Some things I know I still need to work on:
Line quality. I struggle to thicken lines using the ghosting method, so I either end up with wobbly lines (slow and too careful) or inaccurate doubled lines. Perhaps the ghosting exercise from lesson 1 would help with this?
I tend to draw the patterns in textures more than cast shadows.
As always, I appreciate the critique, and I'm enjoying the course so far!
Starting with your organic arrows, your work here is coming along pretty well. You're pushing those arrows fluidly through the 3D space of your scene with the confidence of your linework, and conveying how perspective applies consistently both to the positive space (the width of the ribbon, which gets narrower as it moves farther back in space) as well as the negative space (the spacing between the zigzagging sections).
Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, you've done pretty well to maintain relatively simple sausage forms (keeping the ends spherical and equal in size, while also keeping the width of the sausage consistent through its midsection). You're also doing a good job of keeping your contour ellipses and curves fairly snug between the edges. One thing to keep in mind however is that the degree of your contour lines is currently very consistent. The degree of the contour line represents the orientation of that cross-sectional slice relative to the viewer. As we sample different positions along a sausage, this will change, and as such the degree should get narrower/wider as we move along a given sausage form (as shown here). Keep this in mind in the future.
Your work on the texture analyses has a lot of major strengths to it. Most notably, you're confidently venturing into the use of shadow shapes, and diminishing your reliance on line and outline when conveying the presence of textural forms. I do think that you are still somewhat focusing on outlining some of your forms (like with all the river rocks aside from the farthest to the right side, you're still starting out with an outline, then thinking about how you're going to apply shadows), so keep pushing yourself to work exclusively in shadow shapes with no outlines whatsoever. Also, when we end up with gaps between our forms, we may feel the urge to fill in these 'negative spaces' with black, as though shadow itself is a liquid that will fill its containers. Resist this. Every shadow shape must be directly related to the form that casts it, as the particular shape should convey information about the relationship between the form casting it, and the surface upon which it is cast.
Lastly, no hatching - go full black, or full white, don't try to hedge in the middle. What we're doing here is creating an alternating pattern of light and dark, essentially creating our own alternative to hatching that actually conveys information about the surface and its texture.
You continue to do a pretty good job through the dissections, and I can see a greater focus in certain areas on cast shadow over outline. You do still use hatching on occasion, but for the most part this is continually improving.
Your work on the form intersections is coming along well. You've drawn the forms such that they feel cohesive and consistent within the same space, and you've also started to explore the actual intersections between those forms quite well. This portion of the exercise is intended to serve as an introduction to the concept of spatial relationships - it's a concept that is at the core of the course as a whole, and I don't expect students to be able to nail it at this point, just to get acquainted with it. That said, you've got a great start, and are at a considerable advantage.
About your line weights - the whole "doubling up" effect is pretty normal, and will go away as you continue to practice your mark making. Continuing to integrate exercises like the super imposed lines and the ghosted lines from Lesson 1 into your warmups will help reduce this. As mentioned back in Lesson 0, you are indeed expected to continue practicing those exercises in your warmups in order to continue sharpening your skills. The work assigned in Lesson 1 is far short of what is required to properly hone your skills to their sharpest edge.
Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along really nicely. You're establishing how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, pushing away from the illusion that they're just flat shapes on a page. You're also doing a great job of conveying how gravity causes them to slump and sag against one another in a believable fashion.
All in all, your work here is quite well done. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 3.
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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