Uncomfortable

2015-12-01 23:46

Hate to tell you this, but there are a lot of issues in how you're approaching these exercises, so you're not quite done with this lesson yet. Luckily since you're a patreon contributor (and have been for quite some time, thank you!) your critiques will continue through the month.

• Nice work with the arrows! These can be considered finished.

• For your organic forms with contour lines, I'm noticing that you're not drawing through any of your ellipses (or just in general for the entire lesson). I know it's been a while since you completed lesson 1, so I understand why you must have forgotten that rule, but it's quite important.

• Moving on to the second part of that exercise, keep an eye on how your contour curves wrap around your forms. You're doing okay at this for the most part, but I do feel like it's not entirely solid. Be sure to watch this video on the subject, and remember that your contour lines really need to accelerate and hook around as they reach the edge of the shape to give the impression of a rounded form. Like I said, you're actually not doing too badly at this, I just want to reinforce the point as it's a common issue and it's easy to forget.

• Your dissections pretty much miss the point of the exercise, which instructed you to use photo reference. You are to study textures found in photos, and try to carry those textures onto these simpler organic forms. Focus on identifying the rhythms and patterns of these textures, and try to figure out what exactly makes them feel rough, smooth, bumpy, wet, sticky, etc. and how they visually communicate this to you.

• With your form intersections, you're doing okay, but on many of your pages, you don't draw through your forms. Instead, you focus on creating clean drawings, which is not our main goal here. We are not trying to create neat and pretty illustrations, we are studying how forms work in 3D space. If you look at the demo in the lesson, you'll see that I draw through all of my forms completely - ignoring how they're going to intersect with one another while I'm drawing the forms themselves. All I'm interested in is drawing forms that feel like they should occupy the same scene. Then, once that's done, I can start thinking about if, and how these forms intersect with each other.

I'd like you to do the following:

• One page of organic forms with contour ellipses - be sure to draw through your ellipses

• Two pages of dissections

• One page of form intersections - fill the entire page with forms, and then make them connect with each other. Don't make small clusters and groupings of forms as you did this previous time, make them all one big connecting network. Be sure to draw through all of your forms before even beginning to think about how they intersect with each other. Also, remember that how they intersect is not that important. I'm way more interested in seeing how you draw many different forms within the same scene, and whether you can make them all look cohesive and consistent. Generally you're decent at this, so I just want you to do it as the exercise described.

Lastly, keep in mind that I've noted a lot of points here where you didn't read the lesson or the exercise descriptions that carefully. It's important that you read my instructions and fully understand what I ask before attempting each exercise.

Uncomfortable

2015-12-02 23:44

Awesome work - I especially enjoyed your form intersections and your second page of dissections. The only thing I want you to keep your eye on as you move forward is your organic forms with contour curves (that is, the second part of that exercise where you only draw curves instead of full ellipses). Always keep in mind that those curves need to give the impression of wrapping around a rounded form. As such, as they reach the edge of the form, they must accelerate their curve and finally hook around to properly give the sense that they're continuing on to the other side.

You're not doing too badly at this, but I do feel like you're more at the precipice between doing it correctly and not. As such, I want you to keep an eye on it. This video from the lesson discusses the issue, which is quite common.

Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2015-12-09 23:53

Very nicely done! I can see that you're pushing yourself to wrap your curves around the forms, and for the most part it's paying off nicely. Another thing that you should also keep in mind, that I think may have fallen through the cracks a little is to be mindful of that central spine that I mentioned in the lesson - that is, the line that passes through the centre of the organic form. This line serves as the minor axis to which each ellipse (and therefore each curve, which is merely the visible section of an ellipse) is aligned. Keeping this spine in mind will help you when angling your curves.

Your dissections are very well done - they show a lot of close examination and experimentation with a wide variety of textures. I like that you really dug into each one, but considered how to organize the details not only considering what exists in reality (from your reference) but also how that organization of visual elements would impact composition. You did a great job.

You did a pretty solid job with your form intersections too, there's only one thing that I want to remind you of - draw through your ellipses. You did great with the organic forms with contour ellipses, but I did notice that afterwards you seemed very preoccupied with producing clean drawings, and as such became somewhat less willing to draw through your ellipses. The rule of thumb I use for people is that if they draw through all of the ellipses they draw for every single one of my lessons, they should be good to do whatever feels best to them afterward. They'll have had enough practice drawing in an elliptical motion that their ellipses should be reasonably round and even. Until then, just keep drawing through them.

Anyway, great work - feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2015-12-11 23:05

Your arrows, organic forms and dissections are all looking pretty solid. One thing that I did notice with your form intersections however was that you seem to get very scratchy when you try to add weight to your existing lines. This sort of chicken scratch, making up lines with a bunch of separate marks instead of just a single stroke is a really bad habit, and one you should not indulge. Instead, apply the same ghosting method when you add weight to your lines.

Also, it's great that you're drawing through your ellipses - just push yourself to draw around the elliptical shape only two or three times before lifting your pen, and strive towards tightening them up. I expect that you will continue to do all of the exercises from the previous lesson as warm-ups, so you can continue to sharpen up your skills with ellipses.

I am admittedly concerned about that chicken scratching, but I can see elsewhere that you've applied the ghosting method properly. Continue to do that in general, and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2015-12-11 13:51

Hey, unfortunately I'm taking a break through the month of December. Free critiques will resume on January 1st, so you'll have to resubmit the work then - until then, the critiques are restricted to the patreon supporters (if you are one, make sure you've sent me your reddit username via patreon's messaging system). For now, you can definitely still gain quite a bit by looking at the critiques I've given others - it helps to see if you've made similar mistakes.

You can check out this announcement on the hiatus for more information.

Uncomfortable

2015-12-14 20:13

Pretty solid work. I have only a couple of issues I'd like to raise about your organic forms, but generally you've done quite well and should feel free to move onto the next lesson.

First off, always draw through the ellipses you draw for my lessons - that is, continue going around the ellipse with your pen two or three times before lifting it off the page.

Secondly, you're generally doing a decent good job of wrapping your contour curves around the forms, but there are still some instances where that area is a little weak. I wouldn't say you're doing anything wrong, but rather thant it's important that you continue to focus on that idea of wrapping the curves around a 3D form. As you continue to keep that in mind as you practice, the concept will solidify. If, on the other hand, you stop thinking about it, there's a chance that you might regress and go back to drawing things as though they were a little flatter. So, just be sure to keep it in mind - the forms we're drawing are 3D, and so those contour lines run along the surface of 3D forms, wrapping around them completely.

Anyway, great work. Your dissections, arrows and form intersections are all done very well. I'll mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2015-12-20 22:41

There's some good, there's some less good, but I think overall I can see that you are making improvements and generally moving in the right direction. There are some things that I'd like to point out however.

Your arrows show me that you understand what to aim for, but you got pretty sloppy with them - the twisting ribbon forms were decent (that's the core part of the exercise), but the arrow heads seemed to be done with little care, and even less concern was paid to the hatching lines you added for shading. When you do an exercise, put your full effort into doing every part of it to the best of your ability. Never scribble, don't be loose, and always think through every mark you put down.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses have only one issue, which I'm seeing in other later exercises as well - you're not drawing through your ellipses. It's extremely important that you draw through all of the ellipses you draw for my lessons two or three times before lifting your pen from the page. This will help you capture a more even, rounded shape.

When you move onto contour curves however, the majority of your curves do not give the impression that they are wrapping around the rounded organic forms. Here's an overdrawing showing you what I mean. A lot of them give the sense that they're just continuing on, instead of hooking back around and continuing on behind the form. This is a common issue that you need to work towards fixing - I discuss it in this video from the lesson.

Your dissections are pretty good - I can see that you're really exploring all sorts of textures, and you're really digging into what gives each one its particular appearance. There's only one thing I want to make clear however - never scribble. If you look at this page, you'll notice that at the bottom, you've layered cross-hatching with more complex, observation-based details. Cross-hatching is almost never what you want to use here - it's more often a shorthand for "i don't know what goes here but I don't want to leave it blank". The way you've used it here though takes the more interesting, mindful details you added and makes them look like they're tangled in a bit of a mess. Every texture has a hierarchy and a particular organization to it - remember that. Everything needs to be organized and follow a particular rhythm.

Lastly, your form intersections by the end are progressing nicely. The only thing I want you to remember is what I mentioned earlier - draw through your ellipses. Spheres have a tendency to not read quite well if the circle does not maintain a consistent, rounded shape.

