Uncomfortable

2017-04-06 01:50

Your arrows are looking okay. One thing to consider when working on these in the future though is a matter of depth. In your mind, try to position one end of the arrow physically farther away from you, and the other closer. This will help you regard the page as not just a flat plane across which you make your marks, but rather a window into a three dimensional space.

In your organic forms with contour ellipses, the ellipses are looking really quite stiff. This is something I mentioned in my critique of your lesson 1 work - you need to be drawing those ellipses with a confident pace, after applying the preparation phase of the ghosting method. If you allow your brain to drive the motion of your hand, you will end up with wobbly lines that don't do a particularly good job of conveying solidity and volume.

Additionally, I think you may be having trouble understanding the role each ellipse plays in relation to the organic form you're fleshing out. Basically, you're still thinking of the shape you've drawn as being purely two-dimensional, just lines on a page. Firstly, the contour ellipses are really circular cross-sections of the form. The degree of the ellipses determines each circle's orientation relative to the viewer, as explained in these notes and in this video.

Moving on, your organic forms with contour curves also need work. Your curves do not convey the illusion that they're wrapping around the rounded form - instead of accelerating as they reach the edge and hooking back around to continue on along the other side, they feel more like they come to a sudden stop, as though the opposite side of the form is flat. I address this common issue in these notes. Try applying the overshooting method described there, which helps to link in your mind the act of drawing a full ellipse to the act of drawing a partial ellipse (the curve).

Additionally, you don't seem to be drawing your minor axes in this exercise, as instructed. This is extremely important, as it helps you to align each curve.

Your dissections are a good start, although as you move forwards, you need to push yourself to pay more attention to your reference. What I see here is that you likely study your reference for a while, then move on to draw for a long period, glance at your reference again, then draw for a while, etc. The problem here is that it results in you drawing primarily from memory. Our memories are pretty awful, and the moment we look away from our reference, our brain starts going to work simplifying what we'd seen and throwing away a lot of valuable information.

Because of this, it's important that you look at your reference almost constantly, taking only a second or two to put down a mark before looking back. I talk about this a little more in these notes.

So the main focus of the form intersection exercise is understanding how to draw many forms that occupy the same space without feeling inconsistent. I don't believe you're quite there yet. There are several issues here, like your boxes not feeling particularly solid (I'm glad you're drawing through your boxes here, but since most of your practice in the 250 box challenge was not approached in this way, your grasp of 3D space is still very weak so your boxes feel rather flimsy and your angles are off), your spheres being uneven since you're not drawing through your ellipses, and so on. The biggest problem however is that your foreshortening is not consistent - that is, the rate at which things get smaller as they move farther away from the viewer.

I address this issue in these notes from lesson 1. Basically, it's best to use fairly shallow foreshortening in scenes where you have lots of forms crammed together in order to keep them consistent.

You also seem to have missed the instruction about avoiding forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension (like long tubes, and so on). This adds a lot of complexity to the exercise and makes it that much easier to get it right on the more basic level.

Lastly, the organic intersections could use some work too. They suffer from the same issues with contour curves that I mentioned earlier. Additionally, some of your forms are a little more complex (they get wavy in places), and this complexity undermines the solidity of the underlying form. Simple things are always much easier to depict as being solid, so we always try to capture things as simply as possible before building up complexity in successive passes. For now, all you need to worry about is that simplest stage. Stick to basic sausages only.

I think you definitely have a lot of room to grow, and one thing that stands out a lot is your sense of 3D space. The thing about being able to draw things that feel three dimensional is that the first step is for you yourself to believe in the illusion you're about to put down. You cannot regard your drawings as being lines across a page. If you start to believe in your own lie, then it will start affecting how you draw. For instance, with the organic forms with contour curves, those contour lines run along the surface of a 3D form. If you are convinced that the surface curves and wraps back around, then your brain would fight against you if you tried to draw a straight line across all the way to the edge.

Now this doesn't happen overnight - even believing in our own lies takes time and practice. The biggest thing I can recommend right now is that you're really doing yourself a disservice in not reading the instructions fully. I understand that the lessons are very dense and that it's difficult to absorb all of the information there in one read through. All that means, however, is that you need to read through it a few times, and make sure you go through each exercise description again right before approaching it. Give each exercise the time you require to give your best effort, and if you have to split even one exercise across a few different sittings, make sure you've reread that exercise's material again before starting over.

Lastly, don't forget about the material from lesson 1. As I mention at the beginning of that lesson, completing it doesn't mean you're done with that stuff forever. You need to continue practicing those exercises (in smaller quantity) as a warm-up at the beginning of every sitting so that you can gradually hone those basic skills.

Now I won't be marking this lesson as complete. I'd like you to resubmit the following, though I definitely recommend redoing the 250 box challenge first:

• One page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• One page of organic forms with contour curves

• One page of form intersections

• One page of organic intersections

Uncomfortable

2017-04-07 22:35

So there's a few areas where we can definitely see some improvement here. Firstly, for your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing okay but I get the distinct feeling that you don't quite understand what those curves and ellipses really represent, and what their degrees really say about how they're oriented in 3D space. I definitely recommend that you give these notes a read. They should help you move beyond just drawing arbitrary curves/ellipses and start developing your ability to perceive what you draw as being three dimensional.

Looking at your dissections, that definitely falls in line with what we saw previously - many of your textures here don't really wrap around the 3D forms. It's more like you filled in a flat shape on the page, rather than trying to consider how it would look if you wrapped the form in that texture. Specifically, consider how the surface curves away from the viewer, and how that would make the texture on it become more compressed as you reach the edges of the form. Many of the textures on this page demonstrate that sort of disregard for 3D form. Look specifically at the top left corner, as it's the clearest example, where you've got those tiles arranged in straight lines.

Another point about the dissections - don't go overboard with detail, but make every mark you do put down count. Spend the majority of your time observing and studying your reference, and take only a moment or two to actually make those marks before looking back at your reference. I see several examples where you've gotten rather scribbly - definitely avoid this. Don't allow yourself to descend into randomness, as the results from uncontrolled mark-making are usually not particularly good. Instead, think about what really makes each surface convey a certain texture quality. What details make it look rough, smooth, bumpy, wet, etc.

What you're not doing is simply replicating exactly what you see, value for value, mark for mark. Focus instead on communicating something to your viewer. You can (and should) use the details present there in your reference, but you need to decide what is and what isn't important. There's more information on the challenges of tackling texture here, though for now we mainly want to focus on having you wrap those textures around 3D forms. Other aspects of texture will be more of a long-term goal.

Your form intersections aren't bad, but there is definitely a lot of messiness here and a few points that you ignored from the instructions that hamstrung you.

• In the instructions, you're told to avoid any forms that are particularly stretched in any one dimension. Really long boxes, long tubes, etc. You definitely missed this. The reason I recommend this is because the form intersections are already very challenging in understanding how to draw all of these forms together such that they feel consistent. Adding additional questions of perspective and foreshortening really add complexity and end up distracting you from the core of the exercise.

• Your use of hatching isn't great. Keep in mind that any mark made on the surface of a form plays the role of a contour line. It describes to the viewer how that surface distorts through space, because we know that the line runs along it. Take a look at this page. The sphere in the bottom corner, and the shaded-in cone on the left side both read as being completely flat, because that's what the lines tell us. They're running straight across. In general, I don't really encourage the use of hatching lines here, because it's generally not necessary. I can understand their use on boxes that you've drawn through (draw through all of them by the way, so you better understand how they sit in space) since drawing through forms can result in a sort of unclear, double-sided illusion, but definitely don't use it on spheres as it's only going to make things messy. If you want a circle to read as a sphere, make sure it's even, smooth and confidently drawn. Nothing else is necessary.

All things considered, your organic form intersections are decent. If anything, they only really suffer from the issues raised for the organic forms section.

• Your foreshortening is a little more dramatic here than it should be, which makes the overall sense of scale and the relationships between your forms somewhat inconsistent at times. Try to stick to drawing forms with relatively shallow foreshortening. I go a little further into this in these notes from lesson 1.

So, taking all of this into consideration, I'd like you to do the following:

• Half a page of organic forms with contour ellipses, half with contour curves

• Half a page of dissections

• One page of form intersections

As for your questions:

1. Since most of the lines when drawing texture are shorter and more than likely drawn from the wrist, the benefits of ghosting definitely diminish. You should however spend more time thinking and less time drawing when it comes to texture.

2. You don't control your line weight when drawing your initial strokes - you put everything down evenly, then come back to add line weight similarly to the superimposed lines exercise from lesson 1.

Uncomfortable

2017-04-10 21:19

On the spreadsheet where I keep track of all the homework submissions, I add a little red box next to submissions I think are more or less perfectly done. As it stands, you're two for two. This is exceptional work.

With your arrows and organic forms with contour curves, you're demonstrating a solid grasp of 3D space and how your lines flow not across a flat paper, but through three dimensions to which the page is merely a window.

The little epiphany you had there in regards to texture is right on the money. I actually explained this a few days ago to another student, that many people try to use texture as a means to depict light and shadow on their forms - which often causes them to sink to using a lot of crosshatching all over, as merely a sort of visual noise to differentiate the value scales on their objects. While understandable (especially considering that most drawing instructors will use graphite and speak at length about shading, something I don't even make a peep about), I argue the exact opposite. Lighting should be used to depict and communicate texture which, as you rightly observed, is composed of just more tiny forms.

This begs the question - if lighting ends up being a tool to some other end, how am I supposed to capture the illusion of form? And therein lies the core of the approach I encourage people to use. We establish the illusion of form without light at all. We do so through silhouette (capturing the subtle turns of form), with contour lines running along the surfaces as they distort through 3D space, and with line weight. It kind of goes right in the face of the whole "BUT LINES DON'T EXIST, YOU'RE A MADMAN UNCOMFORTABLE" notion. It's true they don't exist, but as light is a tool to capture texture, line is yet another tool to capture and establish form. To learn to use it properly, we must be aware of what it represents, beyond simple marks on a page.

I've gone off on a tangent there - really, my point here is that lighting is a tool to capture texture, which is in turn plays the role of little contour lines (of sorts, depending on the texture) which describes and reinforces the forms we draw. The actual course where I learned most of what I know about drawing was called viscom - literally, visual communication. Writing this out however has me thinking that perhaps there could be a better term for it. What we're doing is describing, through visual means, an idea. Describing how it moves through space, describing its weight, its surface quality, and so on.

Anyway, moving on - your form intersections are delightful. You've gone above and beyond my expectations for this exercise (to the point that showing people this as something to strive towards may be a mistake - you've nailed those intersections, which demands an extremely well developed understanding of 3D space). At the same time, you've nailed the core goal of populating a space with forms that relate to one another in a manner that feels natural, consistent and believable.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a great job of exploring how these less rigid masses interact with one another. You've captured how they cling to the forms that support their masses, and how they sag where there is nothing there to hold them up.

If I haven't said it enough, you're doing great. Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete. Honestly, if it hadn't been for what you mentioned about the textures, I wouldn't have thought my lessons had any impact at all, as you're clearly coming with an already well developed grasp of form and space.

Uncomfortable

2017-04-16 17:08

Looking pretty good. Just a few things to keep in mind:

• For your organic forms with contour lines, make sure you draw the central minor axis line for all of your organic forms - both those with contour ellipses and those with contour curves. This line is what you want to be aligning those ellipses to (and since the curves themselves are just the visible portion of a larger ellipse, the same rules apply for them). This will help you ensure that they're running perpendicular to the flow of the overall form.

• Your dissections are coming along fairly well. Always remember above all else that you want your textures to wrap around the forms - at times this can be forgotten as you get caught up in the intricacies of your textures. Just remember to compress the textures along the edges of the form, as those surfaces turn away from the viewer. You did a good job of this with your octopus tentacles, but not too well with your wood stock and the leopard skin. Additionally, while your work here is coming along well, you definitely will want to push yourself to pay closer attention to your reference images - specifically to keep yourself from working from memory. The second we look away from a reference image, our brains start processing and simplifying the information we gathered, rendering it considerably less useful. In order to avoid this, it's important to spend lots of time observing your reference, then take a moment or two to put a couple marks down before looking back at your reference to reconstruct a more accurate mental model of what you're trying to reproduce. I go into this in greater detail in the texture challenge.

• Your form intersections are done fairly well, but one thing I want to really stress is the importance of not drawing in two steps (a rough lay-in, followed by a clean-up pass). The clean-up pass is actually the problem, because when trying to ensure that our lines are tidied up, we have a tendency to draw much more slowly and less confidently, which ruins the flow and evenness of our lines and shapes. Instead, push yourself to put down every mark as confidently as you can, accepting that these marks will be the final lines that make up your drawing. Afterwards you can go in to add line weight here and there, but there is a key difference between this and a clean-up pass. A clean-up pass seeks to replace messier lines with cleaner ones. Adding line weight is about emphasizing lines that already exist by confidently applying a little extra weight to them in specific places, largely to clarify overlaps of forms. Don't get me wrong, you're generally doing a good job here, but those spheres definitely need work - since they're drawn considerably more timidly, they came out rather uneven and don't read as being terribly spherical or three dimensional.

Your approach to drawing pyramids is spot on - that is exactly how I explain it in this demo. You may find other useful information in this large demo dump, linked in the sidebar.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-04-23 00:22

So there's some good here, and some less good. One thing that stands out to me in particular is your organic forms with contour lines. The way you've tackled this exercise gives me the impression that you may not entirely understand what these contour lines represent - or moreover, that you aren't yet able to consider how these forms exist in 3D space.

Ultimately while we are drawing on a flat piece of paper, one of the first things we want to train our brain to do is to no longer regard it as a two dimensional plane. What we're doing is creating the illusion of a third dimension, the impression that this page is just a window into a deeper world in which our drawings reside. Once you yourself start being convinced and fooled by your own illusion, you will start to find that your brain forces you to draw in line with this illusion.

