Uncomfortable

2016-09-22 19:54

Very nice work. Over the course of this exercise, I think you've improved considerably with each and every exercise. Your sense of form and construction has gotten much stronger, as has your general sense of how forms sit in 3D space.

As far as the textures go, I believe your first pass at the exercise were decent, but they had one clear misstep - you were treating your pen as though it were a pencil. This influenced how you approached your transitions from light to dark, attempting to achieve a more graphite-like effect where the tool you were using was not really designed for that. In later attempts, you start embracing the nature of the felt tip pen itself, becoming much bolder in your use of solid black shapes, and much more aware of how to approach transitioning between them. Based on some of your studies, it looks like you did look through the notes on the 25 texture challenge, and you do seem to have applied the principles correctly.

Aside from that, your organic forms are feeling solid and voluminous, and your form intersections feel cohesive and well laid out. As for your questions,

• The lessons aren't designed for you to grind on one thing until you feel you've perfected a topic. Being satisfied with your results definitely isn't the same as perfection, but I think it's important to acknowledge that all we're after here is a sign that you understand what you should be aiming for. That's what I look for when marking a lesson as complete. The minimum required amount of homework is generally enough to demonstrate whether or not you grasp certain concepts, or at least give me enough work from which to determine where you're going astray. Of course, if you feel you can do something better right now, and that what you've done is not the best you're capable of at this moment, then sure - keep at it, and submit what you feel is your best effort. Don't push yourself to be perfect, though, otherwise you'll never move forward.

• Doesn't really matter to me if you choose to upload more stuff. It does give me a better insight into how you think and approach things, so there is a benefit there. Ultimately it doesn't add to my workload either, since it's not like I'm going through everything with a fine-toothed comb.

• You are never finished with the basics - like I said before, when I mark something as complete, it means you understand where your'e headed, not that you've reached your destination. As I explain in this comic, you should be picking two or three exercises from the two basics lessons each day to do as a 10-15 minute warmup before moving onto that day's work. You can't leave this stuff behind, as it's necessary to continue building up your technical skills, and also to keep them sharp.

Keep up the great work. I'll mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-22 19:39

You understood it correctly. I'm not entirely sure why I only marked out that corner, but it's likely because drawing a box around that whole section of the plane would have cluttered up the drawing, so I meant for students to infer that the plane's dominance at the corner would imply this quality kind of fades back as you move through the plane. It's not entirely clear cut in terms of where the plane stops being dominant, so it's not so easy to mark out in terms of such simple boxes.

Long story short, you've got it right. You're not missing anything.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-25 02:37

I'd say your list of redos is pretty good, although you don't necessarily have to redo the dissection textures. They're definitely more on the cartoony end, but I think beginning work on the 25 texture challenge once we've finished off with this lesson would be a good idea. That challenge in particular is meant to be done in parallel with the other lessons, as it'll take quite a while and should be spread out over a long period of time.

Your organic forms with contour lines are looking good, but don't forget to include the central minor axis line when doing the contour curves. It's important for lining up your ellipses, and even though the contour curves exercise does not use ellipses, the curves themselves are the visible portion of larger ellipses and so the minor axis still applies.

For your form intersections, I noticed that you missed certain instructions in the lesson - specifically that you should avoid forms that are stretched in any one dimension, specifically long cylinders. These bring far too much complication from perspective into the mix, and considering how difficult the exercise already is, you're just going to distract yourself from the core of the exercise. Also, make sure you're drawing through all of your ellipses, and that you avoid any sort of a clean-up pass after the fact to tidy up your lines. Focus entirely on applying the ghosting method to every stroke - that is, identify the mark you want to make, plan and prepare as necessary, and then execute it with confidence. Then move onto the next mark. Your lines tend to be rather stiff and uncertain, so that confidence isn't coming through.

Additionally, with exercises such as this one, drawing smaller makes things much more difficult, as it robs you of the room you need to think through the spatial problems. Lastly, remember that this exercise is not at all about the intersections themselves. It's about drawing forms together in a way that they appear to be cohesive. Look at my examples again, and look at how large each form is, how I avoid stretched forms, and how I construct each one independently of each other.

Lastly, fundamentally your organic intersections aren't horrible, but I'm still getting that sense that your lines aren't confident - they're stiff, and they're wavering. Remember the ghosting method, execute each mark with confidence. Also, as far as the exercise itself goes, similarly to the form intersections, think through each new form independently.

Drop a form into your scene, draw it in its entirety, focus on capturing the illusion of volume with contour curves that wrap around the form convincingly. Focus entirely on that step and nothing else. Then drop another form on top. Think about where this new form's weight is supported, and where it isn't (and would therefore sag). Again, focus on the illusion of volume for this form. Then add another, and so on. Don't think ahead - focus entirely on the step you're on.

So yeah, as you said, try the form intersections and organic intersections again.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-26 02:09

Very nice work! Just a couple of things to keep in mind:

• For your organic forms with contour curves, the central minor axis line is still important, as it determines the alignment of your contour curves. These curves are simply the visible portion of larger ellipses, and those ellipses should be aligned to the minor axis such that it cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves. If your alignment is off, it can often be much more challenging to get the curve to feel as though it properly wraps around the rounded form.

• For your organic intersections, try to stick to simple, large sausage forms, rather than varying them with skinny ones, forms that taper through their midsection and so on. The awkward swelling/tapering definitely complicates things and honestly kinda looks bad and it can be harder to make those forms look solid. Start by drawing a single sausage, and focus entirely on making it look heavy, voluminous and solid. Then add another sausage to the form, focusing on where it falls onto the previous one, where its weight is supported (which will cause it to wrap around whatever's supporting it) and where its weight is not supported (which will cause this form to sag). Then add another one, and so on.

Anyway, generally you've done really well. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-27 20:54

Pretty nice work! Just a few things to keep in mind:

• Be a little more careful when it comes to getting your contour curves to fit snugly within the organic forms

• Your dissections are a good start, albeit looking a little cartoony. One thing to remember is that the lines we draw don't exist in real life - they're actually shadows, and these shadows aren't uniform in thickness. They can taper and swell, disappear and reappear, and so on. So try to play with varying your line weights a little more, play with lines that vanish and reappear, and so on. Also, reading the notes over at the 25 texture challenge is likely worth your while.

Your form intersections and organic intersections were well done. I especially liked how firm and solid the geometric forms in the former appeared. Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-09-27 20:57

BOX THERAPY!

You've done well! Your organic forms feel pretty good, though keep working on getting your contour curves to fit snugly within the forms themselves. Your texture experimentation is coming along nicely as well. Your form intersections feel solid and the forms seem cohesive within the scene.

Your organic intersections are fine, though I do want to recommend that in the future you stick to simpler sausage forms and try to avoid having those forms taper and swell irregularly through their midsection, even in small amounts. Reason being, this inherently undermines the solidity of that form. Sticking to simple sausage-like masses can allow you to focus on how those forms interact with one another - where a form's weight is supported by another one (causing the first to wrap around the second a little) and where the form's weight is not supported (causing it to sag).

Anyway, keep up the great work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-02 06:05

There's definitely a fair bit of improvement here. It's still not fantastic, though there's clear signs of a growing understanding of how these forms interact with one another. As such, I will mark this lesson as complete. As you continue to move forwards, there's a few things that you do need to focus on:

• Aligning your contour curves to the central minor axis line (each curve is the visible portion of a larger ellipse, and that ellipse needs to be cut into two equal, symmetrical halves by the minor axis through its narrower dimension)

• Making sure your contour curves wrap convincingly around the forms.

• Thinking about what the orientation of each contour curve actually means. You may want to read over these notes.

In general, use fewer contour curves, but put more time and effort into drawing each one carefully and deliberately, such that it actually wraps around the forms convincingly, and is oriented and aligned correctly. If you just draw a bunch of contour curves but don't take care to draw them as well as you can, your drawings will suffer.

Anyway, go ahead and move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-03 22:51

Not bad. Your arrows are looking decent, and flow nicely through 3D space. Your dissections show quite a few interesting experiments with texture. Your form intersections are generally pretty well done, with relatively solid and cohesive sets of forms, though I do want to stress the importance of drawing through your ellipses here (especially with things like spheres, where uneven shapes can really undermine the believability of the form). Your organic intersections are also pretty good, and I like that you appear to grasp how these different forms interact with one another.

For your organic forms with contour lines, there's a couple things I want to stress. Generally these are for the most part fairly well done, but it's extremely important that you not leave out that central minor axis line that passes through the length of each form. Each contour ellipse (and contour curve, for that matter) must be aligned to this, such that the minor axis cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves, as explained in lesson 1. As I mentioned, this applies to contour curves as well, as they are merely the visible portion of larger ellipses.

In general your contour curves do an okay job of wrapping convincingly around the 3D forms, but I feel that this is something you should continue to focus on consciously - you're a bit borderline here, and I believe that if you were to relax a little on that front, you might slip back into not quite getting the curves to hook around convincingly at the edges. Keep this in mind whenever drawing any contour curves around rounded forms.

So, your work is pretty good, those are just a few points to keep in mind as you move forward. I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-06 21:54

The lessons are structured such that each one is designed to highlight certain kind of issues. If they're not dealt with, they tend to get covered up, and it becomes considerably more difficult for me to identify them if they come up in later ones. For that reason, I require people to submit homework in order, waiting for a lesson to be marked as complete before starting the next lesson's work.

I frequently ask students to redo chunks of work, and every now and then I'll come across a student who just rushed through or didn't read half the lesson, so I'll usually send them back to read more carefully. I've never come across a situation where a student put their all into following the instructions who had to redo the whole thing, though many need a little advice and adjustment.

As for the videos, that is something people have asked for in the past. For the time being I don't have any plans to do it - mostly because I don't have the hardware for it, and it'd be massively more time consuming. I might change my mind about that in the future, but not for a while.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-07 19:56

Technically the 250 cylinder challenge doesn't really fit into the same stream so it's fine to submit both.

Your cylinders are looking pretty decent - keep working on tightening up those ellipses (for the ones you drew through) and don't skimp on drawing through the others. I know it feels awkward when they're loose, but as you practice them more, the lines will come together and your shapes will become more precise and even. Also, make sure you put a little more effort into keeping your minor axes straight and solid. They're generally okay, but I am seeing a liiiiittle bit of arcing to them at times.

Pretty decent work on lesson 2 as well. Your organic forms with contour lines and contour curves are solid, but don't forget about the importance of the central minor axis line, to which all of your ellipses and curves align. Additionally, for your dissections, don't forget that this exercise is meant to start off as just another organic form with contour lines - this is meant to reinforce the volume so you have a nice, solid form to apply texture to. You should not be skimping on the contour curves here just to give yourself a cleaner surface to add detail to, as this will lead to an overall flatter result.

Your form intersections are okay, but they're an area you'll want to continue working on as you move forwards. Admittedly, filling in your intersection areas as you have kinda has some sloppy-looking results, and ultimately it draws your attention away from the real core of the exercise, which is not about the intersections themselves. It's about the cohesiveness of having multiple forms present together within the same scene and space. You did okay at this of course, but tightening up your ellipses, avoiding overly stretched forms (like long tubes) and so on will help.

Your organic intersections are pretty nice, and demonstrate a solid grasp of how those forms exist together in the same space, and how they sag against one another in a convincing way.