Anyway, keep an eye on your organic forms with contour curves. I'll mark this lesson as complete, but I definitely think you could use more work in that area, so don't let it slip.

Uncomfortable

2015-12-22 19:28

Generally very nice work. Good work on the arrows, and your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are solid.

Your dissections are moving in the right direction, but there are a few things I'd like to mention about them. These relate mostly to the second page, since it doesn't seem like you used much photo reference for the first one.

When observing a texture present in a photo or in an object you're looking at in real life, it's important to remember that every single texture - no matter how random it seems - follows a particular rhythm and a particular hierarchy. There is very little randomness in the world.

If we think about randomness when we tackle these textures, we end up stumbling into a few common pitfalls, such as scribbling and generally putting marks down without thinking about how we're arranging them. A good example of this is hair. We look at a hairy texture and all we can see is the fact that there's hair, and that it's everywhere. So, that's what we put down.

Instead, we should observe how that hair is grouped and clumped together. Putting a bunch of random lines scribbled in one area results in a lot of contrast and visual noise - this is generally something we want to avoid, because it becomes distracting to the viewer. So, instead of trying to draw exactly every detail we see, we instead need to interpret it, leaving some things out so that we can bring attention to the main point we're trying to communicate.

That is, after all, what we're doing - we're not creating photographs, carrying over every detail with complete accuracy. We are communicating the idea of what it is we're drawing. If it's hairy, we don't need to draw every hair - we can start clumping the strands together into shapes and masses.

Hair is rather complicated, and we deal with it a little later, but I will instead show you this demo about studying textures found on a beetle.

Here, I start by identifying certain details present in the texture. Then I look at how they're grouped - whether they're spread out evenly over the surface, or if they come together to form clusters. I often let details bleed into one another, turning lines into shapes in order to keep my overall contrast down.

Anyway, moving on - your form intersections are good, but the set you referred to as "pure" is definitely the best of the lot. Reason being, the shading you apply in the others is generally quite sloppy. Hatching lines should be continuous from edge to edge, and should not be scribbled. All the same, you have demonstrated that you have a decent sense of form and 3D space. Just remember never to be loose and sketchy or scribbly - always put thought and planning behind every single mark you put down, even if it seems unimportant and inconsequential. After all, if the mark's unimportant, then it probably has no business being drawn at all.

So, I'll mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2015-12-24 19:01

I have a few concerns that I will mention, but overall you did pretty well so I'll mark the lesson as complete.

• When tackling the organic forms with contour ellipses and curves, you're making your organic forms too complex. You're not giving yourself the chance to nail the simpler concepts first (specifically just taking a simple flat shape and turning it into a 3d form that encloses volume). Don't worry about making these forms interesting, just stick to simple sausages for now.

• When it comes to drawing contour curves that wrap around the organic forms convincingly, such that they give the impression that they hook back around at the edge and continue along the other side of the rounded form, you're straddling the fence. In some cases you're getting it, while in others your curves don't hook around enough.

I want you to watch, or rewatch as the case may be, this video on the subject of organic forms with contour lines. It will help emphasize what you should be focusing on. Also, overshooting your contour curves a little bit when you hook them around at the edge may help you get a sense of how the curve should be accelerating. Consider overshooting the curves to be a bit like using training wheels - use them as much as you need until you feel confident, then start pulling back a little.

In your dissections, you did a pretty good job. At times you did focus too much on forms (like the fish head, fish tail, etc.) Remember that this exercise is all about texture - your forms should be simple and nondescript. Also, I know this was momentary and you did not continue the trend, but i do want to mention that for each drawing you do for these lessons, stick to one tool. When you started switching over to felt tip pen, I noticed that you started a drawing in ballpoint, then moved over to felt tip. It's not about switching tools really, but rather that I want you to tackle a single drawing without jumping between thicknesses of pens. Forcing yourself to use the one 0.5mm felt tip pen will teach you how to control the amount of pressure you use, so you can get the most versatility out of the single tool. Admittedly, you don't get that kind of flexibility from ballpoint, so just keep that in mind as you continue to use felt tip.

Your form intersections are moving in the right direction, and are pretty solid. Plenty of room to grow, but you're on the right track.

As always, you should continue practicing these exercises as warm-ups - especially the organic forms with contour curves, which are still shaky - but you're ready to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2015-12-27 21:53

Your arrows, organic forms and form intersections are generally quite well done, all showing improvement over the set. I would however like you to do redo your dissections.

Before I get to that, I wanted to point out that you have a tendency to draw over your contour curves (for the organic forms with contour curves exercise) several times. Draw them only once. Focus on wrapping them around the form as you have, but don't draw more than one mark for these curves. Instead, think through the problem, and overshoot the curve and have it hook around slightly if necessary. Generally you've done a pretty decent job of getting the curves to wrap around the forms, so keep it up. Just force yourself to get out of that habit of immediately reinforcing your a line with another.

As for your dissections - you didn't really do the exercise as described. It's not about drawing heads on your forms (in fact you shouldn't be, and I'm glad that you didn't). It's about looking at reference images and observing the textures present - then unwrapping them and applying them to your simple, nondescript forms. Since you didn't really do this, I'd like you to give it another shot before I mark this lesson as complete.

To help, here's a couple examples of dissections done well: https://i.imgur.com/zyJH8bX.jpg, https://i.imgur.com/ZlTNm6i.jpg. Also, here's a demo I did on breaking down a texture from a reference image.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-01 19:09

Your arrows, organic forms and form intersections are pretty solid. Your form intersections are coming along, but there are a few things I'd like to point out.

First off, when you don't draw through your cones (ie: drawing the whole ellipse for the base) they tend to come out poorly, as the curvature that you use ends up being far too shallow. It's very similar to a common mistake people make when dealing with organic forms with contour curves (although you actually generally did pretty well in that area). Still, watch this video on the topic for more information, and for now you should continue to completely draw through your forms.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, but I do believe you would benefit from doing the 250 cylinder challenge. There's some particular tricks to constructing a cylinder that you should learn, and they're all described on that page.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-01 21:26

I think you're being too critical of yourself. For the most part, your homework is really well done. There's a few minor issues that I will mention, but there's really no big concern that's got me thinking you should redo any of it.

First off, your organic forms with contour lines are generally good, just remember that this exercise primarily focuses on rounded forms - you've got some intentional hard edges and sharp corners in there that, while certainly an interesting experiment, aren't things you should be venturing into just yet. Focus on establishing rounded forms with contour curves that wrap around them convincingly. You're generally doing a good job at this (mostly in the first two pages of organic forms with contour curves, and the contour ellipses before them are very well done), but when you start playing with those sharp corners and flat surfaces things start to fall apart a bit.

As for your dissections, they're well done - you've focused on observing and breaking detail down into their rhythms and patterns. The next step would be to reduce the visual noise from adding all that detail - ultimately it's a matter of deciding what is important to keep in order to visually communicate the surface texture you're after, and what can be thrown out in order to reduce contrast. This may help explain some of that: Too Much Visiual Noise. You're still doing fairly well. As long as you keep that in mind as you move forward, you'll do fine.

I do have two concerns about your form intersections.

• First, don't use a rough underdrawing. This will explain it in greater detail: Using an Underdrawing

• Secondly, your shading/crosshatching is kind of sloppy at times. Not immensely so, but enough to catch my eye. I'd usually recommend not using crosshatching at all (very often the crossing lines end up coming out sloppy), single-direction hatching lines tend to work better.

Anyway, overall you've done quite well so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-01 21:50

Excellent work. Everything seems to be in order - your arrows are well done, your contour curves wrap nicely around their rounded organic forms, your dissections demonstrate a lot of experimentation with different kinds of textures, and your form intersections feel solid, consistent and weighty. I'm not sure if you used an underdrawing for your form intersections, or if those lighter lines are your cross-sections. I'm leaning towards the latter, because your linework appears to be very confident and bold, whereas when most people use underdrawings their darker lines tend to suffer from looking too stiff and careful, which is why I don't recommend it.

So, all I can say is, keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-01 22:49

Your arrows are well done, and your dissections are really cool. Your organic forms with contour curves are on the fence though - you really need to keep focusing on making sure the curves wrap around the forms convincingly. You're doing an okay job but I feel like if you stop thinking about it, you might lose grasp of it, so for the time being, keep it in mind so the idea solidifies. Here's some more info on that topic: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms

As far as your form intersections go, they're alright, though one big issue that I'm seeing is that You're Using an Underdrawing. This has a tendency to undermine the confidence of your lines, and ultimately make your forms lose their sense of weight and solidity. your intersections are pretty decent though.