For instance, if you draw a sphere on a page, it's really just a circle. But if you believe it's a sphere, you will find that your brain fights against you when you try to draw a straight line across it. To your brain, the surface of that sphere curves in space, so the line would have to carve around that surface, resulting in a curve rather than a straight line.

The first step towards getting your brain to do this is to divorce yourself from the two dimensional world. Right now, a lot of your drawings tend to exist at one level of depth. Your organic forms move across the page, but don't move in the dimension of depth. They don't shift from being farther away from you to being closer. Same goes for your arrows.

For the arrow exercise, try to force yourself to draw an arrow between two set points - one point being far away, and one point being close. Try to consider how the width of that arrow will be smaller when it is distant, and how it swells when it gets closer. Then try the same thing with your organic forms - remind yourself that they're not sitting on a flat surface, they exist in a three dimensional world.

Secondly, I want you to give these notes a read. All of your contour ellipses and contour curves (which are effectively the visible portion of full ellipses) are more or less drawn at the same degree. Remember that each ellipse represents a circle in 3D space, and its degree describes its orientation. I talk about this in this video as well. So, once you're thinking about how the form moves through three dimensional space, consider how the orientation of these circular cross-sections changes, and vary the degree of your ellipses accordingly.

Thirdly, keep those ellipses and curves aligned to the minor axis line, such that the minor axis cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves. This will keep the cross-section perpendicular to the general flow of the organic form. Additionally, I noticed that a lot of your curves and ellipses don't sit snugly within the form - they're often floating somewhat arbitrarily, which breaks the illusion that the lines actually sit on the surface of these forms.

Moving on, your dissections do bring to light some issues, but this exercise was another one of those first-exposures rather than a test of any sort. The point was largely to find out how far along you are with that sort of thing, and what we need to work on. So what I'm seeing is that you have a tendency to oversimplify, almost cartoonify the details you're reproducing in your drawing. This happens because it's effectively what our brains are naturally built to do. We look at something, and as soon as we look away, our brain starts to simplify and reduce the amount of information it needs to describe what it saw. This results in a lot of extremely important information being tossed away.

Because of this, you cannot trust your memory. Instead, you must continually observe and study your reference image, looking away only for a second or two to put down a couple marks before looking back and observing it once again. Ask yourself as you look at the object, what makes it look rough/smooth/wet/bumpy/sticky/etc. What visual qualities give it that particular texture? What is creating that illusion that you interpret in that specific manner?

Now, texture is not the primary focus of my lessons, so for now you should focus most of your time on construction. Understanding how forms sit in 3D space, how they fit together, and so on. That's an area you definitely need to focus a lot more on. That said, once you feel more comfortable in that area, you may want to take a look at the additional material in the texture challenge.

Onto the form intersections. In many ways, you did quite well in this. I can see you drawing through a lot of your forms, constructing cylinders and cones around minor axes, adding line weight and so on. The ones where you draw all of the lines of your boxes (rather than just drawing those that would be visible) are much more successful. That said, there is still room for improvement. My recommendation in the lesson 1 critique to go through the 250 box challenge will help here.

One other point on this matter - if a form's going to be cut off the edge of the page, don't bother drawing it. It doesn't end up being of much use at that point. This exercise is all about that illusion of 3D form thing, and as soon as a form gets cut off, it doesn't end up being terribly useful practice to that end.

Lastly, your organic intersections. I definitely agree that you struggled quite a bit here. A good deal of it has to do with the matters I raised with your organic forms, and generally understanding how each of these forms sit in 3D space. There are a few additional things that you can change in your approach that will help, however.

Firstly, draw bigger. This is very much a spatial problem, and in order to deal with these (especially as beginners) our brains require a great deal more room to think. Often times we draw smaller when we're overwhelmed with a particular challenge, feeling that it will help hide our mistakes, or simplify the problem - but instead, it causes us to stiffen up and makes it considerably more difficult.

Secondly, try to tackle this exercise one form at a time. Focus on creating one organic form that feels solid and voluminous. Draw it in its entirety, as if it was the only thing you were putting down on the page. Don't overdo your contour lines. You definitely have a tendency of putting down loads, largely because you don't yet fully understand what each one's purpose is. Those lines are just there to communicate how those rounded surfaces distort through 3D space - just two or three are often more than enough to build this illusion. There's no need to create a wireframe, and it can make your drawing much more cluttered.

So once you've got one form there, flopped limp onto an imaginary surface, add another. Imagine that you're taking another simple sausage form and just dropping it on top. Consider where it lands, where its weight will be supported by the first one, and where it will sag. Draw it in its entirety once again, don't worry about where one form occludes another. You can always add line weight later on, and even simple cast shadows to signify what is on top of what. From there, you repeat it several more times, each time with a new independent form being added to this pile.

So, once you've completed the stuff I asked for in my previous critique, I want you to do the following:

• One page of arrows

• One page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• One page of organic forms with contour curves

• One page of form intersections

• One page of organic intersections

Uncomfortable

2017-04-25 19:57

Your linework is very bold and confident, but there's one overarching problem - you are rushing. Your arrows are good, your dissections are pretty decent, your form intersections are okay (the over-thick line weights end up flattening things out) but your organic forms are really sloppy.

Contour lines run along the surface of three dimensional forms, so anything that breaks that illusion - like an ellipse not fitting snugly between the edges of the form, or a curve flying beyond the form itself - undermines their purpose. Think of it like taking a cylinder and drawing with a pen over its shaft. That line cannot somehow fly off the cylinder, nor can it go into the cylinder. It must remain on the surface.

For the sake of simplicity, the forms we're dealing with are effectively just flexible tubes, so their cross-sections are going to be circular. This means that the ellipses that represent these circular cross-sections all need to be aligned to the central minor axis line, such that the line cuts each one into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension. Keeping this alignment straight will help you maintain the illusion that each curve or ellipse fits correctly.

I want you to give these notes a read, then try the organic forms with contour ellipses, contour curves and the organic intersections again:

• http://i.imgur.com/1rv8Qb4.jpg

• The self critique notes on wrapping curves around your forms

• The video linked from the above self critique bit

So I did mention that the confidence of your linework is great, but what's equally important is that you apply the ghosting method beforehand to ensure that your marks are as accurate as possible. Of course, we don't worry about accuracy so much while executing, but we need to invest as much time into our preparation phase to compensate.

Uncomfortable

2017-04-27 22:12

Your arrows are looking pretty solid, especially after the first page. The second and third page show a good understanding of how they flow through 3D space, moving both across space, but also from points farther away to points closer to the viewer.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are alright, though there's definitely some noticeable sloppiness to your organic forms with contour curves. Firstly, make sure you continue to draw your central minor axis lines through these, as they're still helpful in regards to aligning your curves. Remember that the curves themselves are just the visible sections of the larger ellipses, so they still need to be aligned perpendicularly to the general flow of the form in order to have the best opportunity to get them to wrap around the form believably.

There's a lot of deviation in your pages for this particular exercise. Your first page of organic forms with contour curves are okay, although the y-shaped form on the far right gets progressively more sloppy as you go down its length, and the one to its left is definitely misguided (although it was probably just experimentation gone wrong). Your second page is somewhat better, though at times still sloppy. Alignment is important of course, but also take more care in drawing each individual curve. The third and last page for this exercise largely fails in the area of getting those curves to believably wrap around the forms. You definitely stop concerning yourself with the quality of the curves and just draw arbitrarily. This pattern tells me that you were likely doing the exercises for too long, and should have taken a break instead of pushing forwards. Working tired will make you sloppy, which in turn will cause you to practice bad habits.

Your dissections are a good start, and there's a lot of experimentation here. One thing I do see you relying on a lot is treating your pen like it's a pencil, and attempting to shade in areas with light hatching. There's a few things I'd like to point out about this:

• Firstly, it's generally not a great idea to try and apply techniques meant for one medium to another. At least, in this case it's not. A pen - especially a felt tip pen, which is required from lesson 3-6 - doesn't have the kind of range of values you can produce with a pencil. The marks you put down don't blend together to create a continuous fill, instead it results in a noticeably noisy and high-contrast space filled with alternating light and dark marks. This becomes distracting and draws the viewer's attention unintentionally. I advise you to avoid hatching from now on.

• Another point about hatching - it tends to be used as a sort of filler that beginners often use. Instead of taking the time to carefully observe their reference, they'll often become overwhelmed by all of the visual information and just decide "well this area has some stuff in it" and then just fill it in with non-descript hatching. Because of this, allowing yourself to use hatching becomes a crutch that keeps you from expanding your observational skills.

• Lastly, your particular use of hatching shows me that you're attempting to use texture/detail as tool to help add light and shadow to your object, which in turn you're trying to use to establish the illusion of form and volume. While many follow this methodology, I say it's backwards. Instead, the illusion of form and volume should already be established by your construction, and additional information laid down with contour lines. It's for that reason that successful organic form exercises (which this particular exercise is meant to start off as) already look three-dimensional. Instead of using texture as a tool to establish light and shadow, lighting should be used as a tool to help describe the surface of a form. Remember that what we're doing is communicating an idea visually - we've established the form of that idea, next we want to communicate the texture and tactile quality of its surface. This texture is really just made up of smaller forms - little three dimensional bumps, holes, cracks, etc. that run along that surface, and the lines we see as 'texture' are really just the shadows they cast. We can use shadow to describe these elements in order to build up a certain illusion that the object is rough, smooth, bumpy, sticky, wet, etc.

On the same train of thought as that last point, you don't need to cover an entire drawing in texture and detail. What we are not doing is making a perfect reproduction of a drawing, with full beautiful detail. As I mentioned before, we're just communicating. Think of it like describing an object verbally - you wouldn't explain every little hair or pore on someone's arm. You'd remark on some of them, and leave one's imagination to fill in the rest. Drawing is much the same.

Now, texture is not something you're expected to have any mastery or understanding of just yet - this exercise was added here just to see where you are, and what kind of direction I should push you in. Additionally, texture isn't the main focus of these lessons - drawabox is more about construction, the use of form, etc. That said, if you're interested in learning more about how to tackle texture, take a look at the 25 texture challenge. Be sure to note that this challenge should not be completed all at once like the box or cylinder challenges. It's meant to be completed over a long period of time, in parallel with the other lessons.

Moving on, your form intersections were fairly well done. You do have a tendency to still use particularly dramatic foreshortening on some of your forms (when drawing a large collection of forms, keeping the foreshortening shallow will help you maintain a more consistent sense of scale), and you should make sure that you draw through all of your boxes (I see that you did it for some, but not for others).

Your organic intersections conversely aren't that great, and largely suffer from a lot of the issues I mentioned in your organic forms section. I believe that getting more practice in that area will help you with this exercise.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-04-27 22:25

Not bad. Your arrows are solid, your dissections show a lot of interesting experimentation and your form intersections show a really well developing sense of space. Your organic intersections also demonstrate a pretty good grasp of how those forms interact with one another.

One area where you didn't do so well however were your organic forms with contour curves - based on your work, I know you can do this, but your work is incredibly sloppy here, so you're not at all capturing the illusion that the curves are actually running along that rounded surface, wrapping around and continuing back along the other side.

• Give the notes on this page a read

• Give these notes a read

• Give this video a watch

I know for a fact that you can do better than this, so I'd like you to do two more pages of the organic forms with contour curves exercise before I mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2017-04-29 15:31

Your arrows are generally looking pretty good. I'm glad to see that you're exploring how they'd flow through 3D space, including moving from further away to closer, rather than just going across the page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are moving in the right direction, but your ellipses are definitely noticeably stiff. Notice how they don't generally come out evenly? This is because you're hesitating when you draw them. You're afraid of making a mistake, and holding yourself back because of it.

When it comes to mark making - specifically executing those marks - we always want to approach them with a confident, persistent pace so as to keep our brain (and our fears) from interfering. Beforehand we should invest all of our time into preparing the stroke (as the ghosting method demands), but once you put it down, you basically need to accept that any mistake that will occur is already effectively written in stone the moment your pen touches the page. Mistakes are perfectly fine - we need them to grow and learn. These are just exercises and drills - if you screw up, there's ample opportunity to do better in the next one. So, when executing a mark, trust in your muscle memory and don't let your conscious brain interfere. Ensure that you apply the ghosting method and draw your ellipses from your shoulder. From there, trust in your muscle memory and just let yourself make those mistakes.

Your organic forms with contour curves definitely improve over the set. I did notice though that you're not including the central minor axis line in most of these (you did in a couple). Definitely make sure you do this, in order to help train your brain to understand how those curves need to be aligned. This alignment will ultimately help you to better demonstrate how those curves wrap around each organic form.

You certainly do struggle with those dissections, but this is completely normal. Ultimately this is an exercise where I'm throwing you in the deep end just to see how you handle it. There's no expectation for you to nail it on this first attempt.

That said, it does highlight some issues. First of all, before we even get into the textures themselves, the forms you're building on top of aren't done nearly as well as your last page of organic forms with contour curves. This shows me that you're more than likely getting distracted by the fact that you'll have to eventually add texture, and are likely rushing through to get to that main stage rather than focusing on the step you're at at any given moment. When doing a task, focus only on that task. Thinking ahead will cause you to work sloppy, and will result in a poor foundation on which to build the next step.

Secondly - and this definitely improves by that last page - you start off with a tendency to work from memory. When beginners look at textures in their reference images, they usually stare at their reference for a while, then set about drawing for yet another while. The problem with this approach is that we have notoriously crappy memory when it comes to really specific visual details. As soon as we look away, our brains go to work simplifying and filtering that information, so as to be able to process it as efficiently as possible. By doing these kinds of studies, we gradually rewire our brains to retain more information.

That said, simply repeating this beginner's approach isn't terribly effective. Instead, you need to force yourself to keep looking back at your reference - draw for only a second or two before you look back at your reference, and each time ask yourself what gives that particular surface the illusion of being bumpy, smooth, wet, sticky, rough, etc. As I said before, your last page definitely does a much better job of conveying that complexity, though there's certainly more room for refinement. And of course, that's totally normal and expected.