Overall, decent work. I'll mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. Keep in mind that you should from now on pick two or three exercises from the first two lessons each day to do as a warmup before you start that day's work. This will keep you current and keep sharpening your skills, while keeping the exercises themselves on a cycle so none of them ever get left behind and abandoned.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-08 21:36

There's a few hiccups that we'll have to iron out for sure, but there's definitely some considerable improvement over this set. Your biggest areas of strength here are your form intersections, which started off somewhat weak but the solidity of your forms improves considerably. Note that I'm talking more about how you've maintained cohesion between the different forms occupying the same space, rather than the actual intersections between the forms (which aren't the focus of this exercise despite the name).

I do want to point out a few areas though where you didn't quite follow the instructions properly.

• For the form intersections, I asked that you not use forms that have been stretched too much in one dimension (like long tubes, of which I see a handful here), as they tend to involve far too much perspective distortion/foreshortening, making an already challenging exercise more complicated.

• For your organic forms with contour ellipses, you did not draw through your ellipses. I expect you to draw through each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons. It's kind of difficult to tell because the image is a little blurry, but it does seem like you overlapped your lines slightly - what I want is for you to do two full rounds of the elliptical shape before lifting your pen, allowing you to draw the whole ellipse with much more confidence. This in turn keeps the shape more even.

• You left the central minor axis lines out from the organic forms with contour curves - just as with the contour ellipses, they serve the same purpose here, helping you to align your curves. The curves themselves are just the visible portion of larger ellipses, so they work the same way and are just as important.

I'd like you to try the organic forms with contour ellipses, and the organic forms with contour curves once again (one page each). The contour ellipses aren't that bad, but I think you'd benefit from doing them again, giving you the opportunity to loosen up with those slightly stiff ellipses. Try to keep your forms very simple - hell, just using basic sausage forms with no branching is probably your best bet here. This allows you to focus entirely on taking a 2D organic shape and giving it the illusion of volume and form.

For your organic forms with contour curves, those curves aren't quite wrapping around the forms correctly. Part of this is at times the alignment with the absentee-minor-axis, but generally it's a matter of your curves not quite hooking back around the rounded form as they reach the edges. This is a very common issue which I explain in detail here: Contour Curves Do Not Wrap Around Organic Forms. Be sure to read those notes and to watch that video before you redo those two pages.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-15 17:34

Your form intersections (which are often the most difficult part of this lesson) are looking pretty solid. I do believe we need to work on your organic forms however. Right now the biggest issue there is that your contour curves aren't wrapping properly around the rounded forms. This is a common issue and arises when you don't accelerate and hook your curves around as they reach the edge of the form. One helpful technique to force yourself to think of it as being a rounded, three dimensional form, is to overshoot those curves a little after they wrap around at the edge. This forces you to think of it more like an ellipse, rather than just a line going across a flat page. There's also a video you should watch on that link.

Additionally, for your organic forms with contour ellipses, the ellipses themselves are looking a little stiff - remember that above all else, you want to be drawing everything with a confident stroke. Don't let your brain course-correct as you draw, as this will lead to stiff and wobbly linework, and in this case, ellipses that are not evenly shaped.

Your dissections are a good start, though at the moment they're a little cartoony. As you continue to move forwards with this, focus on spending far more time observing your reference - after a couple seconds of looking away, your brain's going to start throwing away a lot of the information you gathered from your observation, causing you to work much more from memory. Right now we can't trust our ability to remember large amounts of detail, so we need to force ourselves to continually look back at our reference images after only a few seconds of drawing. This will be a little tough at first, but it's a habit you will build up over time.

Also, remember that when doing this exercise you need to be starting off with an organic form with contour curves. I'm noticing here that you constructed your base forms for the dissection exercise with the cuts in mind. You should be drawing them as complete sausage forms, then add contour curves/ellipses, and then start thinking of it as a dissection exercise. At that point you'd pick two contour lines to use as your 'cut' section and start working from there.

Lastly, your organic intersections could use some work. Some of this comes from the issues with contour curves, so the notes I mentioned earlier will help with that. Additionally, I think it'd be best for you to stick to absolutely simple sausage forms - don't use wavy lines, as this added complexity will undermine the solidity of your forms. Right now we just want to focus on creating the illusion, and ultimately buying into that illusion ourselves, that we're drawing actual 3D forms, not just shapes on a 2D page.

One other thing that may help with that sense of 3D space is to start by drawing a plane or a large box, then start piling your organic sausage forms onto it one by one. Drop one form on, think about how its volume interacts with the form beneath it, where its weight is supported and where it isn't (and would therefore sag). Then when you're satisfied, drop another sausage form on and repeat the process.

So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see the following:

• One more page of organic forms with contour curves

• One more page of organic intersections

Uncomfortable

2016-10-18 03:38

I'm actually about to go to bed, but it's a good thing I caught your submission just in time - your link seems to be broken. I'll be adding your submission to the list anyway, so just edit it to fix the link when you get the chance.

Uncomfortable

2016-10-18 22:02

There's some good stuff here, but there's one major problem that I want to point out across much of your work - what I'm seeing a lot of is that you're drawing in two steps. Your first step is faint and light, like you're trying to hide your initial lines. Your second step is bold and dark, but drawn slowly and carefully (to match and replace the fainter lines). This is not a good way to approach these lessons, as it does not encourage the development of your own confidence.

What you should be doing is instead drawing your initial lines confidently - not with any concern to keep them super light and hidden. These lines will be a part of your final drawing, and they will not be replaced. As such, you need to apply the ghosting method (as I'm sure you have) before executing them with a persistent stroke just fast enough to avoid any wobbling. Then once you're done, you can come back and add a little line weight here and there - this addition of line weight is not a matter of replacing the lines you've drawn, but rather merely emphasizing lines that already exist. You should be drawing those marks just as confidently.

A second major issue is that you're not drawing through any of the ellipses in your form intersections - this is something I stressed in lesson 1, and it is something I want you to do for all the ellipses you draw for my lessons, all the way through.

Now, onto the specific exercises.

• Your arrows, aside from what I mentioned above, are fine.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are also done well.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are okay at first, but you are definitely still struggling with the idea of getting those curves to accelerate as they reach the edges and hook around to continue onto the other side. In these notes I recommend overshooting those curves slightly after they hook around to get used to drawing that particular curvature. Additionally, it's best that you continue drawing the central minor axis line through your organic forms, as it helps you align your contour curves. The curves are the visible portion of larger ellipses, and the minor axis should be cutting each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves through its narrower side. Often the curves being misaligned also makes it harder to get them to look as though they're wrapping around convincingly.

• Your dissections are coming along nicely. In the future, one thing I'd work on is generally trying to draw less as though you're drawing with a pencil (creating transition by sketching short line segments), and try and consider ways to achieve different kinds of textures without hatching. Keep in mind that each tool will have particular strengths - so to draw with a pen as though it's a pencil is probably not the most effective use of the tool. That said, you're showing some great experimentation here.

• Your form intersections are okay, but the general issues I mentioned above are definitely a concern here. You should be drawing much more confidently, and not going to any lengths to hide your lines. If you believe a mark will help you understand how something behaves in 3D space, or that generally helps you construct an overall form (like drawing a box and using it to draw a pyramid inside of it), you should draw those lines confidently. Yes, it'll be a little messy, but then using line weight to emphasize some of the particularly important marks will help organize them. Ultimately all of the lessons here first prioritize learning how to think in 3D space, and how to construct. The end result being a pretty, clean picture really isn't a big concern to us.

• Your organic intersections suffer a lot from the fact that you've decided to make each form quite.. weirdly wobbly and awkward. This complex form detail really undermines the overall solidity of the forms. Naturally simple forms are easier to give the impression of solidity - this is why in later lessons when we start talking about the constructional approach to drawing, we always simplify complex objects into a bunch of simpler forms and then build the more complex information on top in successive passes. When you start a form off as already having fairly complex detail, it's almost always going to feel very flat. Here I strongly recommend just drawing simple sausage forms. In general your interaction between your forms is decent, but the forms themselves need work.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do the following:

• One more page of organic forms with contour curves

• One more page of form intersections

• One more page of organic intersections

anchpop

2016-10-31 18:59

For the arrows you can generally shade either side. Your brain can interpret either side as being "on top"

Uncomfortable

2016-10-31 20:05

As /u/anchpop remarked, your shading on your arrows is technically correct. I totally see what you mean, and at first my eyes got a little confused, but there's actually nothing inconsistent about how you've done that. Of course, there's a difference between you doing something unintentionally but it still being correct. Either way, not that big of a deal. Additionally, your arrows are pretty well done in terms of how they flow through 3D space.

Your organic forms need some work. The biggest thing that jumps out at me is that you're pushing yourself to play with some extremely complex forms, though this actually doesn't offer any advantage to you. In most cases it's actually considerably more effective to get a solid grasp of simple organic forms - for example, focusing entirely on basic sausage forms. More complexity, more branching, and so on will result in forms that feel much less solid. It will also take your focus away from the core challenges of this exercise. This includes:

• Aligning your contour ellipses/curves to the minor axis line that passes through the centre of each form

• Keeping your contour ellipses smooth and even, drawing them confidently and from your shoulder

• Considering the degree of each ellipse/curve, and considering what you want to communicate about the form's path through 3D space. Think of the organic form as already following a particular path - you are merely marking out cross-sections of this form, each one being perpendicular to its flow through space. The degree of each ellipse/curve represents a certain orientation of that cross-section. I explain this both in this video and in these notes.

By easing up on the artificial complexity you're introducing through your initial shapes, you can really focus on what it means to reinforce the illusion of form and volume.

Your dissections are looking good - lots of interesting experimentation going on. The only thing I want to point out is that this exercise is meant to start off as just another organic form with contour curves. This means that when you begin, you should not be putting any thought into the textures you wish to use, or how you want to dissect the form.

As for your question, it's okay to look at how other people translate a texture, but it is best to do so with the original texture on hand as well, so you can try to apply their logic as a means to understand and translate the original on your own. One thing to keep in mind though is that there are two stages to learning how to draw texture (I explain this here) - the first one is where you're just doing what you can to observe, study, and translate all the detail as faithfully as you can. This means no simplification, no organization, and the result is going to be very noisy and distracting. Once you fully grasp that, then the second stage is to learn to organize it. There's nothing wrong with not reaching the second phase just yet, and often jumping into it too early can result in not having spent enough time in the first.

As for what you show me, all I'm interested in seeing is the best you are capable of right now. This means that if you feel you were sloppy in your attempt, and that you did not focus enough, you should probably do it again. Conversely, if you put forward your best effort, and the result was garbage, that's perfectly fine. Submit it anyway. The road you're walking is going to be filled with all kinds of failures - you'll only grow by falling and scraping your knees. When you do, you'll get back up and look at why exactly you fell down - or better yet, you'll ask someone else (me) why it happened. Then you'll apply what you learn, and keep moving forwards. If you're preoccupied with never falling, you won't move forward with any confidence, and ultimately won't get very far.

Your form intersections are fundamentally okay, just note that in the lesson I mentioned that you should stay away from forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension (like long boxes or long tubes). This makes the exercise more complex than it needs to be by adding too much perspective distortion into the mix, ultimately distracting you from focusing on drawing forms together in the same space in a way that feels cohesive and consistent.

The only thing I want to mention about the organic intersections is that, while you've done reasonably okay, you should give a little more thought to believable physics when doing this exercise. It's all very much about understanding where a form's weight is supported, and where it's not. When it's supported, one of these sausage-like forms will tend to wrap around the object supporting it. When it's not supported, it will sag under its own weight. As such, physics plays a big role, and so if you've got some serious instability in the way things are stacked, it's definitely going to influence your overall mindset as far as those physics are concerned. While your sagging/supporting aspects are okay, consider how unstable the overall system is, and how it should probably be tumbling apart.