Another thing I'm noticing is that your cylinder constructions could certainly be better - might want to check out the 250 cylinder challenge which specifically details how to construct a cylinder from its minor axis.

I'd like you to do one more page of form intersections, without the use of an underdrawing. I've actually rewritten that section of the lesson, so you would likely want to go back and read it over. Don't think about the intersections until the end, just focus on drawing forms that are consistent with each other and feel like they belong in the same scene and space.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-02 19:51

You seem to have missed some important points from my initial critique.

Here's a few points you should keep in mind:

• Draw through your ellipses

• Ghost all of your lines - you should probably go back to lesson 1 and reread the lesson part of the lines section. At the end I added an explicit breakdown of the three steps of the ghosting method, which you should definitely be keeping in mind.

• Try to draw forms with much, much shallower foreshortening/perspective distortion. That is, your far planes and your near planes should be fairly similar in size, reducing any instances of dramatic perspective. This will make the overall scene far more cohesive, which is probably what is lacking most at the moment.

You're still not Drawing Through your Ellipses. You've improved on the other two points, though. In principle, your contour curves have improved, but they're coming out really stiff and wobbly - you're drawing them slowly, spending a lot of your time in the drawing phase rather than in the planning/preparation phase. I've mentioned this many times, that when you execute a line, it should be fast and confident - all of the time needs to be spent before that, ghosting your lines and getting a feel for the rhythm, angle and curvature.

Honestly, looking at the contour ellipses you drew, it's got me thinking that you need to go back to lesson 1 and reread the ellipse section. You should already be keeping up with those exercises, practicing them regularly - I'm pretty certain that you're not.

Give this a read: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms. As I mention there, if you're having trouble wrapping the contour lines around while drawing confidently and quickly, you may want to experiment with overshooting your curves a little as they hook around at the edge of the organic shape.

I recently rewrote the dissection section of lesson 2 - you should go back there and read it, it may clarify some issues. In general you've improved a little on that front, but I'm getting the impression that you're not spending enough time studying your reference photos. It's fairly common for beginners to look at a reference image, identify one or two repeated visual elements, then just focus on drawing those elements all over their form. There's much, much more to it than that, and you need to get used to constantly looking back at your reference image. The second you look away, the majority of the information you absorbed from it gets simplified by your brain, and rendered useless. You might retain only a second or two's worth of drawing before you need to look back. The problem is that by default, people aren't aware of the fact that their brains are simplifying the visual information they've witnessed. So to start with, you need to force yourself to throw away most of what you think you've seen.

When you study a piece of reference, first identify those repeated visual elements, as you have been. Then observe how they're spread out over the surface of the object. Are they spread out evenly? Do they form groups and clusters, or do they amass together into larger clumps? Also notice how those visual elements differ between one another - if your visual elements are bumps, you might notice small bumps, bigger bumps, compound bumps made up of several smaller bumps, etc.

Also, I noticed that next to one of your drawings you wrote "scribbling, but it's not!" - it is scribbling, because you are not actually keeping an eye on the reference image while drawing it. You look at the reference image, you see "oh a bunch of fuzz" or something to that effect, you assume it's just placed randomly, so you then apply your idea of what random fuzz looks like. Instead you should be looking at each individual section, identifying what differs between them, and what is the same. You should be analyzing it to a much greater degree and drawing it with specific intent. Just zigzagging doesn't follow the contour of the form, doesn't take into consideration how that texture in your reference image might actually group and cluster, it's just your mind's idea of what fuzz looks like.

You can't trust what your mind thinks it knows.

Lastly, while your form intersections are improving somewhat, they have a long way to go. You're very, very eager to draw, and not terribly eager to plan. You're not drawing through your ellipses, and you're focusing way more on the intersections than actually drawing the forms as solid masses with weight to them.

I've also rewritten the form intersection exercise description in the lesson, so you should go back and reread that. I also strongly encourage you to restrict yourself to "equilateral" forms - that is forms that are not stretched more in one dimension than any other. So, avoid long tubes, long boxes, anything like that. Think more cube-like. It's considerably easier to deal with these equilateral forms than it is to throw long stretched forms into the mix, because they add much more perspective distortion and foreshortening into the mix.

Try the homework again - one page per exercise, and take the time to reread the lesson in its entirety.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-02 20:21

Your arrows and organic form with contour lines/curves are generally fairly decent. As far as the contour curves go, keep reminding yourself of how those curves need to wrap around the rounded 3D forms - you're doing okay with them, but I feel like if you let yourself slip they will start flattening out too much. As long as you keep reminding yourself to strive for that illusion of the curve wrapping around the form, it should solidify with time and practice.

Your dissections are also generally well done, though in some areas you fall back to more scribbling, while in others you're more conscientious and analytical with your texture studies. At the bottom left of page 3, you're getting very, very scribbly and sketchy. You should not be zigzagging your lines or relying on any sort of randomness. What you draw should be the result of conscious decisions.

Finally, your form intersections are showing a few key problems.

• You're not drawing through your ellipses, so they end up coming out uneven and stiff. Your spheres especially suffer from this, as the unevenness causes them to not read as spheres. I've mentioned this before - I expect you to draw through every single ellipse you draw for my lessons.

• Using an Underdrawing - now technically you're not using an underdrawing, but the problems that arise are the same. I'm noticing that you drew, and then went over very carefully to clear up your intersections. The problem is that you're not drawing those thicker lines with any kind of confidence - they're stiff and wobbly. If you remember from the ghosting method, I push the idea of executing every line you draw quickly and with confidence. In order to reduce the inevitable inaccuracy that comes from that, you should be spending lots of time in the preparation phase, ghosting your lines considerably.

• Also, you should be Drawing Through your Forms. Doing so will help you catch mistakes such as Far Planes Being Larger than Near Planes.

I'd like you to do one more page of form intersections, taking what I've said here into consideration. Also, before you do that, I encourage you to go back and reread the form intersection exercise description in lesson 2. I've rewritten it very recently, and hopefully the revised approach will instruct you better on where to focus your time and effort.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-05 00:51

Pretty good. Just a couple suggestions as you move forwards:

• Dissections - you did a pretty decent job, but as you move forward you should practice looking at your reference more. Remember that after a moment of looking away, 90% of the information you absorbed from the reference gets simplified by your brain. Much of the finer details (like how the little details are grouped and spread out over the surface, how those visual elements vary in size, shape orientation, etc.) get lost, so you've got to constantly force yourself to look back.

• Form intersections - don't forget to draw through all of the ellipses you draw for my lessons. It's important, if your circles for your spheres come out uneven from being drawn too slowly and carefully, and simply not confidently enough, they won't read well as spheres.

I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-05 01:56

So, there are a few areas where you can definitely improve.

Organic Forms with Contour Curves - as you said, your contour curves are not wrapping properly around the forms, so you've got to work on that. Be sure to read this if you haven't already, and watch the video linked there: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms

Next, your textures still have a tendency of being scribbly. It's very much there in the first page, much less so in the second, but you're still relying quite a bit on randomly repeating lines, and not enough on really studying your reference image and drawing specific marks to create your texture.

I discuss issues with dissections in these two links:

• Scribbling, Randomness

• Too Much Visual Noise

Finally, with your form intersections, you're not drawing through any of your ellipses as you should be - instead I'm noticing some chicken scratching there. Reread the section on form intersections in the lesson.

I'd like you to do one more page of organic forms with contour curves, one more page of dissections and one more page of form intersections.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-08 22:51

The purpose of the self-critique page is to catch mistakes so you can correct them before you submit (ultimately to make my job easier). So, if you find that you've made some mistakes I've mentioned there, you really should redo those exercises on your own.

Anyway, generally your work is pretty well done. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are fairly solid (though I do notice that in many cases you have a tendency to draw ellipses of the same degree throughout the form, which gives me the impression you don't yet understand how the degree of the ellipses describes the rotation of that ellipse in 3D space. Watch this video and read these notes for information on that subject.

Your organic forms with contour curves, however, are not well done. The issue is discussed the video linked above, and also here: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms.

Your dissections are coming along - there's plenty of room to grow, but it does take time and repeated attempts at capturing different kinds of textures for one's sense for how to balance apply and organize detail to develop fully, as well as for one's observational skills to solidify. That said, you're moving in the right direction, so keep ti up. I especially like the one on the top left of page 17 - not the most visually pleasing but the organization of detail and the focus paid to how each visual element differs slightly breaks up the monotony and keeps the texture fresh. The cut-faces where you've applied the fruit texture on that same dissection's nicely done as well. Simple, but simplicity often is all that's needed.