Drawabox isn't really focused at all on texture and detail, because I don't want to distract students from the importance of learning how to construct and depict the illusion of form and volume (similarly to how you had a tendency to construct the organic form sloppily because you were distracted by the thought of adding detail). That said, if you do want to learn more about this, take a look at the texture challenge. This challenge is meant to be done over a long period of time, in parallel with the rest of the lessons, so if you do decide to look into it, don't try to do it all at once.

Your form intersections are generally well done - you've been able to capture the forms together such that they look like they exist in the same space as one another with a consistent sense of scale and perspective. My only issue here is that your linework - especially when you add line weight - is wobbly. This goes back to the same issue I raised about your stiff ellipses. You've got to apply the ghosting method to every mark you put down, prepare diligently before executing your marks confidently. Don't be afraid to make mistakes.

Your organic intersections are alright, with the first page being somewhat better than the second. One thing I do want to point out about that second page is that hatchy shading you added along the edge of one of the forms. Experimentation is good, so I'm not against you trying out things like this, but I did want to point out that those kinds of lines tend to do more harm than good. Keep in mind that any line that runs along the surface of a form will describe how that form distorts through space. Those lines don't really follow that surface, so they end up communicating something different about the form, contradicting the other contour lines. Additionally, they end up being very noisy and draw the viewer's attention due to the high contrast they produce (with all the alternating black/white). Drawing the viewer's attention unintentionally is generally something you want to avoid.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see you do two pages of organic forms with contour ellipses. Additionally, I'd like to see one more page of organic forms with contour curves - being sure to draw the curves confidently and align them to a central minor axis line. You're not doing too badly in this area, but I definitely feel like we need to cement the idea of them wrapping around the forms a little more solidly, since it was somewhat weaker when you got into the dissections.

Uncomfortable

2017-04-29 16:17

Before we get into the critique, I do want to point out that you've effectively made one submission every day for the last four days. There's a couple of issues with this:

• It raises the serious concern that you're rushing and not focusing as much on each and every stroke you put down as you could.

• You may not be taking breaks when you should be - working while tired will result in sloppiness, which in turn will cause you to practice bad habits. You should take breaks regularly and spread your work out in order to achieve the best results.

Additionally, you do need to give some thought to whether or not the number of critiques you are requesting reflect what you are giving in return for them. While it isn't terribly common, I try to point this out to students who have a tendency to submit too frequently - this service is extremely cheap because it's a communal thing. There are supporters who don't submit for critique or do so rarely, there are supporters who submit a couple times a week, there are supporters who give several times more than others and so on - and it's all pooled together so I can be compensated fairly for the time I put into the lessons, and into reviewing homework submissions. When any one student submits very frequently, they are taking a disproportionate amount of that pool for themselves (relative to the amount they're putting in), and are therefore taking that time away from others.

Anyway, onto the critique.

Your arrows are looking pretty solid - your execution of those lines are particularly well done, as they flow fairly smoothly despite maintaining an irregular parallel pair of strokes (keeping the two sides of the arrow evenly spaced out). One thing I want to point out however is that your arrows tend to be restricted to moving across the page - keep in mind that these arrows exist in three dimensional space. As such, you should push yourself to play with having those arrows move from points farther away to points closer as well, in order to play with the dimension of depth. Actually setting out such points before drawing your arrow can help.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are alright - I can see you shifting the degree of your ellipses as the form itself turns in space, though I think you should give these notes a read if you haven't already. They may help you make the decision of which degree should be used at a specific location.

Additionally, your ellipses here are so-so. Some of them are a little stiff, so make sure you're drawing from your shoulder. You also want to work on keeping the ellipses consistently aligned to the central minor axis line - you're not doing a bad job of this, but there are places where you seem to lose focus on this point.

Lastly, the same issue I raised about the arrows can be applied here as well - always remember that these forms are three dimensional, and therefore don't just flow across a flat page. Try to play with the depth dimension as well.

Your organic forms with contour curves aren't great. I can see you making attempts to wrap your curves around those three dimensional forms, but often times they don't convincingly rest on the surface nor give the impression that they're wrapping around at the edges. As the curve approaches the edge of a rounded form, its curvature is going to accelerate before hooking back around. Here's an example of what I mean. Additionally, here are some notes and a video on the subject. This is a common issue, but definitely one we need to tackle. I strongly recommend using the overshooting approach mentioned in the notes I just linked, as it helps force you to think of the curves as being the visible portion of the full ellipse. Also, while it can be difficult to properly draw the central minor axis line, working on keeping your contour curves aligned to it will make it easier to convey that illusion that they're wrapping around the form.

Your dissections aren't bad, though I strongly encourage you to avoid hatching at all costs, at least when drawing with these pens. There's a couple reasons. It's a decent technique with pencils, where the graphite tends to build up together using a range of values, but when done in ink - especially fineliners/felt tip pens - it will create a lot of alternating dark/light spots which contrast heavily with one another and draw the viewer's eye unintentionally. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, hatching is regularly used as a short-hand for "I didn't want to leave this area blank, but I also didn't want to bother to look more closely to see what texture exists on this surface." When we're used to just applying hatching to everything, we tend not to think more deeply about what we're actually trying to depict. There's also nothing wrong with leaving a surface blank - and you do have some examples here where you didn't use hatching, and you were fine with leaving surfaces blank, and they tended to be much more successful.

Another issue that is somewhat related is that you should, at all costs, avoid any kind of random, unplanned strokes. Beginners often feel that textures are chaotic and unruly, because it's easy to be overwhelmed by all the visual information present in a texture at first. They'll respond by seeing chaos, and therefore drawing chaos. Textures are virtually never chaotic - there are flows and rhythms present that all follow their own rules. The first step to being able to see and identify them is to respond to being overwhelmed by stopping and thinking, instead of scribbling. In your dissections, you've demonstrated that you currently do both - at times you hold yourself back, at others you don't give yourself enough of a chance to observe and study what's there.

If you're interested in learning more about approaching textures, take a look at the 25 texture challenge. This challenge is meant to be done over a long period of time, in parallel with other lessons, rather than all at once, so don't try to do it in just one sitting. The notes there are definitely worth reading though. Ultimately drawabox is not focused on texture and detail, as it's quite easy to become distracted by it and ignore the real meat of the lessons, which is more about construction and form, so you'll find that I don't touch on it too much in other lessons.

Your form intersections need work - but not for the reason you raised. As mentioned in the lesson, the exercise is about understanding how to draw forms within the same space such that they feel cohesive and consistent. The actual intersections themselves are a much more difficult spatial problem that I want students to start thinking about, but that I do not expect them to be able to wrap their heads around yet.

Your boxes aren't great. You've got a lot of near plane/far plane size relationship issues, and generally your understanding of 3D space still isn't there yet. This isn't particularly strange though, considering how quickly you've been tearing through the lessons. Additionally, your line quality here isn't great. A lot of your ellipses are stiff and uneven, and while your straight lines are definitely better than they have been in the past, it still doesn't look to me like you're applying the ghosting method particularly carefully.

The stretched forms - which you mentioned you realized was a mistake afterwards - definitely did not make this exercise remotely easy for you. By keeping your forms more equilateral in all three dimensions, you cut a lot of the additional challenge that perspective brings to the table out, allowing you to focus on keeping the forms consistent and exploring space at a more manageable scale.

Your organic intersections are okay, though they do suffer from the same weak contour curves I mentioned before.

I want you to do the following:

• One page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• Two pages of organic forms with contour curves

• First, look over the box challenge material notes again and practice it until you feel comfortable. Make sure you apply your corrections as I mentioned in my last critique, and get used to identifying the more obvious issues where lines diverge where they should converge.

• Then do two pages of form intersections with boxes only

• Then do two pages of form intersections with whatever forms you choose.

I do not want you to submit this before May 5th.

Uncomfortable

2017-04-29 16:51

Pretty well done! Your arrows are looking solid, and demonstrate a good grasp of how they flow through three dimensions of space, instead of just spanning across the flat plane of the page. Your organic forms are reasonably well done, though I think it may help to read through these notes to better understand how the ellipses' degrees should vary at various points through the organic form.

For your organic forms with contour curves, you're doing quite well, just don't forget to include the central minor axis line, as it's important in terms of being able to align the curves/ellipses correctly.

Your dissections demonstrate a lot of solid studying and care, along with a wide variety of textures and experimentation. The only thing I want to mention here is that you should always remember that as a texture reaches the edges of a rounded surface (as that surface turns away from the viewer), the texture itself is going to be compressed. So if you had a bunch of speckled dots on a surface, all spread out evenly, you'd have many more dots much closer together along the edges of the organic form than in the dead center where the surface is pointing directly at the viewer.

Your form intersections were reasonably well done - just a couple things. Firstly, draw through your boxes, as covered in the 250 box challenge. Secondly, the instructions specifically stated that you should avoid forms stretched in any one dimension, like long cylinders. This brings a lot of perspective distortion/foreshortening into the mix and overcomplicates an already difficult exercise. Keeping things more equilateral in all three dimensions makes the exercise more manageable and can keep you focused on keeping your forms consistent and cohesive.

Your organic intersections are generally okay, though there's definitely room for improvement here. The contour curves were applied with somewhat less care as they were in the contour curves exercise, so make sure you're not slacking on that front.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-04-30 21:18

I'm glad that comic was able to motivate you to get back on the horse! Generally you've done a pretty decent job, but there are a few areas that could benefit from some extra focus.

• Your arrows are flowing nicely. One additional thing you can consider when doing this exercise is how those arrows flow from a point farther from the viewer to a point closer. Basically a lot of your arrows stay at roughly the same level of depth, flowing mostly across a relatively two-dimensional space.

• You're doing a great job of trying to get those contour curves to wrap around the organic forms, and I'm glad to see that you're really pushing how they accelerate their curvature as they reach the edge, and how you're even playing a little bit with overshooting them. One area that can improve however is to keep a closer eye on the curves' alignment to those central minor axis lines. Basically these curves are just the visible portions of the larger ellipses, and those ellipses need to be aligned to the minor axis line that describes the general direction of flow of the organic form. Keeping them aligned essentially keeps each circular cross-section perpendicular to that direction of flow, which in turn can help you better reinforce the illusion that the curve is wrapping around correctly.

• Additionally, give these notes a read. They may help you better grasp what the degrees of each ellipse/curve describes about how that cross-section is oriented relative to the viewer. I definitely see that you play with the direction of those curves, so I think you're moving in the direction of getting a better grasp of how these things sit in 3D space. These notes should help solidify that understanding.

• Your dissections are coming along well - you're doing a good job of experimenting with lots of different textures and taking the time to observe and study them carefully.

• Generally good work on the form intersections, but I do have a couple suggestions. Firstly, the instructions did say to avoid using any forms that are stretched in any one dimension, like long cylinders, long boxes, etc. You've got a fair number of stretched cylinders and pyramids in there. Keeping your forms relatively equilateral in all three dimensions eliminates a lot of the extra complexity of foreshortening and perspective that is bound to make a difficult exercise an even greater struggle. Secondly, make sure you draw through those boxes and other forms, as covered in the 250 box challenge. This will help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space.

• Your organic intersections are coming along well, though you've definitely got to watch out for the alignment of those curves relative to the minor axis line.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, but make sure you continue practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 regularly as part of a warmup routine. 10-15 minutes of 2-3 random exercises from the lot should be good at the beginning of each sitting.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-02 19:51

Nicely done. Your arrows flow nicely through space, and your organic forms are looking solid and capturing that illusion of the curves running along their surface and wrapping around quite well. Did want to mention though, when doing this exercise (specifically with the contour curves), make sure you include the minor axis line in there so you have something to align your curves to.

Your dissections are alright although they are definitely showing signs that you could observe and study your reference images more closely, and also more frequently. It's normal for beginners to rely more on their memory than they should - it results in a lot of cartoonier results, where the brain has tossed out key information in order to be able to process the vast amount of data being observed. The best way to tackle this is to ensure that you keep looking back at your reference, taking only a second or two to put down another mark before returning your gaze and refreshing your memory. Also, try and ask yourself questions about what specific kinds of details give the surface the particular illusion of seeming rough, smooth, wet, sticky, etc.

Moving on, your form intersections were generally well constructed. I do recommend though that you'd benefit from reading through the notes on the 250 cylinder challenge to get a better grasp of how important the minor axis is when constructing cylinders and cones. There should also be some more specific demos for different forms in this large dump.

Lastly, solid work on the organic intersections. I definitely get the impression that you fully grasp how these forms exist in 3D space, and how they interact with one another. Keep up the good work.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so go ahead and move onto the next one. Don't forget to continue to practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 though - picking two or three at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes total is a good way to keep sharpening those basic skills.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-02 20:09

Very solid work all across the board. Your organic forms convey a great sense of volume, your dissections' textures were varied and very carefully executed with a lot of time clearly dedicated to simply observing and studying, and your form and organic intersections demonstrate a strong grasp of three dimensional space, and keeping your various forms consistent with it.

The thing about the actual intersections themselves though, I mention in the lesson that they're not really the focus of the lesson, and they're naturally more complex than I'd expect students to be able to manage successfully right now. That said, I do want students to give it a shot so they can start thinking about how these forms cut into one another.

So in that regard, the only guidance I can offer here is to actually try putting in those intersections. You start by following your gut, and you will make mistakes, but these mistakes are entirely necessary to start getting a sense of how these different pieces fit together. It will take time, but if you don't make the attempts, you will end up holding yourself back.

The only other thing I wanted to mention was in regards to your organic forms with contour curves. Don't draw in the ellipses first, then draw your curves on top, Just draw the curve - the exercise is very much about trying to grasp the full curvature of the surface without relying on an ellipse. Many students have a tendency not to have their curve wrap around the form properly, so it's important to figure that out. I don't think you'll suffer much from that problem based on what I'm seeing here, but it is something I need to weed out.