Now, before I mark this lesson as complete, I want to see one more page of organic forms with contour ellipses, and one more page of organic forms with contour curves. Keep the points I raised above in mind, and make sure you stick to simple sausage forms.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-09 01:36

Looking great! I've had a pretty busy day, and I wasn't looking forward to doing critiques - I'm very pleased to see that this one should be pretty easy, since you've more or less nailed each exercise. Your arrows flow nicely through 3D space, your organic forms with contour lines push a strong illusion of volume and form, your dissections (despite your own apparent judgment) are coming along great, the forms in your form intersections all feel consistent and cohesive within the same space, and your organic intersections demonstrate a pretty good sense of how those forms would interact with one another, in terms of where their weight is supported, and when they would otherwise sag against their neighbours.

I'm honestly a little puzzled as to why you felt your dissections didn't turn out well. If you ask me, you've experimented with a wide variety of textures, and have applied a slew of different approaches towards capturing them. I don't see a single inappropriate use of hatching, any reliance on randomness, or anything particularly distracting or noisy.

There can be a lot of harm in setting the bar too high for yourself. Confidence is important, but if you never allow yourself to take pride in your results, you will encounter some serious negative effects. Also, if you'd like to try your hand at the 25 texture challenge that's great, but do it alongside other lessons. It's not the sort of challenge that should be completed all at once, but rather should be spread out over a long period of time. You'll find that I mention that in the challenge itself.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete so feel free to move onto the next one. Also, I wanted to mention that it seems that you've turned your flair off. I'd appreciate it if you turned it back on (by checking the "Show my flair on this subreddit" box on the sidebar). I use it to keep track of who is eligible for critiques, and what lessons they have completed thus far.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-08 15:25

Oh, I should remove that. There was a video, but it wasn't a good one so I got rid of it.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-11 22:38

Pretty nicely done! Your arrows are pretty good. Your organic forms with contour lines demonstrate a good sense of form and a solid grasp of how those surfaces warp through 3D space. Your dissections have got a lot of interesting and varying texture experimentation - I did notice here and there that you did rely a bit more on randomness than you probably should have. Remember that while it is always more time consuming, driving each mark with intent and consideration generally has a much stronger result than figuring out a pattern and then attempting to execute it on auto-pilot.

Your form intersections are looking pretty solid, and for the most part your organic intersections are fine - just keep in mind that if you make your organic forms wobble, that's going to undermine their solidity. You always want to aim for the simplest possible form, as that is always the easiest to make seem solid. After that, you can pile on more forms to add more complex details (like bumps or what have you).

Anyway, keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-14 01:07

That sounds about right, although it's understandably difficult to put to words. Ultimately the organic blob is just a silhouette - how that translates into three dimensions is the result of decisions made by the artist. Some decisions will mesh better with the resulting silhouette and will be easier to make believable, but ultimately there is a lot of freedom for the artist to explore how the form flows through space.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-16 00:51

The most important thing to keep in mind when struggling as you are with your confidence is this: of course you're doing things wrong. Why wouldn't you be? Hell, I've been drawing for years, and I still do things wrong all the time. You're supposed to be doing things wrong - it's important to make mistakes so you can learn from them. If you don't give yourself the chance to stumble, you're not going to be able to grow. You'll just stay exactly where you are, all safe and sound, with no scrapes on your knees.

As far as motivation goes, I actually wrote a little blurb about that. You should give it a read.

Now, onto your homework - you've generally done an okay job, but as you predicted, there were some mistakes. Your arrows are pretty decent, though one thing I want you to focus on when doing this exercise in the future is to consider the arrow as something travelling through space. Right now they feel like they are three dimensional, but their translation is still moving more across the flat page rather than through the depths of a 3D world. When drawing arrows, consider how they would flow from a point far away, to a point closer to the viewer - or vice versa.

For your organic forms with contour curves, you seem to have skipped over the whole "draw through your ellipses" bit. It's important that you do this for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons, without exception, in order to keep them smooth and evenly shaped.

Your contour curves are showing a pretty common issue, where the curves themselves don't wrap convincingly around the rounded, 3D form you're trying to build. Or rather, that you're trying to sell to the viewer. The rounded form is already there, but in order to make the viewer believe in it, you have to include some marks that run along its surface, wrapping all the way around a cross-section of it. Because the object is rounded, as the contour line reaches the edge, it needs to accelerate in its curvature and hook back around, so it can continue onto the other side. You can read more about this issue here. Be sure to watch the video as well, and try using the 'overshooting' method explained in that blurb to help you maintain that curvature.

Your dissections are pretty good. Lots of interesting exploration of different textures, and it's clear that you really put a lot of time and care into studying your references, and kept yourself from relying on too much randomness.

Your form intersections aren't bad, but one thing you should be applying here is the approach you learned when doing the 250 box challenge. That is, drawing through each box, so you can fully understand how it sits in 3D space. This will also help avoid the all-too-common far plane larger than near plane issue.

Your organic intersections are pretty well done. They do suffer from the same issue as your organic forms with contour curves, so getting that sorted will definitely strengthen this exercise as well - but despite that, you've done a decent job of selling the illusion of form, and the idea that these forms are all piled together.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do another page of organic forms with contour ellipses, then another page of organic forms with contour curves. Try to avoid any complex forms - stick to simple sausages, as they introduce the least amount of irrelevant complications. Focus on creating the illusion that the sausages are rounded and solid.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-16 01:05

So! Your work is generally pretty well done. There's a few recommendations I can make, and one common issue that I see, so we'll deal with that. In general though you're moving in the right direction.

Your dissections show a particularly great deal of care and patience. You explored quite a few different textures, and while the level of detail you'll be able to observe and carry over into your drawings will improve with time and practice, it's clear that you drew each one with your full focus, and intent driving every mark. That's definitely what I want to see.

The common issue that I noticed is with your organic forms with contour curves. The curves aren't wrapping convincingly around the forms. As the contour lines reach the edge of the organic form, they need to accelerate in their curvature and hook back around so they can continue along the other side. Think of it as though this sausage-like form already exists in space, and you're just reinforcing it by drawing lines along its rounded surface. Think of how your pen would flow along it, and how some of your current lines would actually start flying off the surface of the object, rather than clinging to it faithfully. I discuss this issue more over here. Be sure to give the video linked there a try, as well as the whole overshooting-your-curves method, as it may help you get used to the kind of curvature you need to be striving for.

For the organic forms with contour ellipses, I did notice that your ellipses didn't really line up to those central minor axis lines. Remember that the minor axis cuts an ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves through its narrower dimension. This applies to the contour curves as well, since the curves are really just the visible portion of the full ellipses. Making sure the alignment is more correct will help you achieve that wrap-around illusion more easily.

The whole issue of contour lines wrapping around also has had an impact on your organic intersections, so getting your head around this particular issue will definitely have some considerably positive results across the board.

The last thing I wanted to mention was that while your form intersections are alright, you really should be drawing through your boxes as you learned in the 250 box challenge. That is, drawing the lines on the far side of the box as well, so you get a better sense of how that box sits in 3D space.

Anyway, I'd like you to do another two pages of organic forms with contour curves, and one more page of organic intersections.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-16 23:03

Definitely some good stuff here, though there's a few things I want to draw your attention to. First off, your organic forms with contour lines are going in the right direction, but with the contour curves you're kind of riding the fence. In many areas, you're doing a good job of wrapping those curves around the rounded form, making sure they accelerate and hook back around as they reach the edge of the form. In other places, however, and not infrequently, you kinda let yourself get sloppy. It's clear to me that you understand the concepts wrapping curves around organic forms but you need to stay on top of it in order to really let it solidify. Letting the curves overshoot a bit as they hook back around (as though you're drawing just a little bit more of the full contour ellipse) can help keep you on track.

You're showing some good experimentation with your dissections, especially on the lower half of this page, so keep that up. The material over on the texture challenge may also be worth reading.

For your form intersections, I'm really glad to see that you're drawing through your forms - just make sure that when you do, don't go out of your way to make those lines especially faint, as this will compromise the integrity of those lines. Basically, if you try too hard to make them faint, you're less likely to keep them straight and solid. Draw your lines normally, then come back later to add more weight to emphasize the more important lines. Adding tight hatching to one of the front-facing faces can also help give the needed visual cue to show which side of the form is which.

Your organic intersections do a good job of demonstrating how those forms interact, and result in a fairly believable illusion of form. The same point I rasied about your organic forms with contour curves does stand for some of these however (like the top right sausage here), but again that's just a matter of not letting yourself get sloppy.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. Don't forget to keep up with these exercises as warmups though.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-19 23:36

They're certainly not the core of that exercise, but don't leave them out just because you're struggling with them. Do your best with the explanations that are available to you right now, and I'll point out any issues or misunderstandings I see when doing my critique. Never neglect to do something just because it's difficult.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-21 23:30

Really lovely work! I have absolutely no complaints. Your organic forms with contour lines show a solid understanding of how those forms exist in 3D space, and how their surfaces curve around. Your dissections show some great experimentation with a variety of ways to approach texture and do so understanding both the advantages and limitations of the pen you're using (rather than trying to treat it like a pencil). Your form intersections are solid and cohesive, and your organic intersections really show an understanding of how those forms support each others' weight, and how they sag when there's nothing there to hold them up.

Keep up the fantastic work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-22 00:06

There are definitely a few things we need to work on together.

Your arrows are looking okay.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are decent, though the ellipses are a little bit stiff. Try loosening up on these, and drawing a little more confidently so your brain doesn't have the chance to course-correct as you draw.

Organic forms with contour curves - here you're missing some of my instructions.

• Firstly, you've jumped right into drawing them without the minor axis line down the center. This is an important cue you're going to be relying on for some time, as it tells you how to align your curve. The curves themselves are just the visible portion of larger ellipses, and those ellipses must be aligned such that the minor axis line cuts them into two equal, symmetrical halves through their narrower dimension.

• Secondly, you're not quite hooking your curves around properly as they reach the edge. As a result, they don't feel as though they wrap around the rounded form, but instead continue on off its surface. You do this to varying degrees - there are many places where you're closer to being correct, but you need to push it a little bit further. The last point about the alignment also factors in here. A curve that is not aligned properly will have an easier time of hooking around on one side, but a much more difficult time on the other. You should try overshooting your curves as described here to get a better sense of how the curve should accelerate as it reaches the edge and hooks around. Also be sure to read the video linked from there.

Your dissections aren't great. Most people struggle with this exercise, and you're not by any means expected to do anything remotely masterful at this point. That said, you're going off in the wrong direction in a few ways.

• What you're choosing for your textures aren't always actually textures. If you take an object - for instance, a rhino horn - you can split it up into two separate components. There's the major forms, which are more in the macroscopic range (so the large elements), then there's the little bumps, scratches, divets, and so on that exist along its surface. These too have form to them, but they exist at such a small scale that they are subordinate to the major forms. These constitute the texture which wraps around those major forms. When thinking of what is the texture of a thing, imagine what you would get if you skinned it and unwrapped its surface. In the case of the rhino texture, you'd get a layer if keratin that would be scratched and dented in small ways from years of wear and tear. This is what you then wrap around your organic form. In this way, eyes are not textures either - they're just objects that you decided to paste onto your forms.

• You need to always think about how this layer of texture you've skinned off will wrap around its new major form. In the wood example, you've drawn those rings as though they were applied on a more or less flat surface. That pattern in particular would be quite difficult to apply to a rounded form, admittedly, but it is something to always take into consideration.

