This is my second go at Lesson 2 - I joined Patreon and had to redo it.
For what it's worth, here's the gallery of my first L2 submission. (I finished it in November last year and put it here for community critique.)
Hi there I'll be handling your lesson 2 critique.
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, I just have a few quick notes for you here. When trying to apply line weight it appears that you're not applying it confidently, it gets a bit wobbly. Remember that confidence comes first, accuracy will come with mileage. Other than that you could push your foreshortening in the negative space between your arrow's curves a bit more, as seen here utilizing foreshortening in the arrow as well as the negative space we can create a stronger illusion of an object moving through 3D space.
In the organic forms with contours exercise you're really close to keeping your forms simple. Just remember that our goal is to have both ends be the same size and to avoid pinching, bloating, or stretching along the form's length as shown here. One thing I'd like you to work on is 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.
Your textures exercises are headed in the right direction, it's a tricky concept but just keep focusing on cast shadows and you'll build up muscle memory in no time. 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 are looking really solid and like they belong in a cohesive 3D space, good work.
Great work in the organic intersections exercise, your forms are looking solid and simple. No real complaints here just keep experimenting with shifting the degree of your contours and with light source positions.
Overall this was a really solid submission and I have no problems moving you forward on to the next lesson.
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups and good luck in lesson 3.
Next Steps:
Keep practicing previous exercises as warm ups.
Move on to lesson 3.
Thank you Tofu for the feedback!
I agree about the Organic Arrows - I realized after I finished the exercise, that I was focusing too much on trying to make the lineweight precise, so the confidence suffered. I'll keep warming up with L2.
Where the rest of my recommendations tend to be for specific products, this one is a little more general. It's about printer paper.
As discussed in Lesson 0, printer paper (A4 or 8.5"x11") is what we recommend. It's well suited to the kind of tools we're using, and the nature of the work we're doing (in terms of size). But a lot of students still feel driven to sketchbooks, either by a desire to feel more like an artist, or to be able to compile their work as they go through the course.
Neither is a good enough reason to use something that is going to more expensive, more complex in terms of finding the right kind for the tools we're using, more stress-inducing (in terms of not wanting to "ruin" a sketchbook - we make a lot of mistakes throughout the work in this course), and more likely to keep you from developing the habits we try to instill in our students (like rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach).
Whether you grab the ream of printer paper linked here, a different brand, or pick one up from a store near you - do yourself a favour and don't make things even more difficult for you. And if you want to compile your work, you can always keep it in a folder, and even have it bound into a book when you're done.
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