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.
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.
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