So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I want to see two things - one page of organic forms with contour curves without the ellipses drawn in first, and one page of form intersections. The form intersections CAN be one of the pages you already submitted, I just want to see the actual intersections being attempted.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-11 23:52

Pretty well done. Your arrows and organic forms are solid. Your dissections are generally good, though I encourage you to give the lesson section of the texture challenge a read. I don't expect students to have read over it before completing this exercise, of course, but now that you've given it a shot, I can that you'd benefit from more careful and continuous observation (avoid long periods without looking back at your reference), and also avoiding the use of any kind of randomness or scribbling (which I noticed in a couple textures, though generally you were pretty good on this front).

For your form intersections, you're doing well but don't approach this exercise in two steps (a rough sketch followed by a clean-up pass), as this will rob your drawing of any sense of confidence. Draw your first pass with confidence, don't try to make your lines faint or hide them. This will ensure that your ellipses come out fairly even, and that your forms feel solid. From there you can add a bit of line weight to clarify overlaps (as discussed here), but don't make the mistake of trying to replace lines with cleaner ones. All you're doing is emphasizing lines that already exist, and doing so with the ghosting method. That means drawing each stroke confidently, rather than slow-and-steady. I noticed that some of your spheres definitely suffered from you slowing down while drawing, as you tried to hit them in a single round.

Remember that these are all just exercises - the point is not to make a pretty drawing that you can pin on your fridge. The point is to learn to draw confidently and to gain a deeper understanding of how to use your arm, and how to understand 3D space.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-05-13 19:54

There's a lot of instructions that you seem to have missed. It's extremely important that you read through the lesson content as many times as is necessary to absorb it. There's a lot of written content there, and I know english isn't your first language, so you may find that you'll need to read through it several times, and even reread an exercise's instructions each time you sit down to work on it.

• For your arrows, you're generally doing decently. One thing I did notice though is that the arrows generally seem to move across the two dimensional page, rather than through 3D space. When working on these, try and imagine in your mind a point farther away from the viewer, and one closer to the viewer, then try and draw your arrow flowing through space between those two points. This will help you think in terms of all three dimensions, rather than just the two of your paper.

• You didn't draw through many of the ellipses for your organic forms with contour ellipses. You need to be doing this for every single ellipse you draw for my lessons, without exception.

• You did not draw the minor axis line for your organic forms with contour curves as instructed. This is extremely important - each curve is really just the visible portion of the larger ellipse, and that ellipse should always be aligned to that central minor axis line so that the minor axis cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension.

• Your contour curves also aren't creating the illusion that they're really wrapping around a three dimensional form either. First off, I recommend keeping these forms as simple as possible - basic sausage-like forms like the one in my demonstration are fine. Secondly, look at how in my example the curvature of the contour line accelerates as it reaches the edge, and eventually it hooks back around in a way that makes us imagine how that line continues to run along the object's surface along the other side. Yours don't do this - if we were to project where your contour lines would continue, they'd fly off the shape. This in turn breaks the illusion that the lines run along the form's surface, which is the main purpose of a contour line - to give us a visual hint as to how that surface flows through 3D space. Here are some additional notes on this fairly common issue.

• As a side note, give these notes a read.

• Your dissections definitely do need work, but that's fine for now. This exercise is really here to let me gauge your observational skills so I could ultimately point you in the right direction. There are two primary things that stand out to me. Firstly, you work from memory, rather than observation. You look at your reference for a while, then spend yet another while drawing. Give the notes on the texture challenge, as they explain why this is not the best approach. As for doing the challenge itself, you're welcome to - though remember two things. Firstly, this challenge is not meant to be all at once like the other two. It's meant to be done alongside other lessons, over a long period of time. Secondly, drawabox is primarily about construction - establishing the illusion of form and three dimensionality, and combining these forms in a way that feels solid and believable. Texture and detail is more often when tackling these rudimentary concepts a distraction. Students who are to preoccupied with learning how to draw lots of detail will often ignore the underlying construction, which is by far the more important part. So as you continue to move forwards, try and separate your efforts to understand how to texture. You may even want to just focus strictly on construction for now, and leave texture out entirely.

• The reason I asked you to do the 250 box challenge before moving onto lesson 2 was specifically because you were not ready to tackle the form intersections. That said, you also seem to have very much missed the instruction about avoiding any forms that are too stretched in any one dimension (like long boxes, long tubes, etc.) so as to keep the exercise from getting even more difficult than it already is. Another thing I noticed is that you have a tendency to draw your initial construction for each form faintly, then go over it more carefully to "clean things up". This is an approach you should avoid from now on. Make sure you draw every line with full confidence - don't worry about the end result, or focus on making a pretty picture. All we are doing here are exercises - we could throw them all away upon completion and we would not have lost a thing. The point is to learn how to draw forms that feel solid and confident. Draw through all of your ellipses, apply the ghosting method to each line you put down (when you try to draw cleaner lines, I can see that you're drawing slower, which makes your lines more wobbly). You CAN add line weight to help clarify key overlaps as discussed in the 250 box challenge, but the important distinction there is that you are not replacing lines with cleaner ones. You are adding additional weight to emphasize lines that already exist, and you are doing so by using the ghosting method. If drawing more confidently causes you to make a mistake, that's not a big deal.

• Another issue with your form intersections is your use of hatching lines. Any line that goes on the surface of a 3D form plays the role of a contour line and describes how that surface flows through 3D space. If you apply straight hatching to a curved surface, it will read as being flat. I recommend avoiding hatching altogether for these form intersections.

• Despite suffering from the same issues I mentioned about your organic forms with contour curves, your organic intersections still manage to demonstrate a reasonable grasp of how the different forms relate to one another, and how they exist together in 3D space.

Before anything else, I want you to complete and submit the 250 box challenge. Make sure you're drawing through each box as instructed. Then once I've marked the challenge as complete, do the following:

• Two pages of organic forms with contour ellipses

• Two pages of organic forms with contour curves

• Two pages of form intersections

Before you start each exercise, make sure you reread its instructions.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-15 01:09

Pretty nice work! Just a few things that I'd like to mention:

• For your dissections, you're doing okay, but I do see a few signs here and there that you observe your reference for a while, seem to get the jist of what's going on, and then rely on somewhat structured randomness (squiggles of a certain sort, or a particular kind of pattern) fueled largely by what you remember having seen. While this isn't serving you too badly, our ability to remember information like this is inherently flawed. You can read as to why in the lesson section of the 25 texture challenge, and long with how you can combat this.

• Keep in mind that the form intersections exercise is not actually about the intersections themselves, but rather about being able to draw many 3D forms within the same space without them feeling inconsistent (I mention this in the instructions). The intersections part is largely just to start getting your brain thinking about these particular kinds of mental challenges, which for the time being are definitely going to continue to be very challenging to you. As long as you make a solid attempt at them, you'll find yourself beginning to consider these kinds of problems from different angles, and it will ultimately get clearer with time. Don't feel bad about the fact that it's difficult right now, as it's supposed to be.

• For your organic intersections, the exercise was done fine, I just wanted to point out that your application of shadow is messy as hell. Hatching wasn't the greatest choice here (and in this particular case, was sloppy to begin with). Never rely on any kind of scribbling or randomness - all of your lines should be purposeful and planned. In this particular case, you should try to fill your little cast shadows with solid black, as hatching generally results in really high contrast (which draws the eye of the viewer unintentionally).

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

2017-05-15 21:00

Nice work! I really like your bold, confident linework. It definitely goes a long way to push the solidity of your forms.

Your arrows are flowing very nicely through space. Your organic forms with contour curves are generally quite well done too, though I do want to stress the importance of ensuring that your contour ellipses and contour curves align to the central minor axis line such that they are cut into two equal, symmetrical halves. This alignment is pretty important.

Your dissection textures were exceptionally well done, so great work there. Just remember that this lesson is meant to be started off as any old organic form with contour curves exercise, so that when you apply your texture, it's to something that feels fully solid. I know those lines will get in the way of your textures, but ultimately the goal here isn't to create something pretty, but rather to grasp what it means to work with solid, three dimensional forms, and in this case, specifically to wrap texture around them. Still, the textures themselves are very well done, and demonstrate exceptional attention to detail.

Your form intersections are looking good. The intersections themselves aren't always correct, but you're doing exactly what I'm interested in seeing - this exercise is all about learning how to draw forms that exist in the same space together whilst feeling consistent and cohesive, with the intersections being an extra addition that is very challenging and demands a much greater grasp of 3D space (which will develop with time). By taking a stab at the intersections as you have done here, you've basically gotten your gears turning in regards to those kinds of spatial problems.

Lastly, your organic intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how these different, floppy forms relate to one another, and how they support each others' weight in certain areas, and sag in others.

Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-15 21:19

Looking pretty good. You're definitely moving in the right direction, but I do have a few helpful points to remark upon:

• Your arrows are coming along well. One suggestion I have is to try to plan your arrows such that they move from a point farther away from the viewer towards a point closer to the viewer. This will help you think about the three dimensional space to which your paper is merely a window. Right now you're a bit stuck in terms of thinking about things that move across the two dimensions of the page, without moving much in that third dimension.

• Decent work for the organic forms with contour lines. For your contour ellipses though, work on drawing them more confidently (they're quite hesitant right now, which causes your lines to wobble). For your contour curves, same thing about confidence - but also, don't come back over the line with an additional stroke. I think you may be trying to apply the idea of 'drawing through ellipses' here, just on the curving segment instead. Unfortunately there's no benefit to that, since you have to lift your pen up in order to move back to the beginning, so try to just do one stroke here.

• Also for the organic forms with contour curves, give these notes a read. They should help explain how the degree of each ellipse/curve comes into play, and how to change the degree depending on the orientation of the ellipse relative to the viewer.

• For your dissections, your textures are showing a pretty good start. You're demonstrating a lot of patience and care, which is definitely key. The one area where I think that is holding you back however is how exactly you spend your time. Looking at your work, I get the impression that for most of these, you spent a good deal of time observing and studying your reference, followed by a good deal of time drawing. This results in you drawing from your memory of what you saw - unfortunately, our memory has a tendency to oversimplify things, and can sometimes go so far as to make things look cartoony. In your case, the result wasn't quite so far down that spectrum - instead, it just had a very subtle repetitiveness to it instead. When drawing from reference, I recommend observing carefully, then taking only a moment to put down a couple marks before returning to your reference to refresh your memory. It definitely is time consuming, but this will help you capture more specific marks and consider what gives a texture the illusion of being rough, smooth, wet, sticky, etc. in a deeper sense.

• For your form intersections, there's a few issues here that I'd like to highlight. In general, remember that this exercise is not really about the intersections themselves. It's about understanding how to draw different forms within the same space so they feel consistent and cohesive. The intersections are a more challenging addition that you are not expected to be able to grasp just yet - rather, I just want you to start thinking about it. On the first page, a major issue I'm noticing is that you're going over your lines way too many times. Firstly, for your straight lines, you should be executing each line with a single mark. You can come back later to add line weight, but your lines here look like you draw a bunch of lines on top of each other with very little planning or application of the ghosting method. Because of this, they look very hairy. For your ellipses, drawing through them is important, but you're definitely doing so too much on this particular page. Two rounds is ideal, three is okay, but any more than that is way too many. Later pages are definitely cleaner, but here you've gone in the opposite direction - you're no longer drawing through your ellipses at all, and when you try and add line weight, it's more like you're trying to go extremely slowly and carefully to "clean up" your lines. You've got to take the time to prepare before drawing, but when you do execute your marks, you must do so confidently. That's what the ghosting method is about.

• For your organic intersections, notice how each organic form is extremely wobbly? I don't mean the lines themselves, but rather how the forms are wiggling around. This should generally be avoided, as it undermines the solidity of the form you're trying to construct. Smooth, simple consistent lines feel solid - wavy, complex lines feel less so. For now, I want you to focus on constructing simple forms that feel solid.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do one more page of form intersections (draw confidently, use the ghosting method - and don't go over your lines with a second pass to clean them up), and one more page of organic intersections (simple, smooth sausage forms).

Uncomfortable

2017-05-18 21:19

Generally pretty well done, though here are a few things to keep in mind:

• For your organic forms with contour curves, you neglected to include the central minor axis line, which is extremely important for lining up those curves and ellipses. Keeping them aligned properly helps maintain the illusion that they're wrapping around, and it can be considerably more difficult to achieve that same illusion when a line is misaligned.

• You're definitely making a good start with your dissections, but there's a lot of examples here that show a particularly limited amount of attention actually being paid to your references. You're working a fair bit from memory rather than direct observation - for example, look at your birch bark texture - I guarantee you there's a lot more going on in a piece of birch bark. The trick is to ensure that you don't spend long periods of time drawing without looking at your reference. The moment we look away, your brain will start oversimplifying what you saw, resulting in memories that don't contain much specific information. Instead, you want to spend most of your time observing, looking away only for a second or two to put down a couple marks before returning your gaze to your reference material to refresh your memory.

• Your form intersections and organic intersections were quite well done.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, just keep the points about your minor axis and paying closer attention to your reference images in mind. Additionally, you may want to take a look at the notes on the 25 texture challenge, which expands on the idea of how your brain processes information.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-21 17:57

Quite well done! Your arrows are flowing nicely through 3D space, your dissections demonstrate a good start in terms of careful observation and thinking through how to tackle a variation of textures in different ways, your form intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how they sit in 3D space whilst maintaining a sense of cohesiveness together, and your organic intersections show me that you seem to grasp how these forms interact with one another, supporting each others' weight and sagging where appropriate.

The only issue I noticed was that your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are a touch on the sloppy side. I can see that you're hooking them around in order to achieve the illusion that they're actually wrapping around the rounded form, but it doesn't look to me like you're really paying enough attention to each individual curve. Additionally, you're not doing a particularly good job of aligning each curve to its minor axis. Your ellipses are somewhat better in this regard - it's important to keep in mind that each curve is merely the visible portion of the entire ellipse that goes all the way around, and therefore behaves in the same way in terms of its alignment.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-05-22 23:00

Pretty nice work! Just a couple things I'd like to mention:

• For the organic forms with contour ellipses, I'm getting a slight impression that you're not exactly tying the nature of the ellipses themselves to what they're meant to represent in 3D space. As a result, the degrees for each ellipse seem to be chosen somewhat randomly. Try reading through these notes, it should help somewhat.