• Your drawings tend to be very scratchy and sketchy, relying very heavily on randomness rather than making specific, planned marks. Don't ever rely on randomness - never scribble, never draw without thought. The right side of your first page of dissections shows more purposeful drawing, with specific little bits drawn, so that's moving in the right direction. Many of the others are drawn as though you're trying to use your pen as a pencil. You must accept that the tool that you're drawing has certain strengths and certain weaknesses, and you need to work within them. A good felt tip pen will create either a fully dark mark on the page, or nothing at all. There are no halftones. This is often quite tricky to work with, but you've got to face it head on. Furthermore, if you've got areas that need to be filled in - fill them in completely. If you leave little slivers of white, they're going to stand out like a sore thumb and become very distracting.

• This exercise needs to be started as an organic form with contour lines exercise. That means that each form should be drawn as though it's being done for the previous exercise, not as a dissection. The dissection phase is just something you add afterwards. This means that the form you're working on should already be fully solid and reinforced, like you're drawing on proper 3D form rather than within a relatively flimsy 2D silhouette.

• For more help with matters of drawing texture, give these notes a read.

Your form intersections are okay. The intersections themselves a little hit-and-miss, but it's not a huge issue right now. Though you complained earlier about box intersections, they're not all that bad. One thing to keep in mind about cylinders and spheres is that if a cylinder sticks right into a sphere, the intersection is usually a simple circle in 3D space, which would be drawn as a simple ellipse in 2D. You sometimes complicate it further than that. Also, I am seeing some of those contour curve issues that I mentioned earlier in how you wrap these intersections around the rounded forms, so fixing those will definitely help here as well.

Your organic intersections, as one might expect, suffer from a lot of the same issues as the organic forms with contour lines. An additional point I'd like to mention is that you should try and keep these forms as simple as possible. Simple forms are much easier to give the illusion of solidity, so whenever we add more complexity to them, we have to work that much harder to make them appear solid. Usually - and I get into this later on so it's not something to worry about just yet - we instead break complex forms into simpler ones, draw those, then refine them and combine them in later passes.

So, when drawing your organic forms - for this exercise as well as for the organic forms with contour lines exercises, maintain simple sausages. Don't let them pinch or taper in their midsections, don't branch them, no waviness or anything like that. It'll make things much simpler, and will help you focus on the main challenges of these exercises.

I'd like you to do two pages of organic forms with contour curves, then take the second page and use those for your dissections. Then I want you to do one more page of organic intersections.

Uncomfortable

2016-11-27 00:22

So the first thing that jumps out at me is the timeline - you completed lesson 1 ten months ago, the 250 box challenge 3 months ago, and your last attempt at lesson 2 a couple months ago. While it's absolutely fine to go through the lessons at your own pace, it is important that you practice these exercises regularly - both so you can implement the critiques I give you at these various milestones, and so you don't forget the approaches each lesson teaches. My usual recommendation is that you pick two or three exercises from lesson 1 and 2 to do as a warmup each day. Now, "each day" is just a suggestion. Every other day, every few days, it doesn't matter, but it should be regular and not once in a blue moon.

I don't think you've really been keeping up with that sort of regimen, and your work certainly reflects that. What stands out most to me is that your linework is very stiff, rather than confident and smooth. This is especially prevalent with your ellipses. You tend to jump between drawing through them stiffly, and not drawing through them at all. Either way, you need to keep in mind that you should be drawing them with a confident enough of a pace such that your brain does not course-correct as you draw, leading to wobbly and stiff linework. Drawing through your ellipses only really helps when you're drawing with a confident pace, as it allows you to deal with the inevitable inaccuracies that come from drawing in this manner. Beginners obviously won't nail the ellipse perfectly, so drawing through them once more helps compensate for little mistakes here and there and generally even things out. Practicing the ellipse exercises from lesson 1 definitely help with this.

Page 4 of this submission - the first set of organic intersections isn't great. Your contour curves are generally not wrapping around the forms that well. Page 7 however is considerably better. The linework is still stiff and wobbly at times, but the overall sense of volume and form, and the use of contour lines is fairly well executed.

The box-only intersections on page 5 are pretty decent. I see some near-plane/far-plane size relationship issues here and there, but for the most part your boxes feel like they exist consistently within the same space, and your intersections are plotted out pretty well.

I am going to mark this lesson as complete, but I'm not terribly confident in doing so. It's more a matter of, you've covered the material, and seem to understand it, but your execution is poor. This is completely understandable considering that you last did lesson 1 ten months ago, so you've probably forgotten a great deal of it by now. Were I you, I'd consider redoing it to refresh my memory.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-04 20:39

You're making good headway, but I see that you got a little confused with your organic forms exercises. For the organic forms with contour ellipses, here's a few ways you should adjust how you approach them:

• Keep your shapes relatively simple. Adding complexity doesn't make the exercises more effective, it's more likely to undermine the core elements of it. Focus on constructing simple sausage forms without much branching. Avoid having your forms pinch through their midsections or any sort of awkward waviness through their length, as these kinds of forms are considerably more difficult to reinforce and imbue with an illusion of solidity and volume. Right now we don't want to impose unnecessary difficulties.

• The central minor axis line that passes through the middle of each form (it's difficult to nail things in the dead-center, but do your best) should be drawn for all of your organic forms. Each contour ellipse must be aligned to this line such that the line cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down their narrower dimension. I noticed that you left these lines out entirely in many cases, and that the complexity of your forms made it fairly difficult to keep them centered, ultimately making the whole alignment thing moot.

For your organic forms with contour curves:

• Same deal with those central minor axis lines, draw them all the way through. The curves themselves are just the visible portion of a larger ellipse, so the rules of alignment apply here as well.

• Your curves aren't quite wrapping around the organic forms convincingly - they should be accelerating and hooking around as they reach the edge, so as to create the illusion that they continue on along the other side. I expand on this concept here. Apply the 'overshooting' approach I describe there, and be sure to watch the video linked there as well.

• Try and think about all of these things you draw as being solid, 3 dimensional forms - like sausages, with smooth rounded surfaces. Try to buy into that illusion, and fool yourself. It's not an easy thing to do, and it takes a fair bit of practice, but as you buy into the illusion more and more, you'll find that your brain will fight against you whenever you try to draw a line that doesn't conform to this mental model of space.

Your dissections are coming along fine, especially into the second page. Your form intersections are decent, though your boxes tend to be a little dramatic in their foreshortening which tends to make things feel a little bit inconsistent. Keeping your perspective relatively shallow tends to help when dealing with large collections of smaller forms.

Your organic intersections are okay, but they do suffer from some of the issues I outlined with the other organic form exercises. Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do one more page of organic forms with contour ellipses, one more page of organic forms with contour curves, and one more page of organic intersections.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-05 21:24

Pretty nice work. Your organic forms are conveying a decent sense of volume and solidity, your dissections are really quite well done, and your organic intersections show an understanding of how each of the forms is supported by those beneath it.

Your form intersections are okay, but you definitely missed the instruction about avoiding overly stretched forms. It's a matter of reducing the complexity introduced by perspective - keeping things relatively equilateral (the same size in all dimensions) makes it all much more manageable. Additionally, you should probably take a look at the 250 cylinder challenge so you can get a better sense of how to construct those kinds of forms. Cones and pyramids follow a similar process to cylinders.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-05 22:17

Looking good! I have only one recommendation - you're not drawing through your ellipses in your form intersections. In general, you seem to be trying to be especially clean with your linework, which is resulting in some of your strokes (mostly ellipses/circles) coming out rather stiff and awkward. Keep in mind that what is most important is that your linework flows smoothly - precision is second to that.

Aside from that, great work. Keep it up, and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-08 23:27

Due to the massive volume of work being thrown my way, free critiques closed indefinitely back in early October. If you happen to be a patreon supporter of drawabox, send me a line through patreon's messaging system so I can note down that this reddit account is eligible for critiques. Otherwise you're welcome to submit your homework to the main subreddit to receive a critique from the community.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-12 23:06

Pretty nice work. There's definitely room for improvement across the board, but you're doing a good job of demonstrating a solid grasp of each section. For the most part, it's a matter of practice.

Your arrows are solid, flowing convincingly through 3D space. One thing I noticed here though was that your arrows tend to always flow across the page - try playing with having them go from a point far away to a point closer to the viewer, moving through the dimension of depth.

Your organic forms with contour lines are decently done. The contour lines themselves are a bit on the stiff side, so you'll have to work towards loosening up and drawing with a more confident pace, but they're wrapping well around the forms to convey a strong illusion of volume, while also reinforcing the roundedness of the form.

Your dissections are better than I expected after having read your concerns. You're demonstrating the appropriate patience and care with tackling each individual texture. Your observational skills will improve with practice, but there is some more material on the topic of handling textures in the 25 texture challenge. Keep in mind that this is the sort of thing that develops over time, rather than something that you'll just grind away at in a day. You're doing fine as is, so don't stress over it.

Your form intersections are solid, though I did notice a lot of empty space - you have a tendency to move onto the next page too early, likely because you're losing confidence in your ability to maintain the quality you've achieved in a drawing. It's this kind of fear that we need to squash out - making mistakes is not a big deal, and when doing these exercises, you should not be concerned at all with the idea of creating a beautiful drawing. They're just drills, so if they come out nicely or if they look like a pile of crap, it's irrelevant. What's important is the doing of them.

Lastly, your organic intersections are okay. I'd probably recommend sticking to basic sausage forms here (no branching of any sort), just a bunch of simple tubes laying on top of each other. Also, try not to swell them out near the ends, or taper them at all through their length.

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

Uncomfortable

2016-12-14 01:07

Eaaase up on your neuroses there - you did some excellent work here. Mistakes are inevitable, there's absolutely no reason to scrap a page just because you messed something up, thinking that way will drive you crazy. What you've got to always remember is that the point here is not to present your overlord with a pristine stack of homework. I fully expect to see mistakes all over, because mistakes are what cause us to grow. Instead of seeing the blunders as things to hide or replace, consider them to be another mark of the progress you're making - they're badges of honour.

Anyway, like I said - you did great. Your arrows flow nicely through 3D space. Your organic forms with contour curves show me that you understand how these forms exist in 3D space not just on a conscious level, but that you're buying into this illusion of form on a more subconscious, instinctual level - that you're fooling yourself. That's what we're after here.

Your dissections are solid - some of the early ones are a bit simplistic and cartoony, while others show a nice grasp of balancing detail with keeping the amount of visual noise down. I especially like the ones with the little fleshy masses bunched up on the surface (bottom left of the first page of dissections), you've shown how you understand the forms of even those little bits.

Your form intersections are very well executed - the network of forms are cohesive and feel tangible, and your use of line weight is very confident. Same goes for your organic intersections, I can tell you understand not only how the sausage forms exist in 3D space, but also how they interact with one another, relying on each other for support, and sagging where there's nothing to hold them up.

You've done a great job. Consider this lesson complete, and feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-15 20:10

To be entirely clear, it wasn't a recommendation - it was an instruction, and my wording was explicit to that end.

Anyway, your arrows are well done. Your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are also done well - there's room for improvement, but generally you're doing a good job of wrapping your ellipses around the rounded forms and conveying a sense of volume.

Your dissections were really well executed. You demonstrated a lot of patience and care, and I'm glad to see the wide variety of textures you experimented with.

Your form intersections aren't terrible, but they're a bit sparse (you should be filling your pages) and the line quality's really scratchy. It seems you used some chicken scratching to add extra line weight. NEEEEVER use chicken scratching, ever. Always ghost your lines and apply them in a single stroke.

