Finally got this done after a whole summer and the first month of college. I feel like I learned a lot from this lesson alone and I'm excited to move on to constructing plants. Criticism is welcome as always. I also uploaded two more arrow drawings as when I finished my first two drawings I felt they were lackluster and decided to try again (I forgot which ones were the original ones though lol).
Hello, I'll be doing your Lesson 2 critiques
A reminder first, a big thing I'm noticing is that your line confidence still needs work. Remember that you should always be ghosting every mark you make with your shoulder, and that during ghosting you can take all the time you can until your arm is used to the motion you're preparing to make. You don't have to ghost at any fast speed whatsoever, you can slow down while you plan your line so you get your shoulder used to the motions you have to make; All that matters is that you execute your final stroke with the most confidence you can muster.
Thinking in 3d
looking at your arrows, some of them are flatter than what is ideal, such as in "Arrow 1". Remember that you're allowed (and encouraged) to let your curves and lines overlap; your arrow isn't on a 2D page anymore, it's in a window to a 3D world. Always keep in mind that you're telling a lie so well that even you get fooled when you draw in 3D space. On that note, another more consistent mistake is that you're not compressing the arrows as they Should be. As you go back further, everything in space at a distance shrinks, and everything closer gets gradually bigger. This applies to both distances between curves and the distance between the bands of your arrow in front and behind one another. As is they're either the same size or changing size along the arrow randomly. You should also be paying attention to where your placing your hatching lines. As like with the form intersections, placing hatching tells you exactly how your arrow is orientated when it twists in 3D space, defining which part of the arrow is infront of which.
You're doing a good job maintaining that formula of 2 balls connected by a tube already, and your ellipses are changing degrees in perspective very well. Even then, you still have trouble with placing your sausage ends and keeping your contour curves stuck very tightly to the edges of your sausage. Those curves represent the surface of a solid form, so if they're arbitrarily floating without much adherence to your solid form, you're already selling your 3D world VERY poorly which can hinder your construction going forward. Make sure you understand exactly where you want your marks to be through ghosting and planning before you execute your marks.
Textures
This is a more minor thing, but when uploading your work from here on out and it involves drawing from a reference, please make sure to provide the references you used in your submission albums for anyone else's reference when it comes to analysis and critique, it just makes the job easier. But regardless, looking at both your texture analysis AND dissections it's clear you still interpret and draw them less as cast shadows but still the forms that make up the cast shadows, as evidenced by particularly the octopus suction cup texture on your dissection 1 as an example. Make sure you understand that you're not drawing the forms you see, but rather the shadows those forms cast. You have a good grasp on sticking your textures around your sausage forms, but remember to think about the density of your texture. Sometimes you do good at this and make your texture more implicit as it reaches more light, but other times you make it consistent around the whole curve of the organic form with no change in dense to sparse. We want to be able to control our detail density so that our drawing is clear, readable, and understandable to our audience and ourselves.
While on the topic of implicit and explicit, the first two of your texture analysis exercise in the last box did a pretty good job making the transition from the black bar to the texture seamless, but the final one is completely obvious. Make sure you create a gradient from dark to light, gradually flushing out shadow with light from left to right and flushing out light with shadow in the other direction.
Construction
All I have to really point out here is sometimes in the form intersections your foreshortening became quite much farther than was asked. We don't want extreme perspective in this exercise, our aim is that we're able to make all our forms belong in the same 3D space they're adhering to. Otherwise you did pretty well here, your line confidence is much better, and your organic intersections mostly support one another without floating in the air too much minus some exceptions.
Next Steps:
I'm going to let you go onto Lesson 3
You understand atleast on a basic level what this lesson was trying to teach you and followed the instructions mostly correct, which is what this course asks even if you didn't achieve it at perfect execution. Keep in mind what you've been taught going forward, and continue to do these exercises in your warmup routines.
good luck Box Warrior.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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