Your form intersections demonstrate a decent sense of form, with some great line confidence. Mind the fact that you did not draw through your ellipses though - it didn't have too great an impact, partially because your ellipses are decent and moreso because you didn't use any spheres where unevenness tends to have its greatest negative effects. Make sure you draw through all of the ellipses you draw for me. Also, you should continue to practice drawing boxes - especially while Drawing Through your Forms, as you still have some near/far plane issues here and there.

Before I mark the lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour curves. Fix the problem with the curves not wrapping convincingly around the rounded forms.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-09 23:26

There is one serious problem that is affecting your work: you're sloppy. Really, really sloppy. You jump into drawing before you are finished thinking through a problem, and then when your solution doesn't work, your solution is to draw more. This runs completely opposite of the principles covered in lesson 1 - specifically the importance placed on the ghosting method.

I want you to try this lesson again, taking the following into consideration:

• A single mark for a single line. Every line fulfills a certain purpose, and if two lines are doing the same thing, one of those is being wasted. Don't confuse this with the idea of drawing through ellipses though - continue doing that, but remember that you are only to do it 2 or 3 times (ideally 2), in order to give you the freedom to draw them more confidently.

• Think before every mark you put down. Prepare, ghost through your drawing motion for every line - be it straight, curved, or elliptical.

• Your ellipses are very hairy and loose - focus more on tightening them up and as I mentioned before, 2 or 3 times max.

• Stop adding hatching to everything - furthermore, when you do add hatching, remember that these lines behave like contour lines - they describe the surface of the form whether you want them to or not. So, if you apply straight hatching lines to a sphere, it will read like a flat disc, not a 3D object.

• Put some thought into your presentation - don't let your drawings bleed through the page, arrange them properly, and so on.

• Draw larger - this is a big one. The smaller you draw, the less room you have to think through spatial problems. At a smaller scale, your pen tip ends up huge relative to the size of the drawing, which makes everything appear clunky and messy.

I mention this often in my lessons - you MUST submit to me the absolute best effort you can. If you show me rushed work, not only will I be able to tell that you did not do as well as you could, but I will also not be able to differentiate mistakes caused by sloppiness and those caused by not understanding the material.

I know for a fact that you can do much better than this. Take your time, and reread the lesson - read each exercise description before you do it, as well as the common mistakes listed in the lesson's self-critique resources section. Then when you're finished, read over those common mistakes again - if you find any, redo the exercise.

I'm noticing a lot of things that you simply missed, that were mentioned in the lesson. Now, that does happen to everyone, and I do allow some leeway with that, but after a certain point it just becomes clear when a student quickly flips through a lesson and jumps straight into doing the exercises.

I will mention one last thing - you will likely feel ashamed after reading this. On one hand, you should - on the other, what you've done here isn't abnormal. With these lessons and my critiques, there are numerous problems I'm trying to solve. Technical problems, spatial problems, observational problems, and so on. Focus and patience is just another one of those problems, and you're not the only one to experience them.

So, in short - give it another shot.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-14 20:30

There are some issues we need to iron out before you'll be able to move onto the next lesson. I'll break things down by exercise.

• Arrows - There's a few things wrong here. First off, the demo in the lesson shows me drawing a single continuous curve/wave, then attempting to draw another identical curve/wave matching the previous one, but a little below it. Instead of doing this, you drew a series of broken lines, breaking the flow of the overall form. Furthermore, your lines are also rather wobbly, which shows me that you're missing several major points form the previous lesson. You're drawing too slowly (investing all of your time in the execution phase rather than spending time ghosting through the drawing motion and executing quickly and confidently), and you're probably drawing from your wrist rather than your shoulder.

• I also noticed that you did underdrawings in pencil - I don't want to see any underdrawings at all, it undermines the confidence working in ink forces you to develop.

• Organic forms with contour ellipses - your ellipses are very stiff and wobbly. This relates to the same issue I mentioned before, where you're drawing too slowly and carefully, instead of spending most of your time in the preparation phase and then drawing with confidence. The idea of drawing through your ellipse a couple times before lifting your pen is intended to give you the freedom to be a little bolder and more confident with your stroke - but if you draw slowly, your brain will interfere and make little corrections as you draw, making the time you spend ghosting through the motion to build up muscle memory pointless.

• Organic forms with contour curves - these aren't too bad, but there are some major issues. First off, I want you to watch this video from the lesson. You've drawn some of your contour lines as really wide ellipses, which shows me that you don't actually understand what the contour lines represent. That video, specifically the part where I talk about rotating a disc in 3D space, should clarify some of that. Also, don't draw multiple curves on top of each other. Take your time going through the 3 step ghosting method from lesson 1 and draw a single curve.

• I'm noticing you chicken-scratching in a lot of your drawings, across many exercises. This is a really bad habit you need to avoid. Chicken scratching basically means drawing what should be a single continuous line as smaller segments. It's a sketchy approach beginners use because they don't have the confidence to try to draw a single flowing line, and they also do this because they're used to drawing from their wrists instead of their shoulders.

• Your dissections are alright - some of your textures are quite well done, though the DNA one doesn't actually have anything to do with texture at all. You're still chicken scratching though - you should go back to lesson 1 and read the break down of the ghosting method again, under the lesson tab for part 1. This is the method you should be applying to every single mark you make. If you force yourself to think through each mark, it will help you avoid falling into these bad habits.

• Your form intersections are okay. There are a few issues but they're minor. For example, drawing through your forms is great, but don't do it with dashed lines - use solid lines only. Also, be more consistent with your hatching/shading, if you choose to apply it. You don't have to, and the form intersections you did without hatching looked much better. You may also want to look into the 250 box challenge.

I'd like you to redo the organic arrows, organic forms with contour ellipses and organic forms with contour curves.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-14 20:35

Your arrows are looking great. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are good but I'm on the fence about your organic forms with contour curves. They're almost there, and I feel like you know what to be striving for (giving the impression of wrapping the curves around a rounded form) but you're falling just a little bit short. I think you just need to practice it a little more to push it beyond the fold. There's more information here on the topic: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms.

Your dissections are a little on the simplistic side, to the point that they're looking cartoony. You need to spend more time really studying your reference images, looking at what kind of visual elements are present that give a texture a certain look (rough, smooth, bumpy, sticky, wet, etc.) and how they're spread out over the entire surface (are they applied evenly, or do they cluster in groups?). When you look away from your reference, the vast majority of what you absorbed will be immediately simplified by your brain. You don't realize this is happening though, so generally you'll happily draw what you think you remember. It's important to force yourself to look back at your reference constantly, after only a moment or two of drawing.

Your form intersections are pretty well done. I like the confidence of your lines and the fact that you're drawing through your forms. I do want to point out though that some of your boxes don't quite sit right in perspective, so be sure to continue practicing those. You may also want to look at the information in the 250 cylinder challenge, specifically how to construct a cylinder using its minor axis.

I'd like you to do one more page of organic forms with contour curves, and one more page of dissections.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-14 20:47

Very nice work! I really like your results, there's only one thing I'd encourage you to work on. You've got a very enthusiastic, jump-in-pen-point-first kind of attitude towards this. I don't want to dim your enthusiasm, the energy is very confident and bold, but I do want to encourage you to spend a little more time thinking before you put the pen to the page. Try to solve more of your spatial and visual problems in your mind before you make a mark.

What I'm noticing is that a lot of your lines are doubled up - you draw a mark, and then you draw another to reinforce it immediately after. This is a common sign of a lack of confidence. Generally your line work is actually quite confident, and fairly accurate, but I think you've still got this holdover from days-gone-by that you should work towards shedding. So just try to stop yourself from making that extra mark. The best way is usually to apply the ghosting method to every mark you draw, since it demands that you stop and think before adding anything new.

Aside form that, everything's great. I especially like the textures in your dissections - a nice balance of visual information and simplicity, your details are organized in a way that is quite pleasing to the eye. Your form intersections also feel quite solid and well constructed.

I'll mark this lesson as complete, so keep what I mentioned above in mind as you move forward.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-14 20:50

Not bad. Your dissections' textures are decent, and your form intersections are well done. Your arrows are also fairly solid. The only area where I have a bit of concern is with your organic forms with contour curves - the contour curves don't quite wrap around the rounded forms convincingly. You can read up a little more on this common issue here: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms. Be sure to also watch the video linked there.