Additionally, you could definitely use more practice.. you know, drawing boxes. As one would imagine. 'Cause that's what I said before. |:

Seriously though, going through the 250 box challenge in its entirety will help you:

• Get a better handle on near/far plane size relationships (which isn't terrible right now, but that big box on the middle of the second page of form intersections isn't great

• Will give you the opportunity to practice ghosting your lines a lot more, hopefully putting that chicken scratching thing to bed once and for all.

Your organic intersections are alright. Nothing remarkable there, but you are demonstrating an understanding of the concepts, so all there is left on that front is more practice playing with form and volume.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, but keep in mind that if you do things out of the order that I instruct in the future, I will just ask you to redo the lesson. Tough love and all that.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-18 20:05

Pretty nice work. There are some issues that I'll mention, but you're moving in the right direction. Your form intersections look particularly nice - the forms have a sense of solidity to them.

Here's a few areas that can be improved upon:

• For your organic forms with contour ellipses, I noticed that many of them focused more on drawing the ellipses quite faintly (somehow, I'm not really sure how you managed to draw them so faintly with pen) - avoid this in the future. Drawing faintly tends to distract one from the mark they're actually putting down, as they tend to be more focused on making as little of a footprint as possible. We're not here to draw pretty things, we're here to practice specific exercises that develop certain skills.

• For your organic forms with contour curves, most of the time your curves aren't quite wrapping properly around the rounded form. They need to accelerate in their curvature and hook back around as they reach the edge to give the sense that they continue on along the other side. I talk about this more in these notes. Try to incorporate the "overshooting" approach I mention there, and give the video linked there a watch as well. You actually do a somewhat better job with these, though that's mostly because the contour ellipses give you that wrapping curvature as a part of their basic shape. That's why I stress focusing heavily on the contour ellipses during that first section, so you get a sense for how they turn in space.

• Your dissections have got a lot of good starting points, as far as experimenting with different kinds of textures goes. Keep up the good work there. Just one thing I want to point out - this exercise is meant to start off as regular organic forms with contour curves, meaning that you don't want to be thinking about the fact that you'll be covering them with texture afterwards. The first step should be entirely about constructing a form that feels solid and three dimensional, with rounded surfaces. Then you make your dissection cuts and start adding the texture. In yours, it's very clear that you went in thinking about the dissection part of it right from the beginning, which resulted in forms that didn't always feel terribly complete and solid.

• Just a couple things about the form intersections. Firstly, I noticed that you didn't use the minor axes stuff that you learned from the cylinder challenge. This helps a lot with alignment, so you should continue to apply it in the future. The other thing is that in the instructions, I said that you should avoid overly stretched/long forms (long boxes, long tubes, etc.) to keep the exercise within simpler bounds and avoid perspective distortion becoming another challenge that you need to worry about. You seem to have missed this, so please read the instructions a couple times before starting a given exercise - they're very dense, so it's not uncommon for someone to only digest part of them during their first readthrough.

• Decent work with the organic intersections - just one little thing. Try to stick with simpler sausage forms in the future, avoiding any sort of strange swelling near the ends, or tapering through the midsection. You'll notice this as a theme - if you keep the components of an exercise fairly simple, it becomes much easier to focus on the meat of the exercise and benefit more from it.

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

Uncomfortable

2016-12-22 01:17

The thing is... that's not at all what you're meant to be focusing on. Your coworkers can't explain it to you because it's very complicated - and things this complex cannot merely be explained, they need to be discovered on your own terms. That's why the very beginning of the exercise description says this:

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.

The main point of this exercise is to get you to start thinking in terms of 3D space - to consider how these objects can exist together, and feel cohesive and consistent (rather than having each one follow completely different rates of foreshortening, throwing the sense of scale way off). This is the starting point for understanding how to think in three dimensions.

An understanding of how forms intersect will develop under the surface as you continue along. It's mainly nurtured by use of the constructional method which is espoused in all of the lessons, and it's generally the result of understanding how 3D space works.

So relax - put the potatoes down, and focus on what the exercise is really about.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-27 00:40

Very nice work! For the most part, everything's looking lovely. Your organic forms convey a strong sense of volume and push the roundedness of the surfaces quite well. Your dissections have a lot of great variety of texture, and you've tackled each one with deliberate, clearly planned and well executed marks. Your form intersections are looking solid and consistent, and the intersections themselves (which certainly aren't the focus of this exercise) seem to be correct for the most part.

Your form intersections are a little bit weaker, but that's more because the other sections are so well done. I'm still getting a general sense that you understand how each of these forms interact with one another, so I believe it's just a matter of additional practice. The only other thing I noticed was that your contour ellipses for the organic forms exercises seemed a little bit stiff, so try to loosen up and draw them a little more confidently. Remember that the evenness of the shape is the top priority, with accuracy coming in a close second.

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

Uncomfortable

2016-12-27 19:12

Nice work on the arrows, they flow nicely through space. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking nice as well, though I'm noticing that you tend to have your ellipses not quite correctly aligned with the central minor axis line, so watch out for that. The minor axis should cut each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves through its narrower dimension.

For the most part your organic forms with contour curves are alright - there's a few that don't quite wrap around the forms properly, but most do and I noticed that you're using the overshooting method to correct this. Keep it up.

As far as your dissections go, they're not great, but this isn't unexpected. I recommend that you give the notes on the 25 texture challenge page a read. From the looks of it, you're jumping into implying and simplifying detail far too early, before properly having the opportunity to develop your observational skills. Furthermore, you have a tendency to use randomness/scribbling to create texture - this is not a good habit to get into. Instead, try to spend significantly more time observing and studying your reference image, and make sure that every mark you put down is carefully planned. This may take a lot more time, but that is simply the way it goes. A drawing will look sloppy if it is the result of scribbling and randomness.

Lastly, when you want to make something solid and black - actually fill it in completely, don't leave little slivers of white. This is where felt tip pens and even a brush pen will come in quite handy. Lessons 3-7 no longer allow you to use a ballpoint pen, so you should make sure you pick up some 0.5mm fineliners/felt tip pens.

Your form intersections are fairly decent. The focus of this exercise, as mentioned in the lesson, is more on having the forms exist within the same space while feeling consistent and cohesive. It's not actually about the intersections themselves. Your intersections were definitely a lot flatter than what I would consider to be correct (think of how those intersection shapes would wrap around the rounded surface of a sphere or cone or cylinder - yours tended to straighten out too much which flattens things out. That said, these are things that will improve as your sense of 3D space develops.

Your organic intersections did leave a little to be desired. When doing this exercise, it's important that you start off by focusing on creating a single solid sausage form. Once you are convinced of its solidity and three-dimensionality, you can then drop another form on top of it. At this point, you have to focus both on making this second form solid, and also considering how it's going to interact with the previous form. Where its weight is supported, it will cling to the form supporting it, where it is not supported, it will sag.

In your work, it feels fairly flat to me, and I don't get the impression that they exist together within the same space. There's a few signs of interaction between the forms, but you need to push them farther.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to try one more page of organic intersections. Try not to use overly long forms, just focus on fat sausages, constructing one at a time, being sure to make each one solid before moving onto the next.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-29 19:02

Very solid work, across the board. I don't have much to say, but I scraped up a couple minor things to mention. Before I get to that, your organic forms have a great sense of solidity and volume. Your textures are extremely impressive in how you've organized your detail to create clear rest areas and focal areas. Your form intersections are cohesive and demonstrate a solid grasp of 3D space. Your organic intersections show a clear consideration for how those forms interact with one another.

The two recommendations I have are as follows:

• I noticed that you used a lot of very tight hatching in your textures where you get into your deepest shadows. For areas like this, fill them in with solid black to avoid the little bits of white. These tend to become quite distracting due to the high contrast. Just as we have rest areas with the large blank portions, we want to balance them out with rest areas of solid black as well. Sometimes a fineliner isn't quite enough to achieve this - in those cases a brush pen can be quite handy.

• For your organic intersections, the first page was excellent. The use of line weight on the second went a bit overboard I'd say, and actually caused things to flatten out a little. Subtlety goes a long way, and you generally want to avoid that kind of uniformity. The added dynamism coming from the little cast shadows helps, but for the most you'd benefit from having more variation in weight (on one side, the line getting particularly fine, and on the other side it getting a little thicker - though try to avoid making things too thick to the point of a sort of graphic look).

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete so feel free to move onto the next one. Also from what I can see, you seem to be dumping work you'd done previously - three submissions over three days is a lot, so keep that in mind as you space out your future submissions.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-31 22:18

You've done a good job with your arrows. Your organic forms are also coming along fairly well, though a few points here. Try to loosen up with your ellipses a little bit - they're a little stiff, so you want to try and draw them with a more confident pace, relying less on your brain to drive the motion of your hand and trusting more in your muscle memory. Drawing through your ellipses (which you do in many of them, but don't for others) is actually only really effective if you're drawing more confidently, as it helps to counteract the temporary decrease in accuracy that comes of it.

Your dissections are looking good, though remember that you want to start this exercise off as just a bunch of organic forms from the previous exercise. Don't start thinking about texture until you've established a solid organic form with surfaces that feel as though they're rounded. Keep in mind that all we're doing in this exercise is transferring textures to existing forms - so the bell pepper strayed a bit from this principle, where you started carrying over the pepper's form as well.

As far as the texturing itself goes, you're doing well - you're being very deliberate and avoiding any sort of randomness. The very heavy application of texture all over is pretty normal at this point. As I discuss in the 25 texture challenge, we learn to texture in two separate stages. First we get comfortable with carefully observing and transferring all of the detail we see (which is what you're doing right now), then we move onto figuring out different ways to organize that information to create those rest areas/focal areas.

Your form intersections are alright, but along with the point about being a bit stiff with your ellipses, your foreshortening is a little inconsistent. This relates directly to what I mentioned here in lesson 1. Also, as far as the longer tubes/cones/etc that you used in some places, I did mention in the lesson that you should avoid these because they tend to complicate things by making foreshortening more of a factor.

As for the intersections themselves, they seem reasonably correct to me - though of course this is not really the focus of the exercise. It's more about keeping all of the forms consistent and cohesive, maintaining the illusion that they all exist in the same space.

Lastly, your organic intersections are looking pretty good. I definitely get the sense that you understand how each of these sit in 3D space, and how they interact with one another.

While there are a few points to improve upon here, I feel that you understand more than enough for me to confidently pass you onto the next lesson, so I'll go ahead and mark this one as complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-31 23:25

Fairly well done. Your arrows are decent, your organic forms convey a sense of solidity and roundedness that maintains the illusion of volume, your dissections' textures really take off by the second page, and your intersections are well done. As far as the form intersections go, I mention this in the exercise but no one seems to acknowledge it - the exercise is actually not really about the intersections themselves, but about drawing forms that feel cohesive and consistent within the same space. The intersections themselves are challenging, and it will take a great deal of time wrapping your head around 3D space to start nailing them. It's not even close to a priority right now, you're just at the beginning of that.

I do want to mention though that another instruction in that exercise was not to draw overly long forms in any one given dimension - basically to avoid long boxes, tubes, etc. so that overly dramatic perspective is not added to the list of challenges of this exercise.

Aside from that, you're doing well, so keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2016-12-31 23:39

One of the things that really jumps out at me when looking at your organic forms with contour curves specifically is that while you've done a huge amount of work on that exercise, you're pretty loose and a bit sloppy when it comes to actually putting the lines down. Be more patient - plan your strokes out more carefully before executing them (with a confident pace, of course). Don't neglect to add the minor axis line, as you did for some of them.

