This was a real challange compared to lesson 1
I had so much problem specially dealing with textures. I have some doubts that came into my mind when I was doing the texture dissections exercise, but I will tell you once you review all of the exercises.
I'll be the TA handling your Lesson 2 critique.
You're making progress towards understanding the concepts introduced in this lesson and hopefully this critique will help you in your future attempts.
Starting off with the arrows section you want to be making sure you're drawing confidently to keep your arrows as smooth as possible, accuracy will come with mileage. There are spots where your arrows bulge/narrow suddenly, this is an issue because it gives the impression that your arrows are stretching which hurts their solidity. Remember that as our arrows move closer to the viewer we want them to widen consistently. It's good to see that you're trying to implement line weight, just remember that you want to keep your applications subtle and you'll become consistent with mileage. here are some things to look out for when applying it. At times you don't overlap your edges when you should, this results in your arrows flattening out as you can see here. I'd like you to experiment more with foreshortening in your future attempts, by utilizing it in both the arrows themselves as well as the negative space between their curves we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space as demonstrated here.
Moving into the organic forms with contours exercise you're doing a good job keeping your forms simple, plenty of people tend to over-complicate them. You're keeping your line work confident here which is great, if you feel uncomfortable working with contours still don't stress, with more mileage it'll become more natural. Speaking of contours I'd like you to try and shift the degree of your contours more. 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, form shadows 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.
It's quite common for people to feel like they don't fully grasp the form intersections exercise, if you feel like you may fall into this category try not to stress too much. 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 are looking quite solid here and they believably appear to belong in the same cohesive 3D space, good work. One thing I will mention is that your added line weight to your boxes does make it a bit overwhelming and harder to find your intersections (partly because the lines that get weight added are inconsistent), it may be worth toning it down a bit when attempting this exercise again in the future.
While wrapping up your submission with the organic intersections exercise you do a great job demonstrating that your sense of 3D space is developing as your forms begin to wrap around each other believably. You're keeping your forms simple and easy to work with which is a good strategy to help produce good results. Your shadows are hugging the form creating them rather than being cast on to another surface believably. It appears like your shadows aren't following a consistent light source, I recommend pushing your light source to the top left or right corner of the page to start with, it's easier than working with a light directly above your form pile.
Overall this was a solid submission, while you may have some things to work on I have no doubt you will improve with more mileage. I'll be marking your submission as complete and move you on to the next lesson.
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3!
Next Steps:
Keep practicing previous exercise as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
Thank you ! I have a question
Will the next lessons help me improve my composition and environment/perspective drawing skills? Or is it more focused on organic things and objects?
Drawabox is not about design , and more about fundamentals right ? So if I continue developing my fundamentals, will I be able to grasp perspective, composition and design faster ?
The goal of this course is to improve your understanding of 3D space so that you can imagine how objects (be they living or not) are placed in this space. Up to this point and going forward this will help with your understanding of perspective and you'll find that the upcoming lesson material on plants and everyday objects/animals/vehicles will help with fleshing out environments.
This course is a lot more focused on the technical side of how to draw these objects and not as much on the stylistic, design, or composition side of drawing. All of that being said, like the name "fundamentals" suggests, these skills are fundamental to everything. In the future you may decide to pursue how to flesh out a style of your own and to better your understanding of design and composition, but if you tried to tackle those subjects without the ability to sell the illusion of those objects existing in a 3D space then the first thing people will notice is how flat everything feels.
There are times where people intentionally make things look 2D (cartoons for example) but the reason they can do so consistently and successfully is that they made the choice to do so after understanding how the space they're utilizing works. (Abstract art is kind of an exception but even then you can usually tell between someone who knows what they're doing and someone who is just... doing something)
Long story short, yes I believe that continuing to develop the fundamentals here will help you in the future just as I've seen it help others before you.
I would also recommend going through the explanations/videos on the first page of Lesson 0 as it goes over some of these topics as well.
Hope that clarifies things.
Hi. So i finally decided to tackle lesson 3 exercises. I already did all of them, except the 8 pages of plant drawings. I have a question about this exercise. Are they supposed to be random plants drawings, or should the plants be based on the demos (Daisy demo, mushroom,habiscus, cactus, etc) that were drawn by Uncomfortable?
This is another one of those things that aren't sold through Amazon, so I don't get a commission on it - but it's just too good to leave out. PureRef is a fantastic piece of software that is both Windows and Mac compatible. It's used for collecting reference and compiling them into a moodboard. You can move them around freely, have them automatically arranged, zoom in/out and even scale/flip/rotate images as you please. If needed, you can also add little text notes.
When starting on a project, I'll often open it up and start dragging reference images off the internet onto the board. When I'm done, I'll save out a '.pur' file, which embeds all the images. They can get pretty big, but are way more convenient than hauling around folders full of separate images.
Did I mention you can get it for free? The developer allows you to pay whatever amount you want for it. They recommend $5, but they'll allow you to take it for nothing. Really though, with software this versatile and polished, you really should throw them a few bucks if you pick it up. It's more than worth it.
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