I'd like you to do one more page of organic forms with contour curves before I mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-18 22:17

Solid work. You struggle a little at the beginning of your organic forms with contour ellipses, as well as the contour curves, but you seem to figure things out and pull through by the end. Your dissections are looking pretty decent. You're doing a good job of observing the detail present in the exercises. The next step - and this is more of something to keep in mind as you continue to practice - is to start thinking about how each texture is really just a collection of light shapes and shadow shapes, and working towards being able to organize those shapes in a way that maintains the illusion of the texture, but tones down the amount of contrast in a given area. Like I said, this takes time to develop, but as long as you keep it in mind while you practice, you will make subtle moves in that direction.

Lastly, your form intersections are looking solid. I see confident line work and a decent understanding of 3D space.

Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-18 22:19

Solid work across the board. You seem to know what to aim for with each exercise, and are moving in all the right directions. When playing with texture, you may want to practice how you would go about demonstrating a gradual shift in density, moving from very dense high-contrast areas of detail to sparser detail and eventually empty space where the detail is implied. That's something that as you continue to practice and move forward you'll have to experiment with.

Anyway, feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-18 23:23

Pretty nice work. In general, you're doing quite well, but there are a few areas where you're missing instructions.

• You're Not Drawing Through Ellipses - I see this both in the organic forms with contour ellipses, as well as in your earlier form intersections.

• You're drawing a few clusters of form intersections, rather than one big network of intersecting forms that fills up the entire page. I mentioned in the lesson that the focus is not actually how the forms intersect, but more your ability to draw many forms within the same space and scene, maintaining cohesiveness and consistency between them.

Aside from those points, your work is really well done. Your dissections are getting a little too preoccupied with form and pushing outside the boundaries of what I want from that exercise, but your textures are well drawn and your observation skills are solid. I also like the fact that your organic forms with contour curves aren't just simple curves, but rather the fact that you've got them twisting and turning shows me that you understand that these contour lines are really just lines that exist on the surface of the form, helping describe it to the viewer.

I do want you to do one page of form intersections though, as the lesson describes it - a single network of intersecting and interconnecting forms that fills the page.

Also, it's great to hear that you're in a life drawing class. I do want to mention that as you're getting instruction from multiple sources, try to keep them separated. Do the exercises your instructor there teaches you as they describe them, and do my exercises as I describe them. There's a good chance they will contradict each other in some ways, especially considering that my approach to art education is very, very different from the traditional approach you'd see in most prestigious art schools.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-20 22:46

Decent work. The only thing that jumps out at me is that you're not consistently drawing through your ellipses as you should be. I did notice that your dissection's textures, while pretty well done, are a little bit on the simplistic side (which is totally fine for now). I do want to suggest however that you make sure you force yourself to look back at the reference every second or two, and not spend too long drawing without looking back. This often results in relying on simplified memories of the details on your reference, which aren't terribly reliable.

Anyway, feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-20 22:55

Your organic forms are considerably better. Your arrows are okay, but you need to work on your tendency to create sketchier lines. You cannot let your line stop, and then pick it up again, leaving a very noticeable break in the middle.

On the topic of this you going over your lines, it becomes a bad habit when you're doing it as a reflex instead of a separate, planned action. If it's an immediate reflex, it means you don't have full control of what your body is doing, and that makes for a terrible habit.

Your dissections aren't good - for the most part, they completely miss the point of the exercise, so I'm going to ask you to reread that section. The exercise is about learning to study a reference image and carry over the information. For the most part you left your surfaces blank, aside from a couple areas where you added hatching lines - which clearly weren't done from any photo reference.

Lastly, your form intersections could still use some improvement. They're better, but still not up to scratch. Here's a few tips that may help:

• Don't use long or stretched forms - keep them equilateral, meaning roughly the same size in all dimensions, like a cube. I mentioned this in the lesson.

• Another thing I mentioned in the lesson - keep your foreshortening/perspective distortion shallow. By this I mean don't draw your forms in such a way that their far end is considerably smaller than their near end.

• Draw through your forms.

• Stop applying hatching lines to everything - the only thing it does is make your drawing look messy and distract you from focusing on constructing your forms correctly. It gives me the impression that you're trying to hide your mistakes, instead of actually dealing with them.

I'd like you to redo the dissections and form intersections.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-20 23:10

On many levels, your work is pretty decent, but I raised this issue yesterday when looking at your 250 cylinder challenge - your line quality is not good by any stretch. You regularly fall back to chicken scratching instead of applying the ghosting method covered in lesson 1.

Your arrows and organic forms with contour ellipses are fine. Your organic forms with contour curves however, are chicken scratchy as hell. They are vastly better on the second page, where you stop chicken scratching - you demonstrate a solid understanding of how they need to wrap around the rounded forms.

Your dissections are decent, with a nice variety of texture experimentation. I would like you to try thinking more and drawing less however - you have a tendency that very much ties into your chicken scratching habit - you want to jump into drawing without thinking or planning out what you want to draw. The result is that you're thinking on the page, instead of thinking of how to best economize your strokes. The result is definitely more than a little wasteful and disorganized.

Lastly, your form intersections aren't great. You're definitely heading in the right direction, but you need to work on your ghosting to achieve smooth, straight and accurate lines. Go back to the first lesson and read over those three steps detailed in the lesson section of part 1. That is the method you should be applying to every single mark you make. Then go back and reread the description of the form intersections, and do so carefully.

I'd like you to do two more pages of form intersections. I expect you to demonstrate to me that you are no longer chicken scratching your lines, and that you're putting plenty of time into ghosting through the drawing motion and preparing, and eventually executing with a quick, confident stroke for each line.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-22 00:09

Generally you've done pretty decently. I do have one really big thing to recommend however - draw bigger. Your organic forms with contour ellipses/contour curves, as well as your dissections are tiny. The result is really stiff looking drawings, that feel wrong even though they're really not. Working smaller tends to leave you with far less room to think through spatial problems, and also in general makes your drawings clunkier because the tip of your pen is going to be really fat relative to the size of the drawing. Super thick lines in a tiny drawing doesn't leave much room for nuance.

Everything else is generally pretty good though. Your form intersections are fine. I'm honestly not even that interested in how the forms intersect, it's more about drawing forms that feel like they exist within the same space and are consistent in their foreshortening and such, which you did well enough. Intersections themselves are quite advanced, and getting caught up in them right now can be distracting. All I ask is that people take a shot, and if it works out that's great, if it doesn't, best not to dwell on it.

Anyway, feel free to move onto the next lesson, and remember to draw larger on the page.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-24 17:56

Very nice work. Your exercises are definitely meeting my expectations for this point. Your dissection texture experimentation is good, and while it does leave plenty of room for growth, you're on the right track. Your form intersections generally feel very confident, consistent and well constructed. Your organic forms feel as though they exist in 3D instead of 2D, with plenty of clear volume brought about by the contour lines.

Keep up the good work. I'll mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-26 21:05

Pretty solid work! Your organic forms are coming along great, and your contour curves wrap around them nicely. Your dissections are moving in the right direction, and I'm glad to see that you're playing with the idea of simplifying textures. One tip I have there is that when attempting to simplify a texture, instead of thinking of each visual element as a separate entity (like each independent scale or bump or whatever), think of the texture as a collection of light shapes and shadow shapes that span over several elements together.

Your form and organic intersections are looking solid. The only thing I'd recommend for the former is that you should avoid using that sort of lighter underdrawing approach, because it undermines the confidence of your strokes, and because generally (not specifically in your case) the cleaner lines drawn on top tend to be drawn slower in an attempt to carefully match up with the underdrawing, so they end up wobbling and getting weird. I don't see this issue in your case, but it is something to be aware of.

Anyway, great work. Feel free to move onto the next lesson and keep it up!

Uncomfortable

2016-01-30 22:39

Pretty solid work across the board. The only thing I took issue with was that you aren't drawing through your ellipses, which is something I stress vehemently. It doesn't matter to me what you do in your own drawings or other exercises, but in the work you do for me, you must draw through all of your ellipses at least twice. Aside from that, everything looks in order. Good volumes on your organic forms, nice textural experimentation in your dissections (note that the face and bear don't have anything to do with texture but the rest were well done), and your form intersections are solid (although I do want to point out that when you use an faint underdrawing, followed by a clean-up pass, it tends to undermine the confidence of one's line work - it's best to just focus on the first pass, but drawing those marks confidently instead of faintly).

It seems you missed the 1 page of organic intersections exercise, so submit that and you should be good to go.