• Also, for future reference, remember that simpler sausage forms are much easier to imbue with the illusion of solidity and volume (as opposed to more complex forms with wavy edges). Instead of starting with more complex forms, it's often better to start simpler and then use the simple form as a sort of foundation on which we can add more complex form information. We'll get into this a little more in later lessons.

• For your dissections, your observation of your textures is quite well done. The only issue is in cases such as the "metal" texture on the first page and the stainless steel tube on the second one. These textures completely ignore the actual form information of the surface they're being drawn onto, and as a result they flatten it out completely. These textures are meant to wrap around an existing form, and therefore their details run along the curvature of that surface. Straight lines applied to a rounded surface would curve to match.

The rest was done quite well - your contour curves wrap around the forms nicely, your form intersections demonstrate a solid grasp of 3D space, and your organic intersections show that you understand how these forms interact with one another. Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-26 23:17

Not bad! Your arrows flow nicely through 3D space and delve in and out of the depth dimension rather than just going across 2D space. Your contour curves wrap nicely around your organic forms, giving the impression that they actually hook all the way around the rounded surface. Your dissections demonstrate a variety of interesting textures, tackled with different approaches tailored to the particular subject matter rather than using a cookie-cutter approach. Your form intersections feel consistent and well constructed, and the intersections themselves are even well done (though that requires a fairly advanced grasp of 3D space. Lastly, your organic intersections show a well developing sense of how those forms all interact with one another.

The only thing that jumped out at me was that you didn't include the minor axis lines in your organic forms with contour curves, and as such the alignment of some of those contour curves are a little off. Make sure you include these in the future.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2017-05-27 00:01

Great work. Your organic forms and contour lines do a pretty good job of conveying those volumes (though I definitely think that you could use a little more focus in your contour curves specifically, which are definitely coming along well but need just a little extra push to really solidify). Your dissections show a lot of great experimentation and fantastic variety, with different approaches being used across the board. Your form intersections are very consistent and cohesive, and show a sense of 3D space that is coming along well. Some of your boxes are a little skewed at times, and your near/far plane size relationship isn't always the best, but in general things feel quite solid, and it all seems to be on track.

Lastly, your organic intersections are decent - I definitely get the sense that you fully grasp how each form interacts with its neighbours. What falls a little short here is that the contour curves themselves aren't the greatest, especially the ones that run along the length of each sausage form. This really comes back to a little extra focus on this front, keeping your mind on the illusion that these lines run along the very surface of the form, and therefore must hook around whenever that surface turns away.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-05-26 20:26

Thanks for your interest in pursuing my lessons! I currently limit my homework critiques to those who support me on patreon - if you happen to do so, check your patreon inbox as I always reach out to new patrons to get their reddit information. It's also important to know that I only critique work in order - that is, students complete lesson 1 first and submit it for critique, wait for a response and the go-ahead to move onto the next lesson and so on. It's time consuming but it allows me to identify key errors that tend to be hidden in later lessons.

It also looks like you only included the last two exercises in your submission - when submitting work for my critique, the submission should include all homework for that lesson.

Laaastly, it looks like you did the work in pencil. I only accept work done with the recommended tools (listed in the homework section for each lesson - in this case, ink, specifically fineliners).

Now none of these restrictions apply if you want to receive a homework submission from the community (by posting directly to the subreddit here). People will generally respond more if you stick to the conditions above that I hold for my own critiques, but it's more of a recommendation in that case.

Uncomfortable

2017-06-03 17:35

It certainly is better in several ways than the last time you tried it, though there are a few things that stand out to me.

• Rather than a page of organic forms with contour curves, you seem to have done one form only. Additionally, the contour curves in this one example more or less cut straight across the form with a very minimal arc. This does not give the impression that the form itself is rounded at all, but rather flattens it out. Remember that these contour curves are meant to run along the surface of the form - as they reach the edge, their curvature should accelerate as they hook around so they can continue along to the other side. Here are some notes on the issue, and be sure to watch the video linked there as well. When trying this again, I want you to apply that 'overshooting' method described there.

• Your textures are an okay start for the most part, but keep in mind what constitutes a texture and what doesn't. Texture is essentially what wraps around a form and gives it the impression of being rough, wet, dry, smooth, sticky, bumpy, etc. While textures are made up of small forms of their own, they generally follow whatever they're wrapped around. So the orca/killer whale you added on the second page is most definitely not a texture. Also, avoid any kind of randomness or scribbling, as you did in other parts of the same form as the orca. We only scribble when we're not sure what rhythms and patterns exist, and we do so in order to save ourselves the trouble of looking deeper and studying things more carefully. You'll find more notes about all of this in the texture challenge, which you can read through later.

• I see no sign of you using the ghosting method in your form intersections, and as a result your lines look a little sketchy. I'm pleased to see that you're drawing through some of your boxes, but you should be doing this for all of them. Also, you seem to have missed the instruction about not drawing overly stretched forms (like long cylinders), as this takes an exercise that is already quite difficult and makes it even moreso. Lastly, make sure you draw through all of your ellipses. You seem to be doing it somewhat selectively.

• Your organic intersections suffer from the same problems as your organic forms with contour curves, but aside from that they're okay. The only other thing I want to mention here is that you've got some forms that are particularly wavy - avoid this kind of complexity for now. The more complex a form is, the more difficult it is to build up the illusion that it is solid and three dimensional. So a simple sausage form will feel much more solid than a form with irregular waves to its edges. The whole constructional method revolves around this - that you start out with things at their simplest, and then build on top of those more solid foundations to add that complexity in later passes.

I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour curves, followed by two more pages of form intersections. Also, when doing the form intersections, don't add any line weight. Focus on drawing everything confidently (and applying the ghosting method) in the first pass, with no follow-up passes to clean things up.

Uncomfortable

2017-06-04 19:14

There are definitely quite a few things to work on here, though many of the issues are fairly common things students face.

• Your arrows are looking decent. When practicing these in the future, I'd recommend checking out the top left of these notes.

• Your contour ellipses are okay, although your choice of degree is a little arbitrary. These notes should clarify what the degree of an ellipse represents in regards to the circle it represents in 3D space.

• Your ellipses are also looking a little bit stiff. Make sure you're applying the ghosting method to these. That means taking the time to plan and prepare beforehand, ghosting through the drawing motion, and ultimately executing the mark without hesitation, but with a confident, persistent pace. This will help keep them more evenly shaped.

• Your contour curves don't wrap convincingly around your organic forms. Read these notes and watch the video linked there as well. Some of yours are a little more successful than others (the right and bottom of these, although you need to keep the ellipses snugly between the edges, and the curve on the side closest to us on the bottom one should really be an ellipse). Remember what contour curves are - they're lines that sit on the very surface of a three dimensional form, and by virtue of running along that surface, they can help describe that surface to us. Think of it like having a long balloon (of the sort clowns make balloon animals from), and drawing on its surface with a big black marker. That is essentially what you're doing to your forms. As those curves reach the edges of the form, they should accelerate in their curvature and hook back around to give the impression that they continue onto the other side.

• Your dissections vary in quality. I see some that are a start in the right direction. Others are examples of common mistakes. At all costs, you should avoid any kind of scribbling or randomness. This automatically implies that you did not take the time to study the patterns and rhythms that are present in your reference image. Another issue I noticed in some places is similar to the issue with the contour lines - you've got to imagine that you're wrapping these textures around an existing 3D form, so they run along its surface. Lastly, it's important not to let yourself work from memory - the moment you look away from your reference image, your brain goes to work throwing out the bulk of the information you had observed. As such, we need to continually look back to our reference, taking only a moment or two to put down a couple lines before looking back. Not doing so results in textures that look cartoony, because they're based on a very limited amount of information. I talk about this more in the texture challenge notes, which are definitely worth reading.

• Your form intersections are a good start, though you need to be drawing through all of the ellipses you draw for my lessons. I also noticed that you drew through some of the boxes (which is great), but not all of them - make sure you do this across the board, as it will help you better grasp how these forms sit in 3D space.

• Aside from being upside down, and the issues I mentioned about your organic forms with contour curves, the organic intersections are okay. There's certainly room for improvement, but I do feel they demonstrate the bulk of what I'm looking for at this point.

I'd like you to do two pages of organic forms with contour ellipses, four pages of organic forms with contour curves and one page of form intersections. Safe travels!

Uncomfortable

2017-06-04 19:34

On one hand, you're demonstrating a lot of confidence with your linework, but on the other, you're also being pretty sloppy and that has a negative impact on the perceived solidity and three-dimensionality of your results. You've got to slow down. Remember that the ghosting method, aside from involving actually ghosting over your intended mark, is all about separating the drawing process into 90% planning and preparation, and 10% actual execution with a confident stroke.

In general, it does feel like you're putting effort in some of the wrong places. For instance, I noticed that your organic forms themselves are generally focused on being somewhat wackier shapes/curves. There's really no need for this, and certainly no benefit. I mean, look at the one from the lesson. It's very simple. This allows us to focus on the meat of the exercise, which is taking that shape and giving it volume.

You are definitely improving as far as having your contour curves wrap all the way around however, so congratulations on that. They are however still pretty sloppy - I can't shake the feeling that you drew them all in quick succession, rather than planning out each and every one individually. I have seen this problem with students, especially those who are very eager - their minds tend to focus on several steps ahead, instead of the one they're on right then. So for instance, they may be drawing the first contour curve, but their mind's already set on the fourth or fifth. One can imagine how this would lead to considerable sloppiness. You've got to make sure you do everything you can before executing to ensure that the mark falls exactly where you mean it to.

Lastly, your organic intersections, while again better than your first submission, still feel kind of flat at times. A big part of that is the really heavy, graphic shadows that don't actually run along the surfaces they're cast onto. It looks like they started out as line weight (and were therefore stuck to the edge of the form itself), but they ended up getting so thick that they became more like cast shadows. The thing about shadows is that they are not attached to the form that casts them - they rest on the surfaces on which they are cast. Therefore, like contour curves, they need to run along that surface, otherwise you'll lose the illusion that what you've drawn exists in three dimensions.

Additionally, take a look at this page. You've got a form that comes up and over what is otherwise the topmost form, but where it does, this form ends up looking completely flat, as though it has no volume at all. Since these forms are meant to be rounded, it's especially important that you take into consideration how this would be demonstrated through its silhouette. Like this.

So, while we're pretty far into these revisions, I do want you to do just a few more:

• One page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• One page of organic forms with contour curves

• One page of organic intersections.

You're improving with every set, but there's definitely some habits here that I want to nip early so you're able to move forward with greater ease in the future.

Uncomfortable

2017-06-13 02:05

Generally you've done well. There's just two issues that I'm noticing, and they're related to each other. They have to do with your organic forms with contour lines.

To start with, your contour ellipses are not quite aligning correctly with the central minor axis line. Remember that the minor axis runs through each ellipse, cutting it into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrowest dimension. Many of yours are slanted in this regard.

For your organic forms with contour curves, you're struggling to achieve the illusion that your contour lines actually run along the surface of this rounded, three dimensional form. Your lines need to accelerate in their curvature as they approach the edges of a given form, and ultimately hook back around to give the impression that they continue on along the other side. Additionally, ensuring that the curves (which are really just the visible portion of a larger, more complete contour ellipse) align to the minor axes will also help, as it can be particularly difficult to achieve that sort of wrap-around illusion when the curve isn't aligned correctly.

You'll find some additional information on this particular issue in these notes. The 'overshooting' approach explained there can definitely be helpful, as it bridges the gap between drawing full ellipses and drawing the partial curves.

I'd like you to do one more page of organic forms with contour ellipses, followed by two pages of organic forms with contour curves.

Uncomfortable

2017-06-21 15:27

Generally quite well done! I'm going to be a bit more brief and direct than usual, since I don't have too much time (thanks to my ridiculous work schedule), but thankfully I only have a couple points to raise:

• For your dissections, they're generally coming along great. My main recommendation here is to try and reduce your use of hatching. People tend to use it to fill areas in, but they don't end up really giving much thought to what's actually present. Don't be afraid to fill areas in with solid black, or even to leave surfaces blank. These are active decisions, while hatching tends to be that last little bit that people give up on. Overall you're very fastidious and observant with your textures, so there's just a couple of places where this is a problem. Examples: Rusted metal, tree bark. Alternatively, you did use hatching with the shiny metal, but this was more directly planned so that sort is fine.

• For your form intersections, you roughed your forms in lightly, then went over them to clean up your lines. Avoid this approach in the future. Worrying about being fainter will cause our confidence when drawing to decrease, which in turn has negative effects on the linework. More than that though, when we come back to add the darker lines, those in particular tend to be drawn more slowly and carefully, so our 'clean' lines tend to be quite stiff. Remember that adding line weight is not a matter of replacing your linework to clean it up. When adding extra weight, we're emphasizing lines that already exist, and doing so only in key areas (often to emphasize overlaps or perform other such clarifications). We use the ghosting method, and we draw confidently here too. Because the scope is often smaller, mistakes are less noticeable than if we were replacing entire shapes, but either way, if mistakes are to happen, that should be accepted as an inevitability. Drawing confidently always comes first. Again, what I'm saying here is exaggerating the issues you're actually experiencing - you're mostly doing fine. Just keep this in mind in the future.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-06-22 13:38

Not bad, but there are a few things that jump out at me that definitely should be pointed out:

• You did not draw any minor axes for your organic forms with contour ellipses or contour curves exercises. These are extremely important when it comes to aligning the contour lines so they run perpendicular to the flow of the form. This was highlighted as being quite important in the instructions, so make sure you reread them and follow them more carefully.

• Your contour curves don't quite hook back around as they reach the edges of your organic forms. This results in us not being given the impression that they actually run along the surface of a rounded object. Give these notes a read, although I should mention that in your organic intersections you handle this much better.

