viewer. The second suggestion is to keep experimenting with foreshortening, you tend to keep things very static but by increasing the size of your arrow itself as well as the space between the curves of your arrow you'll create a stronger illusion that it's moving through 3D space as shown here.

  • You forgot to include your organic forms with contours but I found them in the previous submission so check there if you're looking for them. Your forms here do get a bit too complex but you're close to achieving the goal of the exercise. Our goal here is to create forms where both ends are the same size and we avoid any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length. Your contour ellipses appear a bit stiff at time which shows you may not be drawing them as confidently as you could be. I'd also like you to work on shifting the degree of your 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.

  • 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. 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 look pretty solid most of the time but there's two things that jump out at me. The first is you use some stretched forms which is discouraged here. The second thing I notice is that your line quality suffers quite a bit here and gets fairly messy in some spots, this may be due to lack of planning and you trying to rush to the finish line, remember that whether our goal is to draw 1 form or 100, we want to be giving each line the same amount of time. You may find this section on units of work from earlier in the course helpful.

  • This is a good first attempt at the organic intersections exercise but you do have some notable issues here. Your forms aren't really wrapping around one another in a way that's believable and end up floating, your contours lines aren't hooking back into the form, and your shadows don't behave as if they have a consistent light source. Be sure to keep experimenting with this exercise in you warm ups, when trying to lay down forms on each other it's often more difficult if the forms are stacked on top of one another while facing the same direction. Laying them across one another so they can wrap smoothly will help reinforce your understanding of the 3D space you're building. I'd also recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner rather than working with your light directly above, it's much easier to be consistent and learn how shadows behave this way.

Overall this was a solid submission, you have some things to work on but I believe you'll improve with mileage so I'll be marking your submission complete.

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

Next Steps:

Practice previous exercises as warm ups.

Move on to lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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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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