Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction

6:42 PM, Tuesday March 10th 2020

Vinesh's Draw A Box Lesson 2 Submission - Album on Imgur

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Post with 57 views. Vinesh's Draw A Box Lesson 2 Submission

I really enjoyed this Lesson and I am eager to start the next. I would love any feedback regarding my work. I spent time playing around my 3d software to try and better understand form intersections but I still can't internalize it for anything more complex than cubes.

I intend on returning to some of these exercises in the future.

Thank you for your time!

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10:18 PM, Tuesday March 10th 2020

Starting with your arrows, I think here you're capturing the core aspects of the exercise - the arrows flow fluidly through all three dimensions of space, capturing a good sense of depth - but I do feel that your overall execution is a little bit sloppy. It's important that the marks you put down are intentional and planned - slow down and take the time yo think through every mark. Your execution should still be confident, but don't fall into the mindset of sketching and thinking right on the page. The ghosting method rests at the core of this process, as it separates planning, preparation and execution. Also, draw bigger - there's no need to cram each arrow into a small bit of space. I'm very glad that you were open to letting them overlap one another (though this overlap should not change how you draw a given stroke, you should be drawing them as though the other is not present), but working small will limit how much you engage your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, these are all largely well done. Your linework and general drawing process is much cleaner and better thought out. You're also sticking to simple sausages as directed in the instructions, and show a good grasps of how the degree of your contour ellipses reflects upon the orientation of that cross-section sits in space relative to the viewer.

Moving down to your texture analyses, you've similarly nailed the point of this exercise. Not only is it clear that you understand the focus being placed on capturing the shadows our textural forms cast on their surroundings, but you've also leveraged that understanding to achieve smooth gransitions from dense to sparse areas of texture. The only bit of criticism I have to offer is that similarly to your arrows exercise, you did get a little more haphazard with putting down certain kinds of marks. It's clear that you have a certain amount of patience, and once that runs out, you start falling into poor habits. If necessary, you can take breaks even within a single exercise - don't be afraid to put it down and come back when you're able to once again give it your all.

Similarly, your dissections are looking great, with plenty of excellent experimentation over different texture types. One thing to remember is that when you have an area you want to fill in with black, using a tool like a brush pen may be the best choice to ensure that it is entirely filled in. The little white bits that can remain when filling it in with a fineliner can create unintentional contrast and visual noise that can impact your texture rendering negatively.

Moving down to your form intersections, I can definitely see that the challenging nature of how this exercise pushes you to think about how those forms relate to one another in 3D space definitely had an impact on how you executed your marks. There are places where you'd go back over lines where you felt you'd make a mistake (which is a bad habit that should absolutely be avoided, as it only draws more attention to your mistakes), and I feel that while you were certainly applying the ghosting method to your lines, you weren't necessarily executing your strokes with the kind of confidence I know you can manage, likely hesitating with uncertainty of whether or not it would come out correctly.

As far as the core focus of this exercise - which is on your ability to draw the forms in such a way that they feel consistent and cohesive within the same space - you've done a good job. You did however miss an important instruction from the lesson, which was to avoid forms that are stretched in any one dimension, such as longer cylinders. Sticking to forms that are more equilateral, or roughly the same size in all three dimensions, helps avoid bringing additional complexity into an already difficult task.

Now, the spatial relationships we explore through the intersections themselves are a concept to which this exercise serves as an introduction. I don't expect students to have a good grasp of them just yet, and as far as you've gotten, you're actually doing quite well. This concept is one we continue to explore through the entirety of this course - being that this is just lesson 2, you're already at an advantage. What you should be focusing more upon however is just how you put your marks down on the page, ensuring that all of your lines are drawn with confidence (including the added line weight - I can see plenty of places where you've drawn an initial stroke, then traced over it more slowly with a wobblier line after the fact). Don't rush, and don't fall victim to bad habits. No matter how complex the task you're tackling is, every line is just that - a line - and you have it in you to draw them exceptionally well, given the time, effort and focus.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along quite well. You've done a good job of conveying how these forms are not simply flat shapes pasted on top of one another, but rather 3D forms that interact with one another, slumping and sagging in an attempt to find a state of balance. The only point I want to mention is that your cast shadows are drawn quite sloppily - be sure to draw the outline of those shadow shapes with a fineliner, then fill them in more carefully with your brush pen.

So, all in all you're moving in the right direction and are conveying a strong grasp of many of the concepts in these lessons. What you need to work on is how you actually approach executing the marks themselves on the page, and taking more time rather than rushing forward to tackle the concepts themselves without giving enough time and effort to how you communicate that understanding.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:20 AM, Wednesday March 11th 2020

Thank you for your time and valuable feedback. I will admit to growing impatient in certain places. Especially during the form intersections. I will be more deliberate with my future exercises.

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