• You're doing a great job of wrapping patterns around the organic forms in your dissections. The major issue here is that what you're drawing are in fact mostly patterns rather than textures. The difference being that patterns are completely flat, like wallpaper. Texture is made up of smaller forms that cast shadows (which are ultimately the things we perceive as "lines". Be sure to read over the notes on the 25 texture challenge for more information on this.

• In your form intersections, I noticed that you're not drawing through your ellipses. More over, the ends of your cylinders are less elliptical and more capsule-shaped. Aside from this, your spatial reasoning for these constructions is pretty solid.

Aside form that, your work is generally coming along well, with your arrows and organic intersections being quite well done. I'd like you to do the following:

• One page or organic forms with contour ellipses

• One page of organic forms with contour curves

• One page of form intersections

Uncomfortable

2017-06-24 01:57

Over all you've done a pretty solid job. You've got a lot of interesting experimentation with all three dimensions of space with how your arrows flow. Your organic forms with contour lines are generally pretty well done as well. You've definitely done a good job of nailing the contour curves, getting them to wrap around the rounded forms nicely. With that one particularly odd form near the upper left of that page (with the super wavy contour curves), I'm glad that you realized it was a bit of a dead end to pursue. Not necessarily bad as an exercise, but focusing on simpler sausage-based forms is definitely a much more effective way to get your head around this particular challenge. In the next lesson, we'll get into construction, which is all built around the idea of building things up from their simplest state - this experiment is a great example of starting something way too complex. In this particular case, I'd draw three separate sausages alongside each other, and then let them fuse together. This way you'd maintain the solidity of the simpler forms.

I did want to point you to these notes in regards to your contour ellipses. You're making good headway in that area, but I just wanted to make sure that you understood how the degree of each ellipse relates to the circle it represents in 3D space (and more specifically, the orientation of that circle).

Very nice work with your dissection textures. The only recommendation I have in regards to this is that it's best to treat each organic form as though it's merely another organic form with contour lines exercise, with no thought to the fact that you'll be adding texture. This way you end up with a nice, solid form on which to wrap your textures. Here I definitely get the distinct sense that you were a little more timid with those contour curves, because you were a little too focused on the next step. Always keep your mind on what you're doing in a given moment.

Great work with the form intersections. Your forms feel very solid and well constructed, and I'm very glad to see that you started off with just boxes, and then moved into more complex forms. The only thing that I did notice was that, especially with the box-only one, you did let your foreshortening get a touch too dramatic, which has a tendency to throw off the sense of scale. While not being a major culprit of this kind of issue, your boxes rest a little in the grey area between nice-and-shallow, and too-dramatic. If you don't remember the bit about shallow vs. dramatic foreshortening from lesson 1, give this a read. Things definitely get better on this front in the later attempts at the form intersections. On top of just getting the forms to feel consistent, you're also doing a great job of the intersections themselves (which are just the icing on the exercise-cake).

Lastly, your organic intersections are looking fairly solid. If anything, I suppose I'd recommend drawing them a little bigger (to give your brain more room to think through spatial problems), but overall you're doing a great job of demonstrating an understanding of how those forms interact with one another.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. And by the way - thanks for increasing your pledge! It's much appreciated.

Uncomfortable

2017-06-27 02:27

Your work, as always, is definitely coming along great. You're demonstrating a strong grasp of 3D space from multiple angles. Your arrows flow very nicely, exploring all three dimensions rather than being limited to those defined by your page. Your organic forms maintain a strong sense of volume and form, reinforced by well executed contour ellipses. Your contour curves also wrap properly around each form, adhering to their surface, but there's definitely a lot more wobbling visible here, so I'd definitely encourage you to keep on top of that. Always remember to apply the ghosting method, so that your execution is confident, rather than hesitating as you go. Again, remember that mistakes do happen, and we only hesitate when we allow our fear of making mistakes govern our actions.

Your form intersections generally look pretty solid, and they improve considerably over the several pages. Just be careful about being loose with your lines. I noticed that you do sometimes correct mistakes automatically (rather than just leaving them alone), or sometimes immediately reinforce a line with an extra stroke. In general you're actually pretty good about holding yourself back in situations like this, but I still see cases where your lines are visibly different from just adding extra line weight.

Your organic intersections are generally pretty well done. I think that same wobbling I mentioned for your organic forms with contour curves applies here as well, so you've got to get used to applying the same confidence you achieve elsewhere to these kinds of curves, but in general you're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another.

About the texture - you're doing perfectly fine. In fact, you're a little ahead of where I'd expect people to be for this particular lesson (albeit about where I'd expect you in particular to be, as you've demonstrated a better grasp of most things). As you've likely seen from the last lesson, I have a tendency to introduce particular concepts, and get students to start thinking about them, by dropping them in the deep end of that particular pool. In this case, it's a matter of just seeing how a student approaches dealing with a large amount of visual information, and having it wrap around more concrete forms.

Moving onto the 25 texture challenge next is definitely a good idea, to help organize your approach to texture, and to put your energy to a more efficient use. That said, make sure you don't try and treat that challenge like the other two - it's not meant to be done all at once. Rather, it's meant to be spread out over time. You'll benefit much more from tackling one texture at a time, and giving yourself the chance to really absorb what you've learned from it, and to grow from that experience. Figuring out how to tackle different kinds of texture is very much a matter of experience. While there are common principles that connect a lot of different kinds, it is important that you learn them by doing.

One recommendation that I have for now is to try and rely less on generic sort of hatching lines. Try and commit to solid areas of black or white, and if you want to create a transition area between them, try and find an appropriate pattern that exists inside of your reference image. Hatching lines tend to be used more as filler, where a student hasn't quite looked deep enough to find something more suited to the surface they're trying to create. Additionally, as mentioned in the texture challenge notes, always remember that the lines you're drawing are actually just shadows cast by the tiny forms that exist along the surface of your object. Because they are shadows, they can be blasted out if lots of direct light is applied to them, or they can merge together when there isn't enough light hitting that side of object. Don't be afraid to have large areas of white or black, but rather try and treat the areas of texture, and of higher contrast (where you have lots of black/white marks together in a small space) as a sort of precious commodity. If you apply them all over, things will get noisy and distracting. Rather, we want to use those areas to control how the viewer's eye moves over the drawing, from focal point to focal point.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson. And again, thank you for increasing your pledge once again!

Uncomfortable

2017-06-27 02:37

It looks like you did not include the organic forms with contour ellipses, or the organic forms with contour curves exercises. As for the others, your work is coming along, but there are some points I'd like to mention.

• Your arrows flow nicely, although they mostly flow within the confines of the two dimensions defined by the page you're drawing on. Give these notes a read. It's important to try and push your mind into that third dimension, to treat the page as more of a window to a larger three dimensional world rather than defining the limits of the entire space.

• The dissections exercise is largely meant to let me see how you deal with texture, so I know how what kind of practice you'll benefit from. In your case, something I'm seeing a lot of is that your textures tend to be quite simplified and somewhat cartoonish. This tends to occur when our observational skills haven't yet been fully developed. It's quite normal among beginners, and what it means is that you need to get used to drawing what you see, rather than drawing what you remember seeing. When we draw from observation, beginners will often spend lots of time studying their reference, then lots of time drawing. This results in them drawing more from memory than from direct observation. The moment we look away from our reference, our brains toss out a great deal of the information we'd seen. It's an evolutionary trait that's great for processing large amounts of data and identifying patterns, but can make it quite challenging to reproduce something as it is. Instead, I want you to get used to spending most of your time looking at and observing your reference image, with momentary breaks of a second or two to put down a couple marks before returning your gaze to the reference. While looking at your reference, ask yourself questions about how the details you've identified are arranged, and what exactly gives the surface the visible quality of being bumpy, smooth, sticky, wet, rough, etc. I recommend that you take a look at the 25 texture challenge. The notes there cover the points I've mentioned here in much greater detail, and the challenge itself is designed around building up your observational skills first, before delving into how to organize that visual information in a way that is pleasing to the eye.

• Your form intersections are fairly well done. Your organic intersections are alright, although the specific contour curves are a little on the fence in terms of how they wrap around the surface of each form. This is something I'll be able to critique more effectively once you show me the exercises specific to this aspect.

I'll complete this critique when the remainder of the lesson has been submitted.

Uncomfortable

2017-06-30 00:57

Very nice work! Your arrows are flowing nicely through space, and your organic forms with contour ellipses build up a great sense of volume and solidity. In particular however, your form intersections are excellent. You're showing a really strong grasp of 3D space.

I believe the weakest area in this set is your organic forms with contour curves. They aren't bad, but they're teetering on the fence. It's a pretty common issue for students to struggle with getting their contour curves to feel like they're wrapping around the organic forms, and adhering to their surfaces. In your case, you're pretty close, and just about there, but I feel like if you were to let yourself go a little bit, you'd slip onto the other side. So basically, your grasp isn't 100% there yet.

One thing I recommend for this kind of situation is to overshoot those curves ever so slightly, so they hook back around and continue just a bit along the opposite side. This helps bridge the gap between the full ellipse and the partial curve, and gets you used to the kind of accelerated curvature we need as it comes to the edge. I explain this a little further in these notes.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-07-05 14:43

Long time no submit! It's good to see you back here. From the looks of it, your time away hasn't resulted in you getting too rusty - your work is looking pretty solid. There are a couple things that I want to point out however.

• For your organic forms with contour curves, make sure you continue to include the central minor axis line, as this will help you to maintain a consistent alignment for all of your curves. The curves themselves are really merely a visible portion of a larger ellipse, so they still need to be aligned in the same way the contour ellipses are. You may also want to give these notes a read, they may help better explain how the degree of a given ellipse/curve reflects the orientation of the circle it represents in 3D space. I'm definitely pleased to see that you're doing a pretty good job of wrapping those curves around your organic forms though.

• Your dissections are looking solid. Lots of experimentation, careful observation, and not a lot of reliance on randomness/chaos.

• For your form intersections, you're generally doing well but remember back to your 250 box challenge. Drawing through your boxes (drawing all of the lines that make it up, even those that are not visible) helps immensely to grasp how a box sits in 3D space, and how those forms relate to one another. Definitely would have been helpful here.

• Your organic intersections are solid. You're demonstrating a good grasp of how those forms rest on top of one another, and how they sag where they are not supported.

Overall you're doing great. Keep it up, and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-07-07 17:57

There's a lot of good here, but there are a few things that stand out to me:

• You're a bit lax on using the minor axis line when doing your organic forms with contour lines. This line is super important, as it helps us to align our ellipses and curves, and puts us in the best position to ensure that our contour curves give the impression of wrapping around our forms properly.

• When it comes to your contour curves, you're a bit on the fence as far as the whole illusion of the lines running along the surface of the form goes. You've got some that do a pretty good job (primarily when you overshoot your curves like this), but you've got many others that don't quite give the impression of wrapping around, as they don't accelerate in their curvature enough as they reach the edge (like these).

• Your dissections' textures are coming along very nicely. The only thing I wanted to mention here was that you should always start these exercises off as regular organic forms with contour curves. Don't worry about texture until you have a nice, solid-feeling organic form.

• Your form intersections are looking solid as well, but I did notice that you have a tendency to start things off real faint, and then draw dark on top. Don't do this in the future - focus on drawing confidently in your first pass, don't try and hide your marks. Remember that we're not hear to make pretty drawings - it's all about understanding how the forms sit in 3D space, and drawing them confidently is a big part of that.

Anyway, while I definitely recommend that you practice some more with the organic forms with contour curves to really solidify your grasp there, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-07-13 23:03

Definitely better, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. One thing that does jump out at me about your organic forms though is that you have a tendency not to be too consistent with the width of the form throughout its length. There's often these areas where the form gets pinched or expands strangely. You'll generally have much more success maintaining that illusion of solidity with forms that are more consistent, maintaining a fairly even width.

Of course, that's easy to say. I understand that it can be quite challenging, so just be sure to have that as your goal when attempting this sort of exercise.

Uncomfortable

2017-07-17 20:20

You're right, and as far as this lesson is concerned, that's perfectly fine. The textural element to the dissections was primarily a way for me to gauge your observational skills. As it stands, your textures come out quite cartoony, which tells me that you're not spending enough time observing your references, and are relying more on your memory. The thing about our memory is that the moment we look away from our source image, our brain goes to work simplifying everything we've seen, reducing it to its core symbolic components so that it's easier to remember. This kind of information is awful for drawing from, resulting in a hyper-simplified cartoony result. Instead, you'll want to spend the vast majority of your time looking at your reference, taking only momentary breaks to draw a line or two before looking back.

I recommend that you give the texture challenge notes a read, as I go over this in much greater detail and suggest some exercises for overcoming it. Keep in mind that unlike the box/cylinder challenges, that one is meant to be done over a long period of time, in parallel with other lessons.

The rest of your work is pretty solidly done. You're doing a good job wrapping your contour curves around your organic forms, and your form intersections demonstrate a pretty well developing sense of 3D space. Your organic intersections are also pretty solid, although I did notice that at the top left of the pile, you had a form that started to get pretty bumpy and wobbly. It's important to know that this kind of complexity will undermine the illusion of solidity and make your form feel somewhat flatter and out of place. Keep things simple in order to maintain the illusion of volume and solidity.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-07-19 20:50

Your arrows are coming along well, and explore a great deal of depth instead of just the standard two dimensions of your page. Your organic forms with contour lines are establishing a pretty good illusion of form and volume, and those contour curves do a good job of running along the surface of the forms and wrapping around.

Your dissections aren't bad. I think there's a lot of interesting experimentation going on, which is what I'd more or less expect to see at this stage. Different textures need to be tackled in different ways, so it's important to see you trying to approach each one in a way that is specific to the texture you're trying to produce. That said, I do want to encourage you to spend some more time observing your reference image, and less time drawing. Try to build up the habit of continually looking at your reference, taking only a moment or two to draw a couple lines before looking back. This will ensure that you don't fall into the trap of drawing from memory. Our memory is pretty poorly designed for this kind of thing, so we end up dropping a lot of important information if we spend too much time without looking back.

