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12:14 AM, Sunday June 28th 2020

Yup, looks like you submitted it correctly this time. Just make sure you read through things more carefully next time!

Starting with your arrows, these flow pretty well through space, but admittedly have been drawn a little on the small side. You appear to be somewhat hesitant in really pushing them to be big and confident, and as a result end up limiting the amount of space you had to think through the spatial problems involved in constructing the arrows. This is actually pretty common in beginners, so the big takeaway here is not to give into the urge to draw everything small on the page. Give your brain as much room as it needs to work through those problems, and don't lean into making things cramped.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines - again, these are a bit small, but still generally okay. You've clearly put a lot of effort into sticking to simple sausage forms as mentioned in the instructions, although you do have the odd pinching through the midsection here and there, and some of your ends get a little misshapen (remember that we want them to be fully circular). These are all minor issues though, for the most part the shapes are good. You're also doing a great job of drawing the contour lines themselves - clearly drawing them smoothly and confidently with even shapes while also maintaining good accuracy in keeping them snug between the edges of the form. Lastly, you're demonstrating a good grasp of how the degree of your contour lines ought to shift naturally over the course of the form.

Moving onto your texture analyses, I think you're off to a good start, but there are a number of things that do need to be clarified. First off, this exercise is all about using clear, specific, designed shadow shapes. You often rely on creating shapes with really sketchy hatching - those shapes should be filled in with solid black. Ideally, try outlining the shadow shapes ahead of time, and then fill them in, as shown here. When done correctly, there shouldn't be any sort of hatching or sketchy filling for shapes. They should all be completely solid.

Secondly, I think that you tend to observe your reference to identify the elements that are present, and then attempt to spend a lot of time drawing your marks without looking back frequently. Basically, you're relying on your memory, which as explained here isn't terribly reliable. I can see this from the nature of the marks you're putting down - they're loose and vague, rather than showing signs that you're trying to transfer specific cast shadows into your drawing.

All in all, you've got a good start here, but there's a lot of room to improve your observational skills, patience, and general use of clear shapes rather than rough, sketchier marks. This is pretty normal though - I don't expect students to have prior experience with detail. You may however want to rewatch the demo video for this exercise, as you can see how the approach I demonstrate there is quite distinctly different from what you've attempted here.

One last point - The point of that solid black bar on the left side is that we want to ultimately blend it into the rest of the texture so seamlessly that we can no longer identify where that bar ends and where the texture begins. This is to put focus on achieving a smooth transition from light to dark, which I don't believe you really achieved here. Again - look at the demo video and note how what I'm doing there is quite different from how you approached this exercise.

Moving onto the dissections, I think there's a lot of improvement in your observational skills. Here you're clearly replicating many of the textures much more carefully, demonstrating greater patience and specificity in your marks. You are still being a bit sketchy in some of your shadow shapes, but they're beginning to look more solid as well. One thing to keep in mind though is that when you've got textures that are made up of discrete textural forms (like bricks, scales, etc.) you have a tendency to focus on outlining those forms in their entirety. Don't outline your forms - make sure that everything you draw is just a cast shadow, as explained in these notes. This is at the core of 'implicit' drawing techniques, whereas drawing with outlines is more 'explicit'. The difference between implicit and explicit are explained in this section.

Moiving onto your form intersections, I feel the work you've done in this area is actually really quite well done. You're drawing the forms with clear, concise linework that shows solid use of the ghosting method, with confident and accurate mark-making (although I'm noticing that you're not drawing through the ellipses you use for your spheres - make sure you do that, as it's required of every ellipse you draw through this course. You've also drawn the forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space.

The intersections themselves are intended to be an introduction - similarly to the textures, students aren't expected to have prior experience in this area, it's more of a first exposure to something we'll explore a lot more in the next lessons. That said, you've got an excellent start to it, and I can see you handling some pretty complex intersections quite well, and with clear confidence. Not all of them are perfect, but these are definitely stronger than I'd expect from students at this stage, so nice work.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along well. You're establishing how the forms interact with one another in 3D space, and are establishing a strong illusion of gravity in how they slump and sag over one another. In the future though, be sure to make one pile per page, instead of a bunch of individual piles.

So! All in all, your work here is pretty well done. There are clearly some areas to work on, but you're headed in the right direction and are showing considerable strength in a lot of key areas. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 3.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:32 AM, Thursday July 2nd 2020

Thanks for the critique!

I was struggling quite a bit with the texture analyses. a lot of the shadow shapes in the reference tended to be quite similar, like a pattern almost. Thinking about it now, instead of hatching I guess I could have varied how close the shadow shapes are to each other and their sizes. This way i dont have to rely on hatching to get that light to dark transition.

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Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens

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Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.

Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.

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