Lesson 2: Contour Lines, Texture and Construction
4:17 PM, Tuesday July 18th 2023
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8:41 PM, Monday September 4th 2023
Hello, my name is PizzaPlease and I am here to critique your Lesson 2 submission. Congratulations on getting through the lesson.
Your Organic Arrows pages are well-done. The lines are confident. You employed width and compression to create a convincing illusion of 3D space. You overlapped many of your arrows. Pay a bit more attention to where you place your hatching, it is sometimes on the overlapping section (reference: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/4/step4)
Your Organic Forms are mostly simple and have consistent widths. I recommend reviewing Uncomfortable's example page to gain a better understanding of how the ellipses describe the sausage in 3D, yours are inconsistent. You shouldn't place visible contour ellipses when both sides are facing away, like in most of your sausage forms (reference: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/368871002584907776/867744968432549928/QTEqgJa_1.png?width=618&height=601).
Your Texture Analysis page is wonderful. You clearly paid attention to shadow shapes and achieved an excellent gradient with the corn texture. It looks like you relied too much on stippling for the plaster wall texture, using it like hatching.
Your pages of dissections show close observation of various textures, but you use hatching here quite a bit (reference: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/2/formshading). Avoid this in the future. Cast shadows should be drawn as shapes and then filled in with solid black.
The forms in your Form Intersections should be equilateral to each other (reference: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/8/stretched). You do get better at this in the later pages. You did well completely filling the pages and not clustering forms. I would recommend placing contour ellipses on your spheres to help sell three-dimensionality, but this will be covered more in Lesson 3. Some of your boxes are a little wonky, either not converging at all or diverging significantly. Remember to take your time figuring out convergences, as they are very important to consistent three-dimensionality.
The Organic Instersections pages look good, but might be a little over-full (look at the number Uncomfortable did: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/9/example). The sausage forms at the tops of the piles don't look convincing, like on the far left of page 1 and the far right of page 2. They look good for the most part and are drawn through properly. The degrees of your contour curves could be varied more, but that'll improve with time.
Next Steps:
Lesson 3 is next.
You're doing great so far.
4:13 PM, Monday September 11th 2023
Hi,
Thanks for the feedback. It was very insightful. It seems like contour lines are something I should pay particular attention to in the future.
I have one question, though. Could you elaborate on this part? "I recommend reviewing Uncomfortable's example page to gain a better understanding of how the ellipses describe the sausage in 3D, yours are inconsistent." I agree that there's something off about them, but I can't quite figure it out. I looked at the examples and I'm still not really sure what I should have done differently.
6:53 PM, Wednesday September 13th 2023
You're welcome.
Your Organic Forms are not very off. They follow this section of the lesson very well: https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/ellipses . The issue is there is little variance in how the forms twist through 3D space between all your forms (they all twist really similarly) and the contour ellipses are sometimes placed a little off (look at the top middle form) - they all look like that example and this hampers your progress in understanding 3D space.
I shouldn't have said "inconsistent", as that is too vague and sounds like they're worse than I meant. There are also some sharp changes in ellipse degree, especially between the middle (narrowest) ellipse and the ones right next to it.
3:13 AM, Thursday September 14th 2023
I think I understand now, thank you. I'll be sure to pay attention to this in the future.
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A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
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