Uncomfortable

2016-01-30 22:51

Great work. Everything seems to be coming together, the only thing I want to mention is that in your form intersections, when you try to draw cross-sections to figure out how your intersections work, don't draw broken lines. In general, broken lines are not trustworthy, because the second the flow of a continuous line stops, it will not resume when you pick up the line again. It'll be an entirely different flow, making it a useless mark.

Aside from that, well done. I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-02 00:52

Honestly, your work is pretty much spot on. Not a whole lot to say about it.. which is good because it's the end of the day, I'm exhausted, and I really just want to go kill some dinosaurs. Your organic forms with contour curves start off a little weak, but end strong. Your dissections start off a little on the looser, sketchier side, but start tightening up by the next page. Everything else is well done throughout.

I'll mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-05 20:34

Very nice work! Your arrows, organic forms, dissections and various intersections are all done quite well. I'd say the only thing I'd like to point out is that though your organic intersections are pretty nice, I can definitely see that the idea of each of these forms having solid weight to them and sagging around each other still has yet to fully crystalize in your mind - you're definitely heading in the right direction though. What I would recommend here is to picture a solid object, like an iron rod, and a very large water balloon. Imagine in your mind that you gently place the water balloon on top of the iron rod, such that the balloon spills over on either side of it, sagging down. Think of how that weight would feel as it droops. Remember that sense of heaviness and tension.

I especially enjoyed your dissections - your handle on texture is very good, with a clear sense of both the details that exist on your subject, as well as for how those details can be organized and communicated to the viewer in such a way that they do not become overly distracting where they should not be.

Anyway, consider this lesson complete and keep up the great work.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-06 21:59

Your arrows are pretty good. Your organic forms with contour ellipses/curves are well done too. Your texturing is generally well done, although you left a lot of surfaces untouched. that isn't to say that blank areas aren't important, but there are a lot of surfaces you just didn't apply texture to. As for your questions about applying texture and struggling with being stuck with black/white, these recent notes I posted touch on how to tackle that: http://drawabox.com/lesson/texture. Still, you're mostly moving in the right direction.

Your form intersections are quite solid as well. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by your question regarding the video, but honestly that video is rather old and I'd recommend following the notes in the lesson over it. If I remember correctly, I removed the link to the video altogether.

Lastly, your organic intersections definitely do seem to be the area where you struggled most. I don't see a whole lot of confidence with your linework - the lines wobble in a lot of area, and you tend to get very sketchy and almost chicken-scratchy with some of your lines. Focus more on planning a mark and executing with a single, smooth stroke. When it comes time to add line weight in certain areas, ghosting can still help when running your pen over an existing mark. Also make sure you use line weight to separate your forms clearly (you did on some areas, less so in others), and don't forget about shadows one form will cast onto another. They can also be used very effectively to separate different forms and make things a little clearer.

Anyway, you're moving in the right direction and have generally done well. So, I'll mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-07 18:53

Doesn't look like you've submitted lesson 1 for critique yet. Your work is admittedly generally quite good, but I am very strict about having students go through the lessons in order, so you'll have to have lesson 1 marked as complete first, and then you can resubmit this one.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-08 21:23

As per the message you sent me, I've transferred the completion badges and whatnot to this account's flair. That's basically how I keep track of who's completed what, so I can keep tabs on people trying to jump ahead.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, your work is quite well done. Arrows, organic forms, etc. are well executed. Your dissections' textures are decent, though I did notice the use of scribbling in areas like the marble - try to avoid this sort of randomness - the majority of texture that appears random actually has a rhythm or flow to it that you must identify in order to properly carry it over into your drawing.

I think your second page of dissections shows the beginnings of understanding of texture as the shadow projected by the surface quality of an object, and I can see that you're starting to get a sense of how to clump those shadows together. The next step would be to consider how to achieve a softer edge to a shadow by creating a transition from dark to light. Some edges will remain hard, but you should be able to achieve softer transitions as well. These notes on texture touch on that concept, though you may have already read them.

Your form intersections are also looking good. I'm not terribly fond of the excess of hatching, and I'd sooner recommend applying the lines length-wise to cylinders rather than wrapping them around its rounded face, but the form intersections themselves are quite well executed.

The issue you noticed with that top-right sphere on the last page is simple - it's not a circle, so it isn't reading very well as a sphere (spheres always read as perfect circles, so you've got to be able to get pretty close to that). Beyond that, it's also quite uneven because you did not draw through the ellipse as I always tell people they should.

Lastly, I noticed that you approached this drawing in two phases - an underdrawing and a clean-up pass. This specifically starts off with a more confident, fainter drawing, and then you go back and replace the lines with a cleaner drawing of those same lines.

It would be considerably better for you to draw your first pass as though it were the only pass, and forget about a clean-up. The problem with a clean-up pass is that it causes you to draw more slowly and carefully, abandoning all confidence to the wind. Instead, treat the first pass as the only pass, and then afterwards you can reinforce some of the marks with additional lineweight to bring them forward. This is different from a clean-up pass, as you are not replacing lines with new ones, but rather you are emphasizing those that already exist.

Anyway, I'm going to mark this lesson as complete so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-09 20:52

Pretty nice work. Your arrows and organic forms are well done. Your dissections are also quite good, though I'd say you're making good headway into the first stage of the two-stage learning process that is wrapping your head around texture. The first stage is to acclimatize yourself to the idea that there's a lot going on in the textures you see in the world and in photographs, and to get used to drawing directly from observation without relying on memory. You're coming along with this very well, so keep up the good work.

Gradually as you become fully comfortable with this, then we start looking into how we can take all of the detail we see and organize/structure it so as to preserve focal areas and rest areas, clustering and grouping detail into solid shapes of black or white, and how to use the textural information to create interesting transitions between them. You don't need to worry about this too much right now, but if you do want to learn more about it, be sure to read the notes I posted on the topic just last week.

The only area of critique I'd like to offer is just to point out that you're not drawing through your ellipses in your form intersections. This is causing them to be uneven, and has a great impact on your spheres, which don't really read as terribly spherical.

Don't approach this exercise, or any drawing you do for my lessons, in a sort of rough phase, followed by a clean-up drawing. The clean-up drawing always ends up looking awful because the way we are driven to draw those cleaner marks works entirely contrary to how we've looked at mark-making in the previous lesson. We want to draw everything a confident pace, not slow-and-steady. Instead, we want to plan and ghost through the motion plenty beforehand, make sure that the mark we're making is valuable, and then put it down.

A clean-up pass really is intended to replace the lines underneath. Instead of that, draw your first pass with confidence, and then afterwards reinforce the existing lines that are of most value by adding more weight. This is not a matter of replacing lines, but rather making ones that are already there stand out more, which in turn pushes other lines back. When drawing those initial lines and constructions, you don't want to be worrying about keeping them faint or unnoticeable - you only want to worry about the task at hand.

Keep up the good work. I'll mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-11 20:54

Nice work! Your arrows and organic forms are looking pretty solid, and I'm really happy with your texture experimentation on the dissections. Your form intersections are generally looking pretty good (although watch where you start to draw through your ellipses too much, though that was only one page). I do think there is still room for growth with the form intersections, but you're heading in the right direction. This sort of thing will develop with time, so there's no need to stress over it.

Your organic intersections are looking very nice as well.

I believe you're more than ready to move onto the next lesson, so I'll mark this one as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-13 06:09

Those specific tiny details may benefit from the increased control from the wrist. Always consider however whether a line needs to benefit from very fine, brain-driven control, or muscle-driven flow.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-17 21:21

Your arrows are excellent - they feel very organic and alive. Your dissections' textures are pretty good - at times you're a bit too preoccupied with the forms (like drawing an actual fish), which aren't the focus of the exercise, but I do like the U shaped thing on the left side of your first page of that exercise. The fish scales demonstrate a nice gradation from sparse to dense texture. Just try to be a little conscientious of your mark making - I do see a fair bit of sloppiness where you haven't really put a whole lot of effort into what you're drawing, like with the spine on that same form.

Your organic intersections are alright - when approaching this exercise, try to get in your mind the idea that these forms have considerable weight to them. Think of having a big sausage-shaped water balloon, and dropping it over your outstretched forearm. Think of how it would sag over either side of it, with palpable weight and volume. That sagging and tension is what you're after in that one.

Now, your organic forms with contour curves needs work - the curves do not give the impression of wrapping convincingly around the rounded form. I talk about this common issue in greater detail here: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms.