Overall you are demonstrating a grasp of how your contour curves should wrap around the rounded form, and the last two pages of look quite good, but in general you need to actively think through the marks you want to make before executing them.

Your dissection textures are coming along well - with the fur, just keep in mind that you never want to rely on randomness or thoughtless mark-making to create texture. Every mark should be deliberate (pretty much the same idea as what I mentioned before). In later lessons, we'll explore how to tackle fur in ways that creates less contrast and relies less upon this kind of mindless repetition. Additionally, on the note of contrast, as you more forwards, try to consider areas where you can merge large swathes of very dense linework into solid black masses. The little slivers of white caught amongst the black lines creates a lot of distracting contrast that draws the viewer's eye to where it should not be focusing. The next step about developing your approach to texture (as described in the 25 texture challenge) focuses quite a bit on this idea of controlling the viewer's eye and implying detail without drawing it all out explicitly and creating unwanted focal areas.

Your form intersections are coming along well, though I did catch a few boxes that have some particularly dramatic foreshortening applied to them (relative to their neighbours). Keeping your foreshortening more shallow helps keep the overall assortment of forms more consistent and cohesive, which is more or less the focus of this exercise. For more information, refer to these notes.

Your organic intersections need a bit of work, though the second page marks some considerable improvement over the first. You're moving in the right direction, in terms of understanding how those forms interact with one another, but it just needs a little bit more practice.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. Don't forget to keep up with these exercises as warmups though, picking two or three from lessons 1 and 2 to do for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each sitting.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-05 02:02

Very nice work! Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along great especially, you're really demonstrating a growing grasp of how to convey the illusion of rounded, voluminous forms. Your form intersections are well done too, though I do want to recommend that you avoid that sort of faint under drawing there. Don't try to hide your lines - draw everything with confidence to maintain smooth linework, then go back over it to reinforce line weight where you want to clarify overlaps and such. Purposely drawing faint lines right now isn't a good idea as far as your development goes.

Your organic form intersections are looking good too - or at least, that first page. The second one's weaker largely because your forms are very wobbly, so that illusion of form and solidity definitely doesn't come through that well. For things like this, you really need to push your contour lines, though in that case you also drew them quite faintly, and not with a lot of purpose or clear intent.

Lastly, your dissections are looking solid. Lots of careful observation and transference of detail, along with time clearly spent considering how to organize that information in order to avoid overly distracting, high-contrast areas.

Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-06 01:03

Very nice work! Just a couple things to remark upon:

• I noticed in your organic forms with contour ellipses that you're struggling with keeping the ellipses snug within the form, touching the edges. Spending more time ghosting through the drawing motion will help in this regard. I am glad to see though that your ellipses are smooth and confident - though you may want to limit yourself to draw through an ellipse just two times before lifting your pen to keep them from getting too hairy.

• The organic forms with contour curves demonstrate a decent understanding of the concept. Stick more to strictly rounded forms though - I noticed a few geometric cuts in there. Even just sticking to basic sausage forms can really help you focus on the idea of wrapping those curves convincingly around the rounded form.

• Your dissections are well done. I'm seeing a wide variety of textures and a lot of experimentation, which is good. Just one recommendation - avoid crosshatching or hatching altogether. People tend to use it as a bit of a fallback, and as a habit it tends to keep a person from really looking close to see what textures actually exist on a surface.

• Great work with your form intersections

• Aaaand fantastic work with those organic intersections, you can really clearly see how the forms interact with one another, sagging where they're not supported by other forms, and clinging where they are.

Keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-10 23:35

Generally your work is quite well done. Your arrows flow smoothly through space, your organic forms are demonstrating an improving understanding of how to wrap lines around these rounded surfaces, your texture are patiently and deliberately executed (and show some great experimentation with different kinds of approaches), and your form and organic intersections suggest a properly developing sense of 3D space.

The thing about the form intersections is - as mentioned in the instructions (though most people seem to ignore this) - is that the exercuse is not actually about the intersections themselves. Actually understanding how all the forms fit together, how they cut into one another and so on is extremely challenging, and is by no means a beginner's endeavour. The exercise is more about being able to draw forms within the same space in a manner that makes them all seem cohesive, rather than feeling like completely independent forms cut-and-paste onto the same page. For the most part you're utilizing fairly shallow perspective as instructed, so your forms seem to match reasonably well.

Having students start to think about the intersections merely helps get the ball rolling - while most struggle immensely with it, it gets them to start wrapping their heads around 3D space, which gives them a nice shove in the right direction. You'll find that as you continue to move through your lessons, where you're faced with considerably more straightforward problems involving 3D space, your understanding of how such things interact will improve.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. Don't forget to continue practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 - I generally recommend that students do a 10-15 minute warmup at the beginning of each sitting, consisting of a random selection of 2-3 exercises from those in the first two lessons.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-11 01:29

Your arrows are looking very nice. You're doing a good job of demonstrating how they flow through space organically. Your organic forms with contour curves are okay, but I think what jumps out at me most is the particular degree you use for your ellipses at different points through the forms. It appears to be more like guesswork than actually being driven by intent. Take a look at these notes and this video. Both discuss what the particular degree of an ellipse means in regards to the orientation of the circle it represents in 3D space.

Also, I am seeing that your contour curves are riding the fence in terms of properly wrapping around the forms. They are just barely doing so, but to the point that I feel like if you were to lose focus, you might slip. You actually do end up slipping for many of your organic intersections, so I think we should probably spend a little more time there.

Your dissections are moving in the right direction. There's a couple things that jump out at me here though:

• This exercise is supposed to start off the same way as the organic forms with contour curves - that is, establish a solid, tangible form, THEN start cutting it up and adding texture. You do this in some cases, but in others you skip through.

• You tend to be drawing quite a bit from memory - that is, looking at your reference image for a bit, then spending a lot of time drawing from what you remember seeing. Our memory is not reliable at all - you need to make sure that you keep looking back at your reference image every few seconds, observing and studying the little particulars about that texture and what gives it a particular look. Try to get into the habit of drawing a little, observing a lot.

Your form intersections are actually quite solid to me. Reason being, what you're fretting about is not the focus of the exercise. This is actually mentioned in the instructions - the exercise is about drawing forms that feel cohesive and consistent within the same space, NOT about the intersections themselves. Understanding how these forms, rotated arbitrarily, intersect with one another in 3D space is actually very challenging and I do not expect you to grasp it at all at this point. Attempting them is merely starting you off in that direction, and as you work through the lessons, your understanding of it will improve.

Lastly your organic intersections are a bit borderline. The first one's decent - you demonstrate a solid grasp of how those forms interact with one another, how they sag under their own weight. Your second one is somewhat weaker, giving little impression that the forms are actually interacting in the same space.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do one more page of organic forms with contour curves, after looking through the resources I linked above. Stick to basic sausage forms with no branching or complexity and work on getting your contour curves to align to the central minor axis line that passes through the middle of the form.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-13 00:45

Excellent work. You hit all the nails on the head. Your linework is looking really confident and smooth, you've captured the organic sausages in a manner that conveys their volume and solidity quite effectively, you've done great work exploring different textures, and your form intersections demonstrate a well developing sense of 3D space and how these forms relate to one another as a cohesive group. If I had to offer any critique, it'd be a stretch but in your organic intersections, it looks like some of the forms towards the right respect a particular ground plane (which is great), but the one drooping over to the left seems to ignore it which throws off the illusion a bit. Aside from that, the exercise shows a good understanding of how these forms rest upon one another, and how they sag under their own weight.

Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-13 22:04

Overall very nice work! I especially liked your form intersections - your grasp of 3D space is coming along nicely. Your textures also came out quite well, demonstrating a lot of careful observation and interesting experimentation. The only point that I wanted to mention is one that you actually improved upon considerably later on in the lesson. The particular forms you chose for that first page of organic forms with contour lines were a little bit ill-advised, largely since the particular turns of form along the sides are quite quick (the forms are flatter). That said, you still handled them pretty well.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-01-18 21:09

Really nice work. You're demonstrating a strong grasp of space and how surfaces turn/twist/warp within it. You're able to convey the roundedness of your organic forms with your contour lines, your form intersections feel consistent and solid, and your organic intersections show an understanding of how the different forms sag against one another, and how they react to whether or not their weight is supported.

Your textures are also really well done - the detail and amount of visual information is well balanced and you've done well to leave certain areas blank. The only recommendation I have there is not to rely quite so much on hatching/crosshatching, and to embrace solid black areas more, as you have done in your cucumber. Additionally, graffiti really isn't a texture - think of it in terms of texture being the actual small forms that exist on a surface, and colour/pattern being something that merely runs directly on the surface. Since we're drawing in black and white and are not really concerned with form shading (only shadow as far as it allows us to convey texture), pattern/colour becomes rather irrelevant.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-01-19 21:43

So yes, stiffness is still there (like pointy ended ellipses and so on) but I think it may be improving. You do continuously need to push yourself to draw with more confidence though, like you're purposely overshooting your goal and then reeling yourself back, rather than gradually building up to that goal and hitting it right on. Think of it like you're firing a catapult - wind it all the way back and let her fly, then work on improving your accuracy.

In terms of your linework, there's another thing I'm noticing - it's very uniform. Basically, if you draw a stroke, it tends to be the same weight all the way through. When drawing lines myself, I tend to start and end my lines with a bit of tapering - I don't press down, then draw - I press down as I start to draw so that there's just a touch of more dynamism to it all. This could very well be another effect of your general stiffness, but it is something else to be aware of.

In general, I think your best bet right now when tackling organic forms is to draw really simple ones - basic sausage forms with no branching whatsoever. This will help you focus on conveying the flow of that initial sausage shape (before your contour lines), and then giving it a greater sense of dimension and volume by adding those contour curves.

As far as the curves wrapping around, they're okay (again aside from the stiffness). You're overshooting slightly along the sides, which is helping you get them to convey the rounded form.

Now your dissections suggest a more concrete issue that you need to work on - your observational skills need a lot of work. Or rather, your observational habits do. As it stands, the work that I'm seeing on your textures suggests that you spend a lot of time drawing, and comparatively little time actually looking at your image. You work very heavily from memory, which means you're relying on your brain's ability to store all of the minutia of what you've seen. Our brains don't do this - they very quickly throw out anything and everything that does not pertain to the very essence of the thing, resulting in our memories containing little more than highly cartoony iconography.

Instead, force yourself to draw for no more than a second or two before looking back at your reference. Consider the shapes you're seeing, the behaviour of the lines, the way things are grouped and arranged. Are there bumps? Okay, are those bumps clustered into groups or are they covering the surface uniformly? Ask yourself questions as you go along, and then only draw for a moment before looking again to double check your findings.

The ice cream's an interesting choice of texture. It does pose some challenges in how its value range is quite limited - at its darkest points, it's still quite bright, though our pens allow us only white and black. But setting that aside, each fissure in the ice cream's surface has a very specific and unique shape. You don't need to capture each one exactly, but you cannot simply say "okay I understand that this thing has fissures, so I'm going to draw a bunch of fissures." Instead you need to take the time to study them, identify how they're similar to one another and how they differ, how some are much larger gashes and others are smaller cracks - and how they have a tendency to open and close while remaining more or less part of the same flowing rhythm of a single fissure.

