Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

9:16 PM, Sunday May 16th 2021

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I had difficulty getting the size and degree of ellipse I wanted to in the form intersections so a lot of my cylinders and cones look more foreshortened than they should.

I also saw a comment under the video demo for the lesson where Uncomfortable said you're not required to draw through the intersections, and the example homework doesn't draw through them either, so most of the time I focused on the sides the viewer would see since I often couldn't visualize it fully.

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11:03 PM, Wednesday May 19th 2021

Hi there, I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.

Just a heads up this critique will be fairly blunt but is in no way a comment on your character or a judgment of you as a person. I bring this up because I believe you may have a been a bit hasty with this lesson and didn't give as much attention to the instructions as you needed, keeping it blunt and getting through it as fast as we can will let you get back to work as soon as possible.

Arrows

  • Your lines are lacking confidence and planning which results in wobbling as well as stiffness.

  • The width of your arrows is inconsistent which results in them appearing like they're stretching rather than appearing solid. You're also not overlapping your lines enough which flattens your arrows out as shown here.

  • You're not utilizing foreshortening in the negative space between your arrows' curves as instructed here.

Organic forms with contours

  • Your forms are hastily done and a bit too complex with pinched ends due to a lack of confidence rather than being smoothly drawn with both ends ending up the same size and avoiding any pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length which was discussed here.

  • Your contours are often floating in the middle of the form rather than being ghosted enough to touch both sides of the form.

  • You don't shift the degree of your contours at all.

Texture

  • You're drawing outlines and negative space rather than focusing on cast shadows created from forms along the textures. This makes it difficult to create any shift in your gradient at all which is why it ends up changing from the pure black dark section the left to just thin lines. More on the importance of focusing on cast shadows here.

  • In the dissection section you show that you're working from memory at times rather than giving yourself enough time to look at your reference, the majority of our time when drawing from reference will actually be looking at the reference with just a few seconds attempting to capture what we see on the page.

Form intersections

  • Your forms here definitely could be worse, you kept your line work mostly tidy which is nice but I know that you're definitely capable of better than this by looking at your 250 box challenge submission.

  • Whether our goal is to draw one form or one hundred we want to make sure we give each line the same amount of time and planning to avoid our results looking rushed.

Organic intersections

  • Your line work continues to lack confidence here and gets quite wobbly/messy.

  • Your forms lose their solidity and appear quite flat and over complicated.

  • I'd like you to draw through all of your forms in this exercise to help you understand the 3D space you're trying to construct.

  • Your shadows mostly hug the form creating them rather than being cast on the form/ground below in a consistent way.

I apologize if this was upsetting at all, as mentioned at the start I just want to get you through it as fast as I can because I know you're capable of better than this.

There are a lot of issues here that could have been avoided if more time and attention had been given to the instructions and your work.

I'm going to be asking you to redo this lesson.

With that said, I'd like you to re-read and re-complete this lesson. I recommend taking a look at ScyllaStew's videos which you can find here, she worked through and recorded some of the lessons and will give you a good representation of how much time should be spent on each exercise. Plenty of people underestimate how much time and effort actually goes into putting in their best attempt, it's not an uncommon mistake so again please don't take this personally.

Once you've completed the lesson, you'll have to create a new submission which will cost you an additional credit (because I'll have to critique it all once again).

I know you can do better than this, and I look forward to seeing your work in the future. Good luck.

2:59 AM, Friday May 21st 2021

I have a few questions before I move forward.

I'm having immense difficulty ghosting curved lines as opposed to straight lines. For organic forms in particular I went through multiple pages before I could get semi-workable ones, but this caused problems on arrows too, as well as my contour lines.

For your first point about texture, do you know of any other resources that talk about focusing on shadows? I've read the part of the lesson you linked multiple times and still can't wrap my head around it.

Just so I'm clear, is the line work the main issue with the form intersections? I also had difficulty applying line weight to them, it either felt too bold or not enough.

Do the forms in the organic intersections lack solidity due to the wobbly lines or are there other things causing it?

10:34 PM, Friday May 21st 2021

Sure, if you feel like you have more after this response feel free to let us know and we'll try to point you in the right direction.

Finding curved lines more difficult than straight lines is normal, a lot of this comes down to mileage and putting in your best effort. We don't expect perfection but we do expect your best attempt at the exercises, the more conscious you are about what you're doing and by putting in your best effort the faster you'll find yourself improving.

In the arrows exercise your lines are wobbly showing you're not drawing confidently. This isn't uniquely a problem with just your curved lines however; your straight lines that you use in your hatching are also wobbly and not planned out. Overall you're tackling exercises too quickly and not giving yourself enough time to plan your marks or think about what you're trying to achieve as well as what you learned in the previous exercises. On your second page of arrows, the top middle arrow is a good example of this, if you follow the lines from the center of the swirl, the inner line ends up on the opposite side of the arrow at the point. Try simpler "S" shaped arrows, if you find something difficult it's better to start simple rather than frustrate yourself with more complex tasks.

For the texture exercises, it is completely normal for students to struggle with these concepts - that holding an understanding of a single textural form (like a single chunk of cracked mud, or a single scale) in your mind, and to understand what kind of shadow it would cast on its surroundings, is inherently difficult, and we do not expect students to do it well in their first attempts. What we do want to see however are signs that the student is actually thinking about each individual textural form one at a time, and drawing those cast shadow shapes with one form in mind at a time. You can see demonstrations of this in the video for this exercise. Right now, looking at your work, you're definitely still trying to draw all the texture at once, thinking about it more in terms of patterns that can be replicated across the whole thing, rather than one little piece at a time.

This is a fairly normal misunderstanding that occurs largely because it's easier - and most importantly, faster - to focus on the lines you see and to draw them directly, rather than to study each individual textural form on their own. When we focus on completing the assignment within a set amount of time (maybe to get the whole page done in a single sitting), we opt for the quicker solution even when the approach described in the demonstrations is quite different. So, for now, just focus on investing as much time as you need to execute the instructions to the best of your current ability. If it takes multiple sittings, or multiple days, to complete a page - or even a single texture study - that's perfectly fine. There are no deadlines, no expectations for speed or efficiency. Take as much time as you require.

Your form intersections are actually the strongest part of your submission in my opinion, your line work is mostly ok here the issue once again is that you're going from form to form too quickly. Your convergences aren't always consistent, you don't always draw the intersections, this is a good exercise to experiment with hatching which is shown in this exercise's lesson section as well. So it's not a case of this is section is done poorly, it's a case of I know you're capable of better than this and as mentioned at the start of the course you're meant to submit your best attempts.

Your organic intersections lack solidity for a few reasons, wobbly lines is one of them as you mentioned. Some other reasons are that your contours are quite stiff and don't shift their degree along the form properly as well as your form suddenly shift from rounded forms to straight lines to hide behind another form as quickly as possible so they're out of your thought process. Our biggest goal in this course is to grow more comfortable thinking and working in 3D space, doing so allows our work to appear solid. People try to rush through the basics so they can learn style but style is built on knowing the rules and how to break them in intentional ways so it requires understanding of how to make things appear solid to begin with.

I do hope this helped, if you have more questions feel free to ask. I once again apologize if this came off as blunt, but genuinely the reason behind a lot of these issues is you didn't give the lesson reading/exercises the time you needed.

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