Your form intersections are also not quite there. You seem very preoccupied with drawing cleanly, but to the point where you're not giving yourself what you need to fully understand how the forms exist in 3D space. As I mentioned in the lesson, that is entirely what this exercise is about. It's not about how the forms intersect (despite the name), but rather about drawing a series of solid, convincing forms that exist together. In order to achieve this, there's a few things you need to do:

• Draw forms that on their own feel solid and convincing. Drawing Through your Forms is a good way to highlight areas where your constructions are not consistent, where far planes are larger than near planes, or where your angles are off considerably. I did see one minor attempt to draw through one end of a cylinder, though you used a dotted/broken line - I strongly advise against this. Use a solid, continuous line - as soon as a line is broken, it will not maintain its flow or direction, and you won't be able to trust that once you pick up that line again, it'll be oriented the same way.

• Keep your foreshortening consistent. Foreshortening is the rate at which the farther end of a form gets smaller than the closer end. If it gets smaller very quickly, it's exhibiting very dramatic foreshortening, whereas if it gets smaller relatively slowly, it's shallow. Dramatic perspective implies a large scale, like how the top of a building is tiny when viewed from the large base. In this exercise, and frankly in most of your drawings, you want to keep the foreshortening very shallow, to keep things at a relatable scale.

• It also helps to keep your forms at least somewhat equilateral, mostly the same size in all three dimensions. You didn't exhibit any major problems with this, but it's still something to keep in mind. Avoid any overly long/stretched forms.

I'd like you to try and take another stab at the organic forms with contour curves and the form intersections. I noticed that in the latter you weren't drawing through all of your ellipses and that you drew one page with pencil. Don't do that.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-18 20:05

The biggest issue I'm seeing relates less to the lesson, and more to something you mentioned in your comment:

but sometimes my mind wandered

Your mind wandered a lot, to the point that you regularly lost track of the instructions and went off on your own way, doing your own thing. Yes, the lessons encourage you to play with simple things (like simple organic forms), and this can get dry - but the lessons are not here to entertain you. The fact of the matter is that you do not understand the concepts behind these exercises, so by rushing ahead into needlessly complicated forms, straying entirely from what's written in the lesson, you aren't actually practicing much of what I am trying to teach you.

I'm going to ask you to redo the organic forms, the dissections, the form intersections and the organic intersections. Your arrows are actually quite well done.

Now, with your organic forms, you tackle simpler forms when you deal with contour ellipses, and you don't do too bad of a job, but as soon as you jump into organic forms with contour curves, jump into these needlessly complex messes, and demonstrate to me that you don't understand what contour lines are for.

Their purpose is simple - they are lines that flow along the surface of an object, and by their very existence demonstrate how that surface bends and twists and turns through 3D space. First and foremost, it's best to keep them aligned perpendicularly to the spine that passes through the organic form - which means you need to be aware of how that spine is oriented. It's best to draw it in if you can't keep it straight in your mind (which beginners generally can't).

Next, you need to make sure that when drawing a contour curve around a rounded form (as we are doing for this exercise) that contour curve gives the impression of wrapping convincingly around that form. Yours fall short of this, it's something I talk about a lot in the lesson and in the self-critique resources for this exercise.

You drew maybe one simple form, and it didn't really hit these points - and then you jumped into all sorts of complicated bits. You need to focus on grinding on the simpler end of things, taking things one step at a time.

Next, your dissections are as you said, a mixture of some photo reference (I definitely wouldn't agree that most was done from observation) and a lot of stuff from your imagination. I don't want your mind to wander at all, because the stuff you're doing from your imagination isn't beneficial right now. If anything, it's just going to push you in the wrong direction.

As I mentioned in the lesson, this exercise is about identifying the textures and patterns present in a reference image and transferring them to a completely different, simple form. Your forms aren't simple at all, and from the looks of it, you're not entirely able to separate the idea of 'form information' (solid things with volume and mass) and 'texture information' (the visual information that wraps around these forms to give them the sense of being rough, smooth, wet, sticky, bumpy, etc. You don't want to pull out any form information, the point is to stick to a very simple form. That's why all of my examples consist of sausages - there's nothing complex about them.

Creativity is great at all, but right now it's just distracting you. Focus on photo reference, focus on pulling out texture, and focus on using simple forms. Also remember that this exercise is an extension of the previous one - before you even think about texture, you draw your form simply by following the steps of the organic form exercise. Then you'll have a form with contour curves/ellipses, and you'll be applying texture to that.

Next, your form intersections - you describe your own issues with it where you do the opposite of my instructions (focusing on the intersections, not drawing the forms) so I'm not going to get into that. All I want to stress is read my instructions and follow them. Another one you missed was the following:

For now, I strongly encourage you to avoid forms that are stretched in any one dimension. For example, long tubes, long boxes, and so on. At this point it is far better to stick to fairly "equilateral" forms. That is, forms that are roughly the same size in every dimension.

Lastly, your organic intersections are going in the right direction, they're just not quite there yet. I wouldn't generally hold you back for this, but you do need more practice, focusing on the sense of these forms sagging over each other. Right now they don't feel like they have much mass or volume to them. As you get better with the concept of contour curves and ellipses, this should improve as well.

So, like I said - redo your organic forms (with both contour ellipses and curves, make sure you draw in your spines for all of them and treat that spine as the minor axis to your ellipses/curves so they're aligned correctly), dissections, form intersections and organic intersections.

And before you do this, REREAD THE LESSON, AND REREAD EACH SECTION AGAIN JUST BEFORE DOING A RELATED EXERCISE. Trust me, it does not fill me with joy when I have to send people back to redo chunks just because they didn't follow the instructions.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-19 23:40

You've done a decent job of it. There's room for improvement, but what's important is that you're going in the right direction - it's really a matter of practice beyond this.

The weaker areas are your dissections and your form intersections, which you pointed out yourself. I'd say with your dissections, take more time to really observe and study your reference images. You're identifying various repeated visual elements that exist in your reference images already, but I think there's more to be seen, and that you'll start noticing more and more going on there as you continue to practice. I am glad to see that you are applying these textures with a sense of the form underneath.

With your form intersections, they're alright, but I do have two tips to offer:

• Draw through your forms. This will help you gain a fuller sense of how a form exists in 3D space.

• Don't try to white-out/erase your lines. I understand that you were doing it so you wouldn't be distracted by those lines, and frankly what you did is much better than not drawing those lines in the first place, but as our lessons progress, there will be a lot of these sorts of cluttered networks of lines, and you will need to get used to it. Instead of erasing some lines, try playing with adding line weight to the lines you want to emphasize. This has the effect of making the other lines recede and seem less visible.

Anyway, I'll mark this lesson as complete so you can move onto the next one when you feel comfortable.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-19 23:42

I like what I see. With many of these exercises, you struggle in the first page, but you improve and seem to grasp the concepts solidly by the end. That's really what I'm interested in seeing. The only thing I noticed though is that you didn't complete the organic intersections exercise. Submit that one page and I'll mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-21 02:42

Pretty good work. Your arrows are solid (despite your neuroses regarding drawing through them), your organic forms with contour lines are pretty decent and your dissections demonstrate some nice texture work. Your form intersections are fairly well done, although there's a couple things that I'd like to draw your attention to.

First of all, you seem to have missed the warning against using stretched/elongated forms:

For now, I strongly encourage you to avoid forms that are stretched in any one dimension. For example, long tubes, long boxes, and so on. At this point it is far better to stick to fairly "equilateral" forms. That is, forms that are roughly the same size in every dimension.

Also, your spheres aren't particularly well done - that's definitely something you'll want to work on. When drawing a sphere, you want to do your best to draw a circle - not just any ellipse, but a proper circle. There's some room for error, but you're going a fair bit beyond that.

Anyway, you're generally going in the right direction, so I'll mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one when you're ready.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-21 17:45

Excellent work. Your arrows, dissections, form intersections and organic intersections are all exemplary. I especially liked all of the experimentation with texture and rendering. Your organic forms with contour curves do some some minor issues when it comes to fully wrapping around the rounded forms convincingly, but I think you're going in the right direction. The only thing I'd recommend there is to try overshooting your curves just a little bit as they wrap around the forms (as depicted here), and also to be more mindful of the minor axis/spine passing through the organic form - your curves are really just visible portions of ellipses that are aligned to that minor axis, so it's important when getting the angle of the curve right.

My biggest concern is that you might not be reading the lesson as carefully as you should, and you're perhaps applying your own standards and expectations of each exercise, which differ from the ones I've stated.

The biggest example of this relates to the stress you experienced with the form intersections - you're absolutely right when you say that the understanding of how different forms intersect with one another is something that should be left to a different lesson. The only problem is, that's not the focus of that exercise. This is something I state right at the beginning of the exercise description:

Before tackling this exercise, there's something I want you to acknowledge: The specific aspects of how to handle intersections outlined here and in the video linked below are not entirely correct. I have vastly simplified them, and this is completely intentional. This is for two reasons:

• Proper intersections can get very complicated. A student at this stage could easily become overwhelmed.