Your form intersections have a lot of longer, stretched forms (mostly tubes), which I warn against in the lesson. I mention that you should stick to more equilateral forms that are roughly equal in all three dimensions. This diminishes the effects of perspective distortion, which tends to make the exercise easier. Furthermore, draw your forms to be larger so you can give yourself more space to think through those spatial problems. Notice how in my example the forms are all quite large, and there isn't a whole lot of negative space between them.

For your organic intersections, while the forms themselves feel kind of cramped and clumsy and even somewhat deflated, and your contour curves aren't always wrapping around well, I am getting a strong sense that these are still three dimensional forms that are interacting with one another. They're sagging against each other, and creating a sort of pile rather than interpenetrating. This is a good sign - there's room to grow, but you're moving in the right direction.

Overall, there's improvement, but you really need to push yourself harder to draw with more confidence and stop worrying so much about the accuracy of your lines to the point of stiffening up. That is your biggest source of trouble, and it is more than anything a mental block that you can get past.

Try taking a blank piece of paper and just draw lines, draw ellipses, with no right or wrong to hit or miss. Just draw with confidence, forget about accuracy, and loosen yourself up.

After you've done some of that, I'd like to see four pages of dissections. Draw big, draw from your shoulder and focus on looking and observing rather than drawing. Think of it like a significant other's telling you about their day - you need to listen a lot more than you speak.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-23 23:43

Overall you're doing quite well! You're demonstrating a strong sense of 3D space, and a good eye for detail and texture. I do have a few things I'd like to raise however that should help you push your work to the next level:

• A minor point about the hatching in your arrows. The hatching here is a tad sloppy - rather than having the lines themselves shrink as they get further out (to cause it to sort of fade out), you can have the lines stretch all the way across (which tends to look much cleaner) but decrease their density. It's this density that tends to make a hatching pattern look darker or lighter - the further apart they are, the lighter they'll appear.

• For your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves, you're doing pretty well but keep in mind that the line that passes through the middle of the form represents the minor axis of each ellipse. This means each ellipse should be cut into two equal, symmetrical halves by this line through their narrower dimension. In many cases you're doing fine, but there are many where the alignment is off. There are also cases where the line doesn't pass through the dead center of the form - this is perfectly fine, it just means that you have to try and visualize what the line would look like if it did go through the center, and align your ellipses accordingly. It takes a little extra mental gymnastics, but it's not always easy to get that line dead center.

• Nice work with your textures - you're balancing out the areas of detail-density with rest areas quite well. The only thing I want to point out is that your textures, though pleasantly complex, are a bit on the cartoony side. This means that you're probably not spending enough time observing your reference image, which causes you to draw more from memory. You want to avoid this - try not to draw for more than a second or two before going back to studying your reference.

• Your form intersections are pretty solid, but don't forget to draw through your ellipses. This will keep them even, which is important for the ends of cylinders, but even moreso for spheres. Also, I noticed that you have a tendency of exaggerating the change in degree between the ellipse on the closer end and the farther end of a cylinder. Similarly to how overly-dramatic-foreshortening implies a very large scale, this shift can also give the impression that the cylinder is very large, which then throws off the cohesiveness between all of the forms in the scene. Try and keep these changes more subtle. It should also help to read up on what the degree of an ellipse signifies about the circle in 3D space that it represents.

• Your organic intersections are coming along reasonably well, and you're capturing the general sense of a bunch of forms piled on top of one another, rather than simple shapes just stamped together on a flat piece of paper.

You have a lot of points here to keep in mind as you move forward, but you're generally doing well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-24 21:38

Looking at your work, I think you can do better. Individually, there's definitely some good here, but overall the way you lay out your work, the instructions you missed from the lesson, and so on are problems that don't really have anything to do with your technical proficiency, but rather speak to a sort of disorganization that will bite you in the ass later on. So we're going to sort that out right now.

Previously you mentioned that this paper is the only kind you can get your hands on when you sit down to do this work during your lunch break, so I'm not going to ask you to work on different paper, but I am going to reiterate the reason I encourage people to work on blank pages so that you can be aware of how that choice has been impacting you.

Over the last two years that I've been critiquing peoples' work, I've noticed a pattern that people who tend to work on paper that isn't blank - be it lined paper, the backs of worksheets, etc. - generally produce work that reflects a more disorganized mindset. They fill the pages less, they combine different exercises on the same page, they rush a lot more, they don't take the time to read through the exercise descriptions fully before starting... All that said, perhaps it's not fair to blame this on the paper. The paper is after all a symptom of the larger problem, that you're squeezing this into your lunch break.

We all have busy days, and sometimes we can only fit our work into limited periods. That's what you're being forced to do - but in order to really reap any benefits from these lessons, you've got to give each exercise the amount of attention it requires even if that means completing no more than a single exercise - or even half of an exercise - in one sitting.

Much of lessons 1 and 2 come almost directly from the lessons I did when studying at the Concept Design Academy, and the lessons were assigned on a weekly basis. I spent somewhere in the area of 6 to 8 hours on each individual lesson - that's a lot of lunch breaks. Of course, I had the advantage of having quit my job and moved across the continent just to attend that school, so I had all the time in the world. Things are more difficult for you, but all that means is that you're going to have to pace yourself more, instead of sacrificing the amount of time spent on each exercise. All that aside, the lessons 1 and 2 that I did didn't include some of the exercises that I've added to them myself, so I'd expect it to take someone even longer.

Now I'm going to quickly go over the exercises and point out things that you can improve upon:

• As I mentioned before, keep each exercise separate. Don't mix them up, as this can make it somewhat difficult to focus on one task at a time. I'm specifically referring to your arrows/organic forms here.

• When doing arrows, think about them going from a point far away to a point closer to you, moving through 3D space. It's easy to get caught up in the idea of them going across the page rather than through space. All that said, you're doing a decent job at these, and I think they'll benefit naturally if you just focus a little more while you work. You'll find that this is a general theme through this critique.

• For your organic forms with contour ellipses, your ellipses are looking rather stiff. Draw from the shoulder and do so with a confident pace quick enough to keep your brain from course-correcting as you go. Do this after applying the ghosting method. Also make sure you align those ellipses such that the central line serves as the minor axis of each ellipse. This means that line should cut each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves.

• For the organic forms with contour curves, I can definitely see that you are consciously wrapping those edges (in most cases) around at the edges, having them accelerate in their curvature so they look like they continue onto the other side. The rest of the curve however flattens out quite a bit. Try and treat these curves as being the visible portion of a larger ellipse - this means a more continuous curve, rather than a flatter portion with ends that wrap around. Be sure to read through this material on the topic and try overshooting those curves a little bit to get a greater sense of the invisible ellipse. Also, just as I mentioned before - that imaginary ellipse should be aligned to that central line. In the top right side of your organic forms with contour curves, these are falling out of alignment quite a bit.

• As far as the dissections go, this is just the beginning - at this point, no one has received any real instruction from me in regards to how to tackle texture. Before I go further into that, I do want to mention that it seems that from this point on, you stopped drawing through your ellipses. This makes sense to me, as your previous attempts to do so were very stiff and wobbly. This is rather because you weren't drawing with a confident pace, and as such drawing through those ellipses seemed to be quite useless. You'll find that it becomes extremely valuable once you do increasing your drawing speed and can no longer rely on your brain, but rather have to fully trust in your muscle memory and use of the ghosting technique.

• Back to texture - Yours are rather cartoony. They're certainly complex, and they demonstrate a certain degree of tenacity when it comes to producing repeating patterns, and this will be a very valuable asset to you. What you're lacking though is the all-too-important observational component. You look at your reference image, then you store what you see in your memory, and you go to work. Unfortunately, within moments of looking away from the reference image, your brain also goes to work simplifying what you saw and throwing out what it considers to be excess information, resulting in iconographic, oversimplified and, as I mentioned before, cartoony facsimiles of what you'd actually seen. This is why your grass looks like a bed of spikes, and why the gorilla hair looks like a bunch of lines. What you need to be doing - and this is something you'll get used to as you practice - is spending vastly more time actually studying and observing that reference image to identify not only the elements present, but how they are arranged, how they are grouped, the rhythm and flow they follow, and ultimately what little features tend to differentiate them. This is a lot to worry about, so for now focus on this one thing - get into the habit of not drawing for more than two seconds before looking back at your reference. Don't put down more than a line or two, because by that point you'll already have forgotten most of the important information.

• For your form intersections, one big point stands out to me - you're drawing a fair number of dramatically stretched forms, though the instructions direct you to avoid this. This tends to bring more perspective distortion/foreshortening into the mix, which further complicates an already difficult exercise. Try to keep your forms more equilateral, being of roughly equal size in all three dimensions. You did a better job here of drawing through the ellipses of your spheres, which definitely helped keep them even, but you don't seem to have done the same for the ends of your cylinders. Lastly, the pages themselves are quite small which in itself makes things more difficult for you, as it forces you to draw smaller and gives you far less room to think through these spatial problems. Drawing on a larger piece of paper will, almost surprisingly, give you greater freedom to use your brain as well as your shoulder.

• Your organic intersection has its strengths as well as its weaknesses. You've used line weight reasonably well to demonstrate clear overlaps, though your sloppy use of contour curves still makes the forms themselves feel a little awkwardly flat.

Keeping everything I've mentioned in mind, I want you to take another stab at this lesson, from start to finish. Take your time, pace yourself, and please get yourself a larger blank sketchbook at the very least. I usually prefer loose blank sheets of printer paper, but that's probably not particularly easy to take to and from work. A sketchbook should at least be manageable.

Uncomfortable

2017-01-28 23:55

Your arrows are looking good. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are pretty well done, though the ellipses themselves are a little on the stiff side. You can see how they sometimes come to a point on one end, because you're not allowing yourself to loosen up and draw confidently enough to get a good, even shape. Definitely something to work on.

Your organic forms with contour curves are looking solid though, and your dissection textures are really nicely done. Lots of great balance of detail, and while you're simplifying a lot of the noisy detail, you're maintaining a very pleasantly realistic feel rather than going towards the cartoony.

For your form intersections, those stiff, uneven ellipses are really biting you when it comes to the spheres. Always remind yourself that the confidence of the stroke is a higher priority than your accuracy, and that accuracy will come with practice but to achieve even, smooth shapes you need to consciously keep your brain from micromanaging as you execute the mark.

Your organic intersections leave a little bit to be desired. What you want to focus on for this exercise is how the forms themselves interact with one another. Imagine that you're dropping a single one of these putty, sausagey forms onto a flat surface. Consider how it's sitting there, how its own weight is playing against the tension on its skin/surface, and how it's redistributing its own mass as much as it can. Then drop another form on top of it, once you've fully grasped all of the dynamics of the first. Imagine that it's fallen directly across the first, so that it sags over on both sides, with its midsection held up by the structure of the first. Think about how this second form now arranges itself to wrap around the object supporting it, due to that fundamental tension in its own form.

Run your mind through this sort of simulation before drawing, and then when you do draw, try and play through the scene again. Stick to simple sausage forms - don't complicate things with overly long or flat forms.

Anyway, overall you're doing quite well, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You'll definitely want to continue working on your ellipses, your form intersections and your organic intersections, but I feel that you should be ready to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-01 00:32

I'll go ahead and add that to my backlog list. For future reference, I get notified for replies to the main thread, and replies to my own comments. If you respond to your own comment, I won't get notified.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-01 21:42

Pretty well done! Just a few things I'd like to point out:

• Draw through your ellipses! All of them! Each and every one you draw for my lessons. Yours tend to be somewhat uneven and stiff, and this will help you maintain a more confident pace when executing the marks.