Your form intersections are reasonably well executed. You'll definitely want to use shallower foreshortening on your forms (especially your boxes, as well as your cylinders). This means drawing them such that their farther end is not dramatically smaller than their closer end. This kind of dramatic perspective is reserved for representing objects at very large scales (like the top of a tall building when seen from the street), and using it in this kind of situation throws off the sense of scale between different forms.

Additionally, make sure you draw through your boxes, as discussed in the 250 box challenge. This will help you to better grasp how each box sits in 3D space, which is important when you need to deal with the relationships between different forms.

Lastly, your organic intersections are okay. They're not great, but they do demonstrate the relationships between the different forms, and how they support each others' weight, or sag where there is no support beneath them. In general I think this will get better with practice, and that you're moving in the right direction. One suggestion I have though is that if you look at the top most form on the last page, you'll see that it swells and tapers multiple times through its length. This somewhat undermines the perceived solidity of the form itself, and makes it feel a little flimsy. It's important to keep the width of the form more consistent through its length.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. Be sure to continue practicing these exercises as warmups though.

Uncomfortable

2017-07-26 01:29

Overall you're doing quite well. Your arrows flow nicely through space. Your organic forms with contour ellipses show that you're taking the time to align your ellipses correctly.

Your organic forms with contour curves are moving in the right direction, although I'm noticing that in a lot of areas your curves aren't quite wrapping around the organic forms correctly. They need to be hooking back around as they reach the edge, so they give the impression that they continue on along the other side. I talk about this a little bit in these notes, and I recommend that you try the 'overshooting' method demonstrated there.

You also neglected to include the minor axis as demonstrated in the lesson. Make sure you do this in the future. The curves themselves are merely the visible portion of a larger ellipse, so the minor axis is still an important tool for understanding how to align them.

Your dissections show a lot of different approaches to a variety of different textures. I do agree that there is a bit too much hatching going on, and that in general it's best to simply avoid hatching altogether, which forces you to think more about what's going on in your textures. Still, you're doing a pretty good job as it is.

Your form intersections are solid. The forms themselves are quite well constructed, and you're able to maintain a fairly consistent sense of scale and cohesion between all of the different forms. The intersections themselves are also reasonably well done, although this is not the main focus of this exercise and is generally considered to be quite difficult.

Your organic intersections could definitely use some extra work. The main issue is that they read as being quite flat, largely because of the issue I pointed out regarding your organic forms with contour curves. I also want to recommend that you try and keep these forms as simple as possible. Basic sausage forms are best, as more complexity will generally undermine the solidity and illusion of three dimensional form.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-07-29 02:02

So there are a few issues that stand out to me. They're pretty standard issues that are common for students at this stage, but they are things we'll have to get sorted.

• For your organic forms with contour ellipses, you need to be drawing through your ellipses. This will keep them evenly shaped and smooth, as you'll be able to execute those marks more confidently.

• Your contour curves don't convey the illusion that they're running along the surface of your rounded organic form. Keep in mind that they're just the visible portion of the larger contour ellipse, and if you look at your contour ellipses, you'll notice that their curvature accelerates as you reach the edge and give the impression that they're hooking back around. Your contour curves are quite flat in comparison. I talk about this a little more here. I recommend trying to overshoot your curves a little as described there, to help your brain draw a link between the ellipses and curves.

• Your textures, despite certainly having been difficult, are actually not abnormal by any stretch. This exercise was more for figuring out where a student sits in regards to the particular skills at play here, rather than achieving a particular set goal. What your textures show me is that your observational skills (or perhaps more accurately, your observational habits) have yet to be developed. Right now you're drawing more from memory - perhaps looking at your reference image a little bit, getting an idea of what's there and then spending the bulk of your time just looking at your drawing as you work on it. This results in you drawing from memory. Our capacity to remember specific details and the arrangement of those details is actually quite pathetic as a species. We're good at remembering simplified versions of things, the core elements, rather than all of the complexities. So when you look away from your reference, your brain immediately throws away the bulk of what you actually saw, simplifying the rest into an iconic or symbolic representation of it. That's why your textures tend to look very cartoony. The first step to fixing this is to get in the habit of spending most of your time observing your reference. Draw less, look more. Look away from your reference only for a second or two to put down a couple of marks, but then look back to refresh your memory of what's actually there. In addition to this, while observing you should try and ask yourself questions about what kind of visual features are present, and how they're grouped and arranged. Ask yourself what makes the surface appear bumpy, soft, rough, sticky, wet, etc. There are more notes on this over at the 25 texture challenge page.

• Your form intersections demonstrate a couple issues. As far as your demonstration of spatial understanding goes, you're actually doing quite well. It's good then that this is the primary focus of the exercise. There are signs however that you're not applying previous concepts as you should be at this stage. Firstly, your line quality is quite loose when it comes to your straight lines - they're quite sketchy, and it's clear that you're not applying the ghosting method to every mark you draw as you should be. I do see you drawing through some of your boxes here and there, which is good, but you need to be applying that to every box so as to better grasp how each one sits in 3D space. Also, when you draw through your forms, don't intentionally draw some of them as being fainter. Don't worry about hiding lines - as far as these exercises go, if a line is valuable to what you're doing, you should draw it confidently. If it is not valuable on its own, then you should not draw it at all.

• Your organic intersections definitely suffer from the same issues as your organic forms with contour curves, as one might expect, though that larger form's not bad. Also, try to keep these forms as simple as possible. Basic sausage forms are all you need. If they taper/swell irregularly through their length, that will undermine their perceived solidity.

So, take some time to read through what I've said here a few times, then I'd like you to give the lesson another try.

Uncomfortable

2017-07-29 03:16

Excellent work all around. Your organic forms with contour lines create the illusion of solidity and volume, and your contour curves wrap around the forms very nicely (a common area of difficulty for students). Your dissections are exceptionally detailed and demonstrate a lot of care and patience in identifying just what makes each surface appear to be rough/smooth/wet/whatever. You've also avoided any kind of randomness or chaos (a common shortcut that produces less than stellar results), and generally (though not always) stayed away from hatching lines, instead opting to really take the time to observe your reference carefully.

Though you may have had trouble with the form intersections, you did quite well with them. Remember that the target of this exercise is more about drawing a bunch of forms together that feel consistent in their sense of scale and their general cohesion. That said, you also did a pretty good job with the intersections themselves, despite this being a particularly challenging task.

Lastly, your organic intersections came out pretty well, demonstrating a strong understanding of how they would rest on top of each other, and sag where their weight failed to be supported.

Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-04 02:52

Quite well done. Your arrows flow nicely through 3D space, your organic forms' contour lines wrap convincingly around their rounded surfaces and your dissections demonstrate a variety of different textures and a well developing approach to observational drawing.

Your form intersections are quite well done too, although I think the foreshortening on your boxes might be a little bit too dramatic, and it's throwing off the cohesiveness of the whole set. I think it'd help to make them a little bit more shallow, so the far planes don't get too much smaller than the near planes. Still, I'm very pleased with how this exercise came out as well, as you're very diligent about drawing through your forms.

The organic intersections are pretty decent, although in certain places your contour lines get a little bit sloppy as far as having them wrap around the forms goes. Being mindful of your minor axis in this situation is important, as contour curves that are slightly misaligned can be considerably more difficult to work with.

One last point about your dissections - remember that the texture you apply to the object needs to wrap around it - so when that surface turns away from the viewer (due to being rounded), that texture needs to demonstrate this as well. You showed some signs of this towards the edges of your basket weave, but not so much towards the ends. Similarly the hardwood floor showed that you kind of understood what you should be aiming for, but the texture still came out like the flow of those panels were working against the actual surface they were being placed on.

Anyway, overall you've done a pretty solid job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-04 03:11

Generally good work, but I have a few things to point out:

• For your organic forms with contour curves, you've still got to include your minor axis, to help with the alignment of your contour lines. The minor axis is not just another line that wraps around the form length-wise - it actually cuts directly through the center. Keep in mind that contour curves are just the visible portion of elliptical cross-sections of your form. If their alignment is off, it becomes considerably more difficult to nail the illusion that they're wrapping around the form.

• Very nice work with your organic intersections, you really nailed the idea that these forms are sagging on top of each other.

• Also great work with your dissections - you've got a lot of careful observation going on here.

• For your form intersections, you missed the instruction about avoiding overly stretched forms. This brings in more perspective-complexity to the table, and makes an already difficult exercise more unmanageable. I am glad however that you drew through your forms. You definitely do need to work on your ellipses when it comes to capturing spheres (really, circles in this case rather than ellipses). The other thing I wanted to point out is that you should avoid going back over your work with an evenly weighted line over an entire form. Students often do this as a sort of "clean-up" pass, but as a result it drastically stiffens their linework, since they're drawing slower and trying their hardest to be accurate, rather than focusing on flow. Instead, if you want to add line weight, focus it on specific sections of lines, especially where you want to clarify overlaps.

Anyway, while there's certainly room for improvement in certain areas, you should be okay to move onto the next lesson. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, just make sure you continue to work on these exercises as warmups, along with those from the previous lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-04 03:40

Those droopy sausages are exactly what it's all about - and you did a pretty solid job with them too, especially in that last page. The key is to keep the forms simple, and just focus on how they, well.. droop. And sag.

You also demonstrated a fair bit of improvement with your form intersections, between your first attempt and your last. Your last couple pages feel very confident and demonstrate a generally strong sense of 3D space.

Your first page of dissections is quite well done, and demonstrates a variety of different textures all approached in ways tailored to what you're trying to capture. I think after that you got a little sloppy and lazy though. Overall, keep in mind that this exercise should be built on top of the same kind of results we get from our organic forms with contour curves/ellipses. Meaning, you should be adding textures to forms whose volumes are already solidly fleshed out.

Speaking of which, your organic forms with contour curves don't quite make the cut. Specifically, your contour curves aren't accelerating enough in their curvature as they reach the edge of the form. They need to give the impression that they're hooking back around and continuing along the other side. Instead of focusing on that in your first page, you seem to have instead increased the complexity of your forms, giving yourself entirely different challenges to contend with before the main one was actually handled. I've got some extra notes on this issue here. The 'overshooting' method described here is generally a good way to draw a link between drawing full ellipses, and drawing just the partial curves.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-08-04 03:48

I think it's very good that you decided to double back to this lesson. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking good, although you seem to have neglected to do the organic forms with contour curves. Based on your organic intersections however, I do see some areas where your curves don't quite wrap around your forms correctly. This isn't always the case, you kind of waffle back and forth between them. In case you don't recall, I discuss this issue in these notes.

In your form intersections, it's important that you draw through your forms. This exercise is all about understanding how the forms relate to one another, and drawing through them is the best way to get a sense of how each box sits in space. Additionally, your linework here is notably sloppy. Doesn't look like you're applying the ghosting method - your lines tend to arc and waver. Lastly, I noticed that you use a minor axis in the construction of your cones and cylinders some of the time. It's a great thing to apply all across the board. When you do though, make sure your minor axis is longer - the ellipses should sit with the minor axis going all the way through them, rather than just partially, as the purpose of the minor axis is to help with alignment.

Skipping back to your arrows, I'm getting the impression that you're still somewhat thinking about the scope of space as being the page itself. The arrows feel quite a bit like they're going across the page, rather than going all that far into it. As I discuss in these notes, it's important to think of the page as a window into a larger three dimensional world, rather than defining the bounds of the world in which your drawings exist.

Lastly, I'm going to leave the dissections alone for the time being, because your primary focus should be on establishing the illusion of form. Texture will largely just be distracting. Once we get through that however, it wouldn't be a bad idea to gradually work through the 25 texture challenge - after reading through the notes there of course. But again, just tuck that away for later.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-08 15:05

Solid work on the arrows exercise. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally well done, though I do want you to give these notes a read to help explain what the degree of each ellipse really represents about the circular cross-section it represents in 3D space. Also be a little more careful about aligning your ellipses to the central minor axis line, as I noticed in a few cases that alignment was a little off.

Speaking of the minor axis, you should definitely continue to use them when drawing contour curves. Keep in mind that the central line is not also a contour line - it penetrates through the dead center of the form itself, and is still important for aligning the curves (which are just the visual portion of the full ellipses) in these exercises.

Your first page of dissections was definitely on the weaker side, but your second page improved considerably. You're demonstrating there a much more solid grasp of the individual textural components as being actual forms, just at a smaller scale. If you want more information on how to tackle texture though, I'd definitely recommend the texture challenge notes.

Both for your form intersection exercise was done quite well. The organic intersections were reasonably done too, and you're demonstrating a well developing understanding of how these organic forms all sag against each other whilst maintaining their volumes.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep what I've mentioned here in mind, but feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-09 22:59

Nice work overall, just a couple points to mention:

• I am noticing that your arrows, while generally well done, tend to move across two dimensions of space, rather than exploring all three. This shows me that your mind's a little bit trapped in the space defined by the page itself, rather than looking at the page as a window into a larger three dimensional world. Give the top-left part of these notes a read for a little more information on that issue.

• For your organic forms with contour curves, make sure you include the central minor axis line. While we're not drawing full ellipses here, the curves we draw are technically parts of larger ellipses, and the alignment of those ellipses should still be bound to the minor axis line.

• Your dissections were generally well done, but I'd like you to play a little with breaking up the silhouette of the forms themselves. Texture is not simply two dimensional wrapping paper stretched across the form - it certainly wraps around its parent form, but it exists in three dimensions itself, and can have parts that stick out beyond the natural edge of its parent. Like this. Since the silhouette is the first thing a person's eye notices, any information that is conveyed through that edge will generally have a much stronger impact than any details that exist internally within the form, so it can be a very effective way to communicate certain qualities without going to town on the whole thing.

• The form intersections exercise is all about drawing forms that feel consistent and cohesive within the same scene. I feel you achieved this quite well. The intersections themselves were fairly decent as well, though this is a much more advanced aspect of understanding the interactions between forms. I do not by any means expect students to be entirely comfortable with that just yet, and only ask them to play with it here so they can start thinking about how forms might cut into one another.