• This exercise is, in all honestly, not really about the intersections. It's about being able to arrange forms together in 3D space. Ultimately that is what I gauge when critiquing homework submissions, though general intersection mistakes would also be pointed out. Still, that should not be your focus.

So, while some of you may feel the desire to open up a 3D modeling program and test out the intersections yourselves, know that the results may be different, and you may end up confusing yourself far more than you need to.

I think you may have missed that, which led to you spending a lot more effort on understanding the specific nature of the intersections. On the bright side, you're not the only one who's done that - but most of the others do so while ignoring the main focus of the exercise. You on the other hand nailed what the exercise was all about, and then went waaaay beyond it. So, while you may have spent more time on it than you might have liked, I do think that at the end of the day you've benefited from it all the same.

All that said, I seriously think you're being too hard on yourself. Everything I see here is very well done. Humility is definitely a virtue, but it can be problematic when it starts chipping away at your confidence.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-22 20:42

Pretty nice work. I especially like the texture work in your dissections. Well detailed, and those details are nicely organized to establish focal points and diminish competition/noise.

The only issue I want to raise is with your form intersections. Fundamentally they're fine, but it's more about the approach to drawing where you drew faintly on your first pass (which resulted in more confident linework), then went over it again to 'clean things up' by drawing darker lines over everything. This is not a great approach, because it results in the most visible lines being the result of drawing slowly and carefully - a method that generally diminishes confidence and causes lines to flow poorly.

Instead, draw confidently the first time as you did, but not faintly. If you decide to put a mark down on the page, that mark needs to contribute to your drawing in some way (this includes drawing through your ellipses and through your 3D forms). If it contributes something, it should be drawn with confidence, rather than trying to hide it like a preliminary sketch.

The result will be a little visually confusing and cluttered, so you can then reinforce some lines with additional line weight to help organize them. Adding weight to some lines will cause others to recede. The difference between this and your method is that in yours, you were replacing the linework with new marks - in the method I'm suggesting, you are emphasizing lines that already exist, simply adding a little thickness to them. The difference in result is quite noticeable, and your forms end up looking considerably more solid.

Anyway, keep this in mind as you progress. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, so you may feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-22 22:48

Nicely done! I actually quite liked your dissection's textures. Technically speaking everything will always need work, but you're very clearly moving in the right direction, observing your references carefully and attempting to approach a given texture on a case-by-case basis, instead of applying the same sort of techniques and marks to everything. At this point it's just a matter of refining your approach, rather than learning something new.

I did notice that your organic forms' contour curves jump between being decent, and not quite wrapping around the forms convincingly. Luckily the former was more often the case, but I can see that you're likely in a position that you might slip back if you don't focus on those issues. This is what I mean. You've got a lot of instances where your curves overshoot off the form itself - I generally encourage people having trouble with the curves to overshoot and hook back around the form, keeping it within that shape. I think what's most important is just to take more time when you apply those curves - I notice a fair bit of sloppiness in that area that's holding you back.

Your form intersections are looking pretty decent, although I have one suggestion in that area as well - I strongly disagree with your decision to outline all of your forms so solidly in black. I generally am in favour of applying additional line weight to existing lines to add a sense of dimension and dynamism to your drawing, but this is somewhat different from what you did in two ways:

• First and foremost, adding weight means taking existing lines and emphasizing them. Your approach leaned more towards replacing existing lines, a technique people often use when doing "clean-up passes" over their drawings. You want to be able to take ownership of every decision you've made throughout the drawing - so instead of replacing/erasing lines, we emphasize some over others to help visually organize all of the marks on the page.

• Secondly, when adding line weight, you generally want to do this on specific sides of forms, or on overlaps. Adding a heavy line all around the forms will actually flatten things out.

There's some more information on the use of line weight here: Line Weight

Lastly, you actually did an excellent job with your organic intersections. Contour curves aside, the forms really feel as though they have weight, and that they're interacting with one another. I can feel the tension that comes from one form sagging over another, which is excellent.

Keep what I've mentioned here in mind, but feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-22 23:01

Fairly nice work. Your dissections are demonstrating some nice texture experimentation, your form intersections are remarkably well done (although there's a minor issue I'll mention below) and your organic intersections are pretty solid.

The main issue I'm seeing is with your organic forms with contour curves - those contour curves are not at all wrapping around the forms. Rather than giving the impression that in your mind you perceive these forms as 3D objects, I'm led to believe that you yourself still feel as though you're drawing those contour curves across a flat page. This is a fairly normal and common problem, but it is one we need to work towards fixing. Take a look at this section of the self critique resources for more information, and a link to a demo video that discusses the topic: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms.

The other issue is actually one I wrote about in another critique - so instead of rewriting the same thing, I'll quote exactly what I wrote here.

Your form intersections are looking pretty decent, although I have one suggestion in that area as well - I strongly disagree with your decision to outline all of your forms so solidly in black. I generally am in favour of applying additional line weight to existing lines to add a sense of dimension and dynamism to your drawing, but this is somewhat different from what you did in two ways:

• First and foremost, adding weight means taking existing lines and emphasizing them. Your approach leaned more towards replacing existing lines, a technique people often use when doing "clean-up passes" over their drawings. You want to be able to take ownership of every decision you've made throughout the drawing - so instead of replacing/erasing lines, we emphasize some over others to help visually organize all of the marks on the page.

• Secondly, when adding line weight, you generally want to do this on specific sides of forms, or on overlaps. Adding a heavy line all around the forms will actually flatten things out.

There's some more information on the use of line weight here: Line Weight

There's only one other thing I want to mention in regards to your form intersections that I didn't cover there - make sure you draw through all the ellipses you do for my lessons. This includes form intersections, contour ellipses, and anything else that involves an ellipse later on.

I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour curves before I mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-23 21:03

Very nice work. I did feel at first that your organic forms with contour curves were a little on the weaker end, but they improved considerably over the set. By the end of that section you seem considerably more confident.

Your textures are very well done, despite the challenges you faced - you pushed through them, and were able to strike a solid balance between capturing detail with a variety of unique, case-by-case appraoches (instead of applying the same kind of technique across the board) and maintaining clear focal points. You've established a fair bit of detail without giving into the urge to just slather everything in high-contrast detail, overwhelming the viewer.

Your form intersections feel very solid - each form feels as though it has weight to it, and as though it exists in 3D space. Your organic forms are also quite well done, and I'm beginning to get the impression of how each one impacts its neighbours - how they sag over one another, and so on.

I don't really have anything to suggest at this point - I think you're moving in the right direction with everything, so all I can say is keep it up and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-02-24 21:06

Your arrows and organic forms are looking solid. Your dissections are also quite well done, but I did notice that you have a tendency to use little lines in every case. There are a wide variety of marks that one can use when approaching different textures, with short lines being only one of them. Keep this in mind as you continue to move ahead. I'm still very pleased with your textures (you establish strong focal points and manage to capture a wide variety of textures despite the limitation).

Your form intersections are well done as well, though based on the little comment you added about figuring out the intersections and using 3D software to double check tells me you didn't read the lesson as carefully as you should have. This is right at the beginning of the exercise description:

Before tackling this exercise, there's something I want you to acknowledge: The specific aspects of how to handle intersections outlined here and in the video linked below are not entirely correct. I have vastly simplified them, and this is completely intentional. This is for two reasons:

Proper intersections can get very complicated. A student at this stage could easily become overwhelmed.

This exercise is, in all honestly, not really about the intersections. It's about being able to arrange forms together in 3D space. Ultimately that is what I gauge when critiquing homework submissions, though general intersection mistakes would also be pointed out. Still, that should not be your focus.

So, while some of you may feel the desire to open up a 3D modeling program and test out the intersections yourselves, know that the results may be different, and you may end up confusing yourself far more than you need to.

Intersections themselves are very complex and are not something people at this point should be worrying about. The bigger concern is drawing forms with relatively consistent foreshortening within the same scene - something that in and of itself is not easy either. I'm glad to say that you did a solid job of it all the same, despite being clearly distracted by the intersections themselves.

Your organic intersections are excellent - I'm glad to see that they all hold clear volume and it's very easy to see how they interact with one another, warping around their neighbours and sagging where there isn't enough support to hold them up.

You've done well in general, just make sure to read my lessons more carefully in the future. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.