• Your form intersections are decent, but your foreshortening on your forms (mainly your boxes) is a little too dramatic, which throws off the consistency of the scale across the whole scene. I talk about this a little more in these notes.

Your textures are looking especially nice, so good work there. Great attention to detail, and a good use of balance in terms of where you chose to pack in more visual information, and where you decided to be a little lighter.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-02 20:57

Pretty solid work! Your arrows flow nicely, your organic forms with contour lines demonstrate a solid grasp of establishing the illusion of volume and form, your dissection textures are well structured and organized, and convey the complexity of the objects you're depicting without getting too distracting, and your organic intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how these different forms interact with one another.

The form intersections are fairly decent, though I do feel that your actual sketchbook may be giving you a little bit of trouble by limiting the amount of space you have to work with, and in turn hampering your ability to think in 3D space. I often find that perfect-bound sketchbooks like that tend to be harder to work with, with their tendency to want to fold back over, and not sit flat.

On top of that, giving yourself more room to work tends to really help when it comes to thinking through the spatial problems involved, so that is definitely something to give though to. Generally your work on this exercise is pretty decent, but I feel like that may have been holding you back a little.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-02-04 00:03

You've done pretty well. Your arrows flow nicely through space, your organic forms with contour lines establish a solid illusion of form and volume (though don't forget to build those contour curves around minor axes, as though they are merely visible portions of larger ellipses), and your dissections demonstrate a developing grasp of how to approach texture. I see differing approaches across the textures, which is great - experimentation is always good. I'd say that the more successful textures were more deliberate, and had a bolder use of marks. For example, the cabbage leaf was very strong, while the woven string felt a little weak and the bread was perhaps too vague and uncertain. Fineliners are very good at making solid full black marks, so take advantage of that. It's common for people to treat them more like they're drawing with a pencil (being more exploratory with their markmaking, and trying to be delicate and timid). Since the tool is not well suited to this, the results aren't generally that great.

Your form intersections are generally showing a solid grasp of form and space. Your organic intersections are okay, though I feel that your decision to do an underdrawing, and then replace the lines with clean, dark ones was a little misguided. This resulted in a clean, yet not particularly solid or convincing look. The problem with drawing in two phases like this is that you end up losing the confidence and solidity of your initial drawing.

Instead of replacing your linework in this way, you should instead be thinking of your application of line weight as emphasizing lines that already exist. Draw confidently through the entire process (initial organic shapes, contour lines and all), then add line weight to help organize those lines - rather than replacing them with new ones altogether. This will help you retain the underlying confidence and construction, while also allowing yourself to organize your linework, pulling some marks forwards with additional thickness and having others recede.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-08 21:47

Nice work! I especially liked your dissections - you paid a lot of careful attention to each mark you were putting down, demonstrated solid observational skills and did a good job of organizing those details so as to avoid overly distracting and noisy results.

Your organic forms with contour lines are also generally well done. Don't forget the importance of the minor axis line though when you practice this exercise. I noticed that you only drew it for the first organic form with contour ellipses, but it's very important across the board. This minor axis line helps you to know how to align your contour ellipse/curve. The minor axis should be cutting through each ellipse, splitting it into two equal, symmetrical halves.

Your form intersections were pretty solid - the super thick lines were a bit much. I get that you were trying to emphasize the intersections themselves, but it wasn't really necessary. Chunky lines like that have a tendency to flatten things out. I can tell that before those things were looking pretty solid.

Your organic intersections aren't that great. Fundamentally you are demonstrating an understanding of how those forms relate to one another, but the relatively low viewing angle was just a poor choice, I guess. Well, you win some, you lose some. In the future, try not to build one 'main' form and then pile everything else on top of it. Try to consider each form as being of equal weight and value, and try to run your brain through the simulation of first dropping one form, considering how it would sit on a ground plane, then dropping another similar form on top of that. Then another, and another, all forming a pile of similarly-sized forms. It's really an exercise on figuring out how those forms would interact with one another, clinging to the forms underneath that support their weight, and sagging where they fail to be held up.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-14 00:55

Very nice work! Your organic forms with contour lines feel solid and convey the illusion of volume quite nicely. Your dissections are also quite well executed, with a lot of thought put towards how you organized your areas of visual interest, and your rest areas. The tree bark one did get a little haphazard in places though, so keep an eye on that. The others were much more intentional, for lack of a better word.

Your form intersections are generally well done too, but there's one point that stood out to me. Your foreshortening is a liiittle bit extreme. You handle it decently with the scope of the intersections you drew, but the problem with perspective that dramatic is that it tends to throw the consistency of scale off when you start expanding into larger networks of forms in the same scene.

For this reason, had you filled an entire page with forms like this (which was actually what was instructed), things would have started to go a little wonky. One good rule of thumb is that as perspective gets more dramatic, the scale of the objects you're drawing inherently increases. Think about how when you hold a box-like object in your hand, you can't tell the difference between the sizes of each end. When you look at the top of a building from the ground however, it looks tiny in relation to the base.

So, when you've got a lot of forms put together, you'll generally want to keep your foreshortening shallow to help keep things consistent. If everything is super dramatic, our ability to discern scale falls apart.

Lastly, great work with the organic intersections. You've conveyed the interactions between those forms quite convincingly.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-02-19 19:30

Your arrows are looking good. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are solid. Your dissections show a lot of careful observation and attention to detail. Your form intersections are coming along well, and while the intersections themselves are a little hit-and-miss, that's not the primary focus of the exercise. What I am mainly looking for here is the ability to construct these forms together in a way that feels consistent and cohesive across the whole set, and you're doing a pretty decent job of that.

Your organic intersections are okay, and they definitely improve considerably by the second page. They do however suffer a bit from an issue that rears its head back in the organic forms with contour curves exercise near the beginning.

The issue is that your contour lines don't always convincingly wrap around the forms. They do sometimes, but I see a lot of cases where they fall a little short, which tells me that we need to work a little more in this area. It's not by any means that you don't grasp the concept, but rather that you need to be nudged into focusing more when doing them.

There's two ways I want you to change how you approach the organic forms with contour curves exercise:

1. Include your central minor axis lines - you seem to have consistently skipped over this step once moving on from the contour ellipses, but they're still very much relevant here. The contour curves are really just visible portions of larger ellipses, so they still align in much the same way to the minor axis. Keeping them aligned correctly will put you in a better position to achieve the illusion of your contour lines wrapping around.

2. Apply the 'overshooting' method described in these notes.

I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour curves. I have no doubts that you'll be able to do better, and that it's more of an issue of focus, as you have several examples of where you've been able to do it correctly.

Uncomfortable

2017-02-20 21:16

Pretty well done. Just a couple things to keep in mind:

• Don't forget to draw your central minor axis lines when doing your organic forms with contour lines, both ellipses and curves. It's important to use your minor axis to help keep these ellipse-based contour lines aligned correctly.

• Your foreshortening in your form intersections is a little too dramatic, which relates to this issue raised in lesson 1. Basically you should keep your foreshortening more shallow when dealing with lots of forms stuck together in the same scene, as it helps maintain a more consistent sense of scale.

• Here and there in isolated areas I see a little bit of sloppy, sketchy behaviour. Keep pushing yourself to think in terms of the ghosting method - that is, every mark should be planned and prepared for, then executed confidently. You're doing better in this regard, but it's something you need to keep in mind as you push forwards.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-02-21 00:47

So there are a few issues I'd like to point out. Some of them are skipped steps/missed instructions, though others are more about your approach and understanding of space.

Before we get to that though - it seems you've turned off your flair on this subreddit. I'd really appreciate it if you turned it back on, as it's how I track whether or not you're eligible for homework critiques and which lessons you've completed thus far.

On to the critique:

• Your use of contour curves is pretty good, as they are wrapping confidently around the forms and do a decent job of conveying volume.

• Your contour ellipses however are really lacking. You're not drawing through most of them (something I expect you to do for all the ellipses you draw for my lessons), and you're neglecting to include the central minor axis line. This minor axis is important, as all of your ellipses need to be aligned to it such that each ellipse is cut into two equal, symmetrical halves down their narrower axis. Additionally, give these notes a read in regards to what the degree of an ellipse tells us about the circle in 3D space it represents.

• Your first page of dissections is a start, though I do want to point out that your textures are at the moment very heavily relying on your memory, rather than direct observation. Now that doesn't mean you're just working from your imagination - it means that you're looking at your reference for a bit, then going to town drawing for a long while before returning to your reference. You can read more about what I mean in the lesson section of the 25 texture challenge.

• Your second page of dissections is incomplete. Also, the contour curves you're using here aren't wrapping confidently around the forms. Though you did this correctly in the previous section, I'm still going to ask you to read these notes and watch the video linked there.

• The form intersections definitely are challenging by nature, but you also made them more difficult than they needed to be. In the instructions, I mention that you should be avoiding any and all forms that are 'stretched' in one particular dimension. Long tubes, long boxes, etc. These bring perspective too much into the mix and make things much, much harder than they need to be. I do see that you're drawing through some of your forms, which is good, but you should be doing this more consistently as you learned in the 250 box challenge. I also recommend that you take a look at the 250 cylinder challenge to get a better sense of how to construct those particular kinds of forms.

• Your organic intersections are a little hit and miss. A lot of it has to do with you getting sloppy and not wrapping your contour curves around the forms correctly, so they end up reading flatter than they should be. Other forms there do give a certain sense of how they all relate to one another, however. Overall, plenty of room for improvement, but a somewhat decent attempt.

In general, I'm a little on the fence about this. Your work leaves a lot to be desired, but it's really more a matter of reading the instructions more carefully. As such, I'm going to ask for you to do the following:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves

• 1 page of form intersections

I want you to do these exactly as they are written in the lesson - no deviation, no skipped steps. Also, while your organic forms with contour curves are technically fine, they aren't exactly as described in the lesson - so this time around, I want you to do them to match my specifications as well (so they should look like contour ellipses, just without the full ellipse).

Uncomfortable

2017-02-21 00:57

Pretty good work. I think your general sense of form and 3D space is coming along quite nicely, as you're demonstrating in the form intersections and organic intersections. Both of these exercises show me that you understand how these forms relate to one another, and how they play together within the same space.

This isn't all that important right now, but I figured I should also mention it - your use of line weight in the form intersections is really nice. It's subtle and understated, and really helps solidify your forms and maintaining a sort of cohesiveness for each one without being overbearing.

Admittedly your organic forms with contour curves are a little on the sloppy side, so keep an eye on that. Don't forget to include and build around a central minor axis, as this will help you keep those curves aligned properly.

Your dissections are well done - I definitely see a lot of experimentation, and it's coming together quite nicely.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-02-21 01:02

Generally very solid work. I especially like how some of your organic forms droop lazily off one another - it shows a solid grasp of how they relate to one another in 3D space. Your form intersections are also well done, and your dissections show a lot of great experimentation with different textures, most of which have been executed quite nicely.

Your organic forms with contour curves also generally show a good grasp of the technique, using it to convey a good sense of volume. It all would have been perfect... were it not for your contour ellipses. Maybe I'm just getting a little emotional since this is the last of a whole bunch of submissions I've had to critique today (many of which made this same mistake), but.. DRAW THROUGH YOUR ELLIPSES! You need to be doing this for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons. Additionally, you completely left out the central minor axis lines from this exercise, which are very important. Lastly, you demonstrate a good grasp of what the degree of each ellipse/curve means in other parts of this lesson, but here it's a little shaky, so I'm going to point you to these notes.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson. You've done a great job despite that little ellipse issue, so the only thing I want to stress is the importance of following instructions.