• Generally decent work with the organic intersections as well - you're doing a good job of showing how those forms sag against one another.

As for your question, I actually talk about this in the FAQ. The short of it is that your wrist should generally be used for lines that need to be stiff and precise (usually just detail/texture). Everything else that needs to flow smoothly should be drawn from the shoulder.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-08-15 20:43

In general, this is really well done. Your arrows flow very nicely through 3D space, your contour lines wrap quite well around the organic forms in such a way that they accurately describe the deformation of those three dimensional surfaces, your form intersections demonstrate a great grasp of how those forms relate to one another in space, and your organic intersections capture how each form sags under its own weight.

The only area that was somewhat weaker was the dissections, and this is perfectly normal. The textures themselves are really more of a way for me to assess how you approach that particular kind of challenge, rather than expecting any particular level of quality.

I do see signs that you're experimenting with a lot of different kinds of textures, and that you're pushing yourself to draw what you see more than what you think you see, which is great. Developing your observational skills is important, and moreso is understanding that our memories are highly ineffective at this kind of task.

Where things go a bit wrong is that you have more of a tendency to scribble and rely on chaos. This should always be avoided, in favour of taking the time to really look at your reference image and identify the subtle rhythms and patterns that exist there. While they're not always clear, they do exist, and the second you give in and draw those details without thinking, your texture will start to fall apart.

I talk about this a little more over at the 25 texture challenge, so be sure to give that a read when you have the chance. I did want to mention though that I can see a careful consideration for how those textures wrap around your rounded forms, so that's great. Even though these textures are difficult, you're still applying your understanding of 3D space to great effect.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-08-15 20:56

There's some good here, and some less good. I'm actually very impressed with how you tackled the textures in the dissection exercise - you've demonstrated a lot of patience and careful observation with each one, and never really succumbed to the urge to let go and rely on randomness and chaos.

Your organic forms definitely leave a fair bit to be desired. To start with, try and stick to simpler forms - there's really little benefit to deviating much from the standard sausage form. Instead, you want to focus your time and effort thinking about what those contour ellipses are - they're continuous lines that wrap all the way around a rounded form, running along its surface. It's important that those ellipses align to the central line (the minor axis) such that the minor axis cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension. I see several areas where that alignment is off in your drawings. There are definitely places where it's done better, but overall I get the feeling that you were somewhat distracted by the complexity of your forms, and didn't quite demonstrate the best of what you could do in regards to actually executing each contour ellipse.

For the contour curves however, these don't quite capture the illusion that they are running along the surface of that form. Specifically, if you look towards the edges, you'll see that they fail to appear as though they're hooking back around - their curvature needs to accelerate as that surface turns away. I talk about this further in these notes. I'd recommend trying the 'overshooting' method described there. Again, keep the forms simple and straightforward.

Your form intersections were executed very cleanly, and the presentation is solid. The area where they miss the mark somewhat is in two specific ways, though they are quite related. Firstly, in the instructions I recommended that you avoid forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension. A good example of this would be the long tubes you included in your attempts at the exercise. The reason is that this exercise is already quite challenging, and this only serves to make it more complex. The other point I'd like to raise is that your forms generally have a rather dramatic foreshortening applied to them. In lesson 1, I explain why this tends to throw off the sense of scale when many forms are presented together like this with overly dramatic foreshortening.

The other thing I'd recommend on this front is that you should definitely be drawing through your boxes as mentioned in the 250 box challenge, as this helps you to better grasp how each box sits in 3D space. I actually just checked back, and it seems that in my critique for lesson 1, I did ask you to complete the 250 box challenge before moving onto this lesson, though you don't seem to have done so.

For your organic intersections, it's definitely a good attempt. One thing I'd highly recommend here is drawing each organic form in its entirety. That is, you've got several places where you've drawn parts of individual forms, but stopping where they'd be hidden by those in front of it. This does not give you a very good understanding of how each form sits in 3D space.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two pages of organic forms with contour ellipses and two pages of organic forms with contour curves. I'd also like you to complete and submit the 250 box challenge as previously requested, again with special attention paid to the notes about drawing through your forms.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-17 21:31

Your arrows and organic forms were done quite well. One thing I did want to point out however in regards to your contour ellipses (and to an extent your contour curves as well) is that you're hesitating somewhat while drawing them, and executing those marks slowly enough that some wobbling comes through. Remember that everything should be done using the ghosting method - so we invest our time into the preparation and planning phase, but execute our marks with confidence and a persistent pace. This probably will reduce your accuracy at first, but it's entirely necessary.

You made some solid attempts with your dissections and did a fair bit of experimentation, which is great to see. I do think that you certainly have room for improvement as far as your observational skills go, but you're pushing them in the right direction. I recommend that you give the notes over on the 25 texture challenge a read though, as it may fill in some gaps in your understanding of how to approach this sort of thing.

There were two other things I wanted to mention on that topic. Firstly, it's important to start this exercise out just as you would the organic forms with contour lines. You want to work on top of a form that is already imbued with the illusion of volume and solidity, rather than an empty organic shape. We really need that sense that it's a three dimensional object, so we have an easier time getting into the groove of "wrapping" these textures around those 3D forms.

Additionally, keep in mind that textures are essentially made up of smaller forms of their own. Usually those forms don't stick out too much from the surface, so we don't have to worry about their being 3D all that much, but there are definite cases where this becomes a major factor. For instance, the suckers of the octopi you used - where those tube-like forms connect to the main form ends up flattening out considerably, because there's nothing there to reinforce it. You'll actually find this often in later exercises, that leaving two lines running parallel and suddenly stopping tends to appear very flat. It's best to cap off such forms with another ellipse (assuming they're cylindrical), or with a matching contour curve. Here's what I mean.

Now obviously things with such significant forms sticking out of them starts to go beyond texture, though the line is somewhat blurry. That said, when looking at an octopus' tentacle, there definitely is much more going on than just the fact that they have suckers. When observing a texture, try and look deeper and ask yourself questions about the surface quality. Ask yourself, what makes a surface look wet, smooth, sticky, bumpy, rough, dry, etc. Think about whether it's shiny where the light hits it, or if the light tends to diffuse over the surface. Asking yourself questions like this is the first step to build up your observational skills.

Moving onto the form intersections, you've generally done a good job here, though mind you I did recommend in the instructions that you avoid forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension. Your cones/pyramids are definitely looking quite stretched. This generally brings more perspective distortion into the mix, which makes an already challenging exercise considerably more difficult. You did a pretty good job with it all the same, but we want to avoid anything that may serve as a distraction from the main focus of a given exercise.

Your organic intersections on the other hand were notably sloppy. Based on what I can see from your organic forms with contour lines, you're definitely capable of much better than this, but didn't really put the time in to establish the illusion of form and volume for each individual mass.

I'd like you to try this last exercise once again. Draw each form individually - think about how they're big and round, like balloons filled with water. Think about how they sag under their own weight, and how their neighbours hold them up. Draw your contour curves carefully, ensuring that they wrap around the forms completely. Lastly, keep the forms simple - basic sausage shapes are all you need. The more complex a form gets, the more difficult it is for it to maintain the illusion that it is three dimensional. This is why, in later lessons, we'll be talking about how to build things up from the simplest elements, rather than jumping into complex shapes and forms right off the bat.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-22 18:28

Sorry about missing your submission previously. I'm actually out of town, on vacation, so I'm trying to make do with the tools I have on hand. The change has resulted in me fumbling some of my usual patterns of behaviour, since change tends to make me a bit scatterbrained.

Anyway, you're generally doing a pretty good job here. Your arrows flow nicely through space. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are pretty solid, though your ellipses could stand to be a little less stiff - try to draw them with a more confident pace when actually executing the mark, after following the preparation phase detailed in the ghosting method in the last lesson.

Your organic forms with contour curves are pretty solid - I can see you overshooting those curves slightly as you hook them around at the edges, which is definitely a good way to get the hang of how those curves should turn. There is room for improvement here to really solidify that sense of how the curves wrap around, so don't let up on practicing these - I think it'll take some more practice and time before you've really cemented it for yourself. That said, you're heading in the right direction. Do remember though that the central minor axis is still important here, as it governs the alignment of your curves, as it did for the ellipses.

Your dissections are coming along well. Your first page was a little weak - I saw some somewhat more scratchy/scribbly marks where you were getting a little overwhelmed with certain textures. I saw much less of this in later pages though, where you took more time to really identify what kind of elements were present on each surface. In general, relying on randomness/chaos is something to be avoided - while it takes time, it's important to plan your strokes out and consider each one against the reference you're drawing from. You definitely improve on this front over the set.

Your form intersections are coming along well. You're careful in your constructions, and the forms feel cohesive amongst each other, which is what I'm looking for here.

The organic intersections are alright, though there is definitely room for improvement. Try and keep in mind the sense of volume for each sausage form, as though they're inflated, and use this understanding when you have them sitting on top of each other. Especially towards the top of the pile, you have those forms flatten out somewhat along the sides where they come in contact with something beneath them, in a way that doesn't feel entirely natural. The best way to think about this is as though they're a bunch of water balloons filled up all the way. They'll sag over one another, and their contents can shift within their skins, but that water has to go somewhere, leading to a balance between the mass of water and the tension in the balloon. Try and think about how that would work when attempting this exercise.

Anyway, while you've got room for improvement, I think you're moving in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to incorporate these exercises into your warmup routine.

Uncomfortable

2017-08-23 23:36

Well, it's not great. There are a few things that your work suggests to me about how you've approached this.

• You may not have read the material in the lesson, and the exercise descriptions themselves, all that carefully. There's a lot missing. I understand the material is quite dense, so it certainly cannot all be absorbed in one read through, but that means it is your responsibility to read through it as many times as you need before attempting the exercise, and reviewing it before any subsequent attempts.

• In some exercises you're shying away from attempting things that may be challenging to you. For example, the dissections have a vast amount of surface space on those forms that are just blank. The exercise is about trying to reproduce various textures from photo reference on those surfaces. Doing it badly is entirely acceptable - leaving 75% of it blank is not.

• To varying degrees, there are definitely things we've covered in previous lessons/challenges that you're not at all applying here. For example, drawing through forms. You've done both box and cylinder challenges, so my expectation is that you'd have come to understand the purpose of drawing through forms (to better grasp how they sit in 3D space). Everything you learn from these lessons exists as an additional tool or trick that you can pull out to deal with the challenges that face you in the future, so you need to think back to what you've learned previously and apply it to that which is ahead of you.

I am going to ask you to try this lesson's homework again, in its entirety, but I will give you some additional tips for the exercises:

• In your arrows, you're demonstrating a certain level of discomfort with having your arrows fold back over themselves. You seem to want to keep them flat relative to the viewer, in a way that really undermines the illusion that these arrows flow through three dimensions of space. Let go of your attachment to the page itself - the page does not define the limitations of the space in which the things you draw exist. It is merely a window looking out into a larger world.

• Understand that your organic forms are like three dimensional sausages, and the contour lines (be they ellipses or curves) are lines that run along the surfaces of those forms. As though you've traced around it with a permanent marker. Think about that, or maybe even try it with some kind of a 3D form, like a styrofoam cup or something else that constitutes a simple 3D object. If you've got a balloon, that'd work well too. Most of our contour lines go around the organic form in an area where we cannot see the line all the way around (even though that line does exist where we cannot see it). In some areas however - like the ends, if they're oriented towards us - we may see a full ellipse. Consider how the orientation of that surface will change what it is that we see.

• Keep your organic forms simple - any additional complexity will not help you, and rather it will make it more difficult for you to grasp the concepts of the lesson.

• Your ellipses are stiff - I fully expect that you are continuing to practice the material from lesson 1 as a regular warmup, and if you're not, get to it. You need to work on executing your ellipses with a more confident, persistent pace, so as to avoid any stiffness or wobbling that leads to an uneven shape.

• Your contour curves are actually quite well done. You're getting those curves to hook around as they reach the edge of each form, which is something that MOST people actually struggle with considerably. This is good. The only thing missing in this exercise is that you're not including the minor axis passing through the center of each form, to which those contour curves should be aligning.

• Drawing the minor axes properly through the center of an organic form can definitely be difficult - so keeping those forms simple and even avoiding making them overly long will make this somewhat easier.

• Where you have actually drawn on the surfaces of your dissections' forms, what you've drawn appears the largely from memory rather than directly from the observation of some reference (photographic or from life). I want you to read the notes on the texture challenge page, as it gives a good breakdown of why drawing from memory is bad, and how to properly approach drawing from observation. Read this before tackling the dissections again, and as I said before, Do not simply leave surfaces blank because you don't feel you'll do a good job. Failure is an important and necessary part of learning. A hundred instances of failure will give way to success. A million instances of giving up will lead to nothing.

• For your form intersections, lets start by actually drawing through our forms. Think of it as though you have x-ray vision, and do not leave certain lines out because you wouldn't logically be able to see them (due to them being occluded by other forms). This exercise is all about understanding how those forms exist in the same space on a cohesive manner, so understanding how each one individually sits in space is at the core of that. Don't stress about the intersections themselves either - I mention in the instructions that they are not the focus of this exercise.

• I also mention in the instructions that you should avoid forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension - you have included here a LOT of forms that fall under that category, especially some particularly long boxes. These make the exercise needlessly complex, by bringing more foreshortening into the equation.

• When approaching the organic intersections, think of it as though you're piling, one at a time, a bunch of water balloons. Focus on each one at a time, and don't move on from it until you feel personally convinced that it is a three dimensional form with volume to it. Then add another, and when you do, consider how that second one is going to be supported by the one underneath it. Keep your forms simple and sausage-like, and again, don't move on from the second until you are personally convinced of its solidity. Draw your lines confidently to keep them smooth, and focus on how all of these exist in 3D space.

That should be enough for now. The biggest, most important thing is that you NEED to read the instructions as many times as is necessary. When attempting an exercise, don't just jump right into it - read its description again, even if you're confident you know what is being asked of you.