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1:43 AM, Monday March 7th 2022

Hello,

Thank you for the detailed and thorough critique! I will go over each point and apply them to my revisions. I have a couple of questions / concerns:

  1. How do I add lineweight to curving (organic flowing) and/or long lines? I understand adding lineweight to reinforce the silhouette of a rigid object like a box, but when it comes to long flowing lines or curves I am at a loss. I have been practicing in my warmups but progress has been extremely slow - not sure if I am missing something. For example, if the curved line has many turns and twists do I just do one 'section' at a time? When I do that I can easily see where I stopped and started and the lineweight essentially ruins the continuity and flow of the original mark.

  2. How to I properly observe a reference? Like you stated in your critique, I am overwhelmed by the information I am seeing. In turn, I become frustrated and start guessing.

  3. One of the reasons why I tend to tack on flat shapes to my forms is I have a extremely difficult time understanding intersection lines. I greatly struggled with it in lesson 2 and to this day I still do not see those lines properly. In my warmups I have been mashing boxes together and while I do see (for the most part anyway) how they are intersecting with one another, I cannot identify those specific contour lines. Do you have any advice or resources to help me in this particular area?

  4. For my revisions I plan on not doing any textures. Is this okay?

  5. I am mentally not in a good place to keep working on these technical exercises. I am feeling burnt out and very frustrated. I plan on taking a break and coming back to this in a few weeks. Is this okay? I am still drawing for fun every day. I am worried about my technical ability deteoriating though. Do you have any advice on persevering these skills while on break?

Thank you for your time.

5:55 PM, Monday March 7th 2022

How do I add lineweight to curving (organic flowing) and/or long lines?

Generally I would avoid applying line weight to marks that are especially long - instead, it's more effective when we minimize its use, concentrating it instead on doing a specific task. Ideally it's used to help clarify the manner in which different forms overlap one another, and we can do this by limiting its use to the localized areas where those overlaps occur. You can see this in action in this example of two overlapping leaves.

As for longer lines, we do still need to be applying the ghosting method (which culminates with a smooth, confident execution), so it is inevitable that we'll make mistakes in doing this. That's simply part of the process - with practice, your execution of those smooth, confident strokes, reinforced by planning and preparation will get more accurate. What matters most right now is that every stroke is smooth. If your accuracy is undermined by this, that's fine - it'll come back in time. These drawings are, after all, just exercises.

How to I properly observe a reference? Like you stated in your critique, I am overwhelmed by the information I am seeing. In turn, I become frustrated and start guessing.

You identify one form at a time. One thing. Focus on it alone at first, to determine how it sits in space, and then expand that to look at how it relates to the forms around it. Then draw that one form, while adhering to the principles of construction (everything being its own self enclosed silhouette, with complexity only coming from contact being made with the structures around it). Then go back and do it again for the next form.

There are a few things to accept:

  • Firstly, you will make mistakes.

  • Secondly, in making such mistakes, you will end up deviating from your reference image in ways that you will not be able to correct while continuing to hold to the principles of construction. This is not a problem. Our goal here is not to reproduce the reference image perfectly, but rather to use it as much as we can as a source of information, to define the direction in which we're taking our construction.

  • At its core, these constructional drawing exercises are each of them puzzles. We start with similar masses to start, and gradually build up complexity one step at a time, going back to our reference to identify our next step. The goal is to create something believable and solid, but not necessarily to perfectly replicate that reference.

Ultimately though, a lot of it comes down to an awareness of yourself. If you catch yourself getting frustrated, that's a good time to take a step back, and even to take a break. Not to push forwards and "finish the drawing at all costs". You control every choice you make - but it's easy to forget that fact.

One of the reasons why I tend to tack on flat shapes to my forms is I have a extremely difficult time understanding intersection lines. I greatly struggled with it in lesson 2 and to this day I still do not see those lines properly. In my warmups I have been mashing boxes together and while I do see (for the most part anyway) how they are intersecting with one another, I cannot identify those specific contour lines. Do you have any advice or resources to help me in this particular area?

So the thing is this - the kinds of intersections we tackle in these kinds of organic constructions are much simpler than the form intersections from Lesson 2. Being that they're organic, it's more forgiving, and so it is by working through them here and in Lesson 5 (and no doubt getting a bunch of them wrong. and having such things pointed out in critique) that your grasp of it will become stronger and more confident, which will then better equip you to tackle geometric constructions.

Unfortunately this means there are no tips and tricks to offer - it's simply going to require you to make the attempts, to stumble, to scrap your knees, and to work through it.

For my revisions I plan on not doing any textures. Is this okay?

That's fine.

Do you have any advice on persevering these skills while on break?

Taking breaks is perfectly fine. Just be sure to keep up with your regular warmup routine (as explained back in Lesson 0, where you pick 2 or 3 exercises from the pool of exercises you've been introduced to thus far and do them for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each drawing session). This will help you avoid getting rusty, and will continue sharpening your skills.

1:27 AM, Friday April 8th 2022

Hello,

I have resumed my drawabox exercises - can you take a look at my first revision? Is this acceptable / on the right track? I would like to know before I work on the remaining three. Thank you!

Here's the ref: https://imgur.com/jJ1oTgB

Here's my attempt at it: https://imgur.com/xXIZcKf

7:51 PM, Friday April 8th 2022

Keep in mind that the time it takes me to critique one drawing is not much different from the time it takes to critique four - so this request results in me spending twice as much time as was initially intended. When you're assigned 4 drawings, you should not submit until they are all completed. Yes, there is the possibility that you'll do all 4 with the same mistake that could have been caught earlier, but one of the reasons we're able to offer feedback as cheaply as we do is that the student takes on the onus of investing their time in order to reduce the time required of me and my staff.

That said, your work is looking better, though don't pile contour lines onto your additional masses, as they don't actually help solve the problem at hand. Establishing how an additional mass wraps around the existing structure is achieved entirely through the way in which its silhouette is designed. Contour lines of the sort you've used here merely make a form feel more solid and three dimensional in isolation, but establish no such spatial relationships between forms. Furthermore, they can convince us that there is something we can do to "fix" our additional masses when the silhouettes have not been designed correctly, and actually cause us to spend less time thinking through where we place our inward curves and corners (which should occur only as a result of direct contact with an existing structure where that inward curve or corner occurs, as demonstrated here).

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