Hi Soundpaints, congrats on finishing lesson 2! For your information, since this is my first time critiquing a lesson 2 submission, I will be relying on the guide provided here: https://pastebin.com/ggmPxnzF

I’ll start with a general comment: please refrain from adding annotations to your homework submissions. Writing the title of each exercise is fine of course, but comments like “woops” or “oops” should not appear in future submissions. They distract from the actual homework and make the job of the people who’ll be critiquing it more difficult, as these comments grab our attention and communicate no relevant information.

Other comments addressed to the person who’ll be looking at your homework, as well as notes you might be writing for yourself, or what I’d call “pre-critiques”, such as “no gradient”, should not be included on your homework pages either. My aim as someone offering a critique is to try to help you improve, but also to train my own observational skills in order to improve as well, so comments like these take away from that benefit, on top of adding unnecessary noise to pages that I need to observe carefully.

I understand the impulse of commenting your own homework and trying to show that you are aware of some of your mistakes, since submitting one's work for critique can make one feel very vulnerable! (I’m sometimes guilty of this myself). But there's no shame in making mistakes and having them pointed out by others :)

If you really want to add a few comments about the things you had trouble with or questions about your submission, please keep them in the submission description and do not write them down on the homework itself.

Overall, I feel like this is a pretty solid submission, even if the more demanding exercises have room for improvement, which is absolutely normal and expected.

With that out of the way, let’s look at the individual exercises:

Arrows

Your lines look pretty good to me, they are mostly confidently drawn and have a nice flow to them. I’m not seeing any lineweight though, but it might come from overexposure in your pictures.

You drew some overlapping arrows, which is good, however the compression in size & in the spacing between each fold as the arrow gets further and further away from the viewer is too subtle, so practice drawing more dramatic changes in size in future warm ups. When you start feeling more confident, you can also practice having some of the folds overlap. Also, your 11th arrow has the spacing get smaller as it goes towards the viewer, which is confusing, so pay attention to that in the future.

Organic forms

I like the shape of your ellipses, they seem confidently drawn and are drawn through 2-3 times, so that’s good! They don’t always fit the bounds of your sausage forms, but confidence is always more important than accuracy, so keep practicing them and your accuracy will get better with time. I can also see that you focused on having your ellipses align with the axis line, which is good, even if you don’t always succeed (see the middle ellipse on sausage no. 7 for instance).

I also think that you did a good enough job trying to keep your sausage forms simple, without any pinching or bloating. There’s still some room for improvement there, but it’s a difficult thing to achieve in my opinion so keep on practising!

A mistake both in the organic forms with ellipses and the organic forms with contour lines however is that you’re barely varying the degree of your ellipses at all, so practice doing that in future warmups (with consideration for what these variations mean when we’re drawing 3D forms, that is which way the forms are facing)

Textures

You did a good job drawing cast shadows and not lines in the texture analysis exercise, sometimes less so in the dissections one (see your onion texture or your tire texture for instance). In the texture analysis exercise, you did not leave enough blank space at the right end for pebbles and cobblestones, so the transition isn’t quite as smooth as it should be, so in the future try to force yourself to be subtler with shadows as you go towards the light source.

In the dissections exercise, I can see that you took your time observing and drawing your textures and did not take any shortcuts with hatching or dotting, so good job! Refraining from scribbling is something that you should always remember. I can also see some work on the silhouettes (even though you could have been bolder with the octopus, for example). There’s definitely room for improvement regarding the wrapping of textures around your forms, but I can see that you did your best (I am a bit sad about the durian specifically though, which is looking very flat). And sometimes your transitions look a little too much like a thick dark outline followed by much lighter shapes (see the sponge and the stone brick walls on sausages 1 and 4 for instance), so pay attention to achieving smoother transitions in the future.

Form intersections

Your lines are looking really good in these exercises, they are straight and confidently drawn. The line weight and hatching is applied well and gives clarity to your drawing, so that’s really good! The foreshortening is consistent, however it’s not quite present enough, especially with your boxes, so remember to have your lines converge, even if it’s supposed to stay subtle. Same with your cylinders on your last page, which have no foreshortening at all.

The intersections themselves are looking good as far as I can see, it looks like you took the time to think about them, and there are enough overlapping forms on your pages to my liking.

Organic intersections

I can see that you hooked your curves and drew through your forms as instructed, so that’s good!

A mistake you made on both pages is that your shadows are sticking to the form casting them rather than to the form they’re being cast onto, and thus are looking more like a thick dark outline than like cast shadows, as is shown here: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/516f8d4f.jpg

Your forms also feel too stiff, especially on the second page, which could be improved by having them intersect more instead of laying them one in front of the other. The underside of one sausage will be “lifted up” by having another round sausage under it, and you can show that by “carving” the form of that second sausage into the first one. It may be a little difficult now, but keep practising and thinking of your sausages as water balloons, and it’ll get better. See how the small round bottom sausage on the right is carving into the bigger central sausage laying on it here, for example: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/db8b6730.jpg