Uncomfortable

2017-09-07 22:49

I'm sure you've heard this before, but it's entirely counter productive to compare yourself to other students. It doesn't tell you where you should be, because people start these lessons from different points in their lives, from different circumstances, etc. Furthermore, as I mention at the very beginning of lesson 1, you should not be aiming for perfection with each exercise. The point is to do it to the best of your current ability so I can assess where you're going wrong. If you were just to submit perfect work to me, what purpose would I serve? That's why I recommend an amount of work - you do that much, and then you submit it and I tell you what and how much you need to redo.

Anyway, your first three exercises are pretty well done. The arrows are solid, the organic forms with contour ellipses are fine, and your contour curves generally wrap nicely around the forms. You did misunderstand the concept of 'overshooting' the curves somewhat though - the lines still need to be sitting on the surface of the form, as that is the point of contour lines. All I mean is that you continue the line a little further after it hooks around.

Either way, you achieved the illusion of them wrapping around just fine in the next page. I do want to mention though that when practicing this exercise, you should be still including the central minor axis line to help with alignment, as mentioned in the instructions.

Your dissections are well done - they demonstrate a wide variety of textures, all tackled in their own manners rather than attempting to apply any kind of one-size-fits-all approach. Keep up the good work.

Your form intersections are generally okay - one thing that jumps out at me is that you seem to have not noticed the instruction about avoiding any forms overly stretched in any one dimension, and to keep things fairly equilateral. Avoiding too much stretching keeps things simpler, whereas the way you approached it brings more foreshortening into the equation, which complicates an already difficult exercise. Many of your ghosted lines here are also a touch sloppy, in that they're arcing through their lengths rather than being entirely straight.

As for your question about pyramids, I construct pyramids like this, by starting with a box and finding the center point of the two opposite planes. For cones, I use the minor axis of the base ellipse, as the minor axis is always going to run perpendicular to the circle the ellipse represents in 3D space. Like this.

Your organic intersections do need work, but they're getting there. It helps to keep your forms relatively short and sausage-like. I noticed that some of yours are a bit flatter, rather than being fully inflated. How you perceive the forms themselves will strongly influence the result, so you've got to hold onto the illusion that they're all sausage-shaped balloons, with circular cross-sections, rather than flatter ellipsoid ones. Then place each form into the scene one at a time, focusing on how the newly added one interacts with those already present. Think about where their weight would be supported, and where they'd sag. Once one form has been placed in the scene, it's not going to yield to any new ones, as it's already been drawn - so it's the subsequent ones that need to conform to those already in the scene.

Anyway, you're moving in the right direction, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Remember that you're to continue practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of a regular warmup routine, picking two or three exercises at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-07 23:04

Generally you're doing pretty well, but there are a few things that caught my eye, mostly related to your organic forms exercises. The first of those is that you almost completely neglected to include the minor axis line stressed in the exercise instructions. That is, the line that runs through the center of reach organic form. This line serves to help align your contour ellipses and curves, and is mentioned as the second step to the exercise.

The other issue is with how your contour curves behave as they reach the edge of the form. Some of yours are fine - they'll accelerate in their curvature and hook back around as though they continue along the other side. Others however hold a fairly consistent curvature (rather than accelerating) and give the impression that they'd shoot right off the surface of the form. I talk about this somewhat here, and the 'overshooting curves' approach I mention there often helps to build up a better grasp of how that curvature should behave.

The point is to convey the illusion that these curves run along the surface of the form, so maintaining the idea that the line turns away as the surface does so is very important. I think this would have helped greatly with this page of organic intersections, as those forms gave the impression that their undersides were flatter than you likely intended.

This page however does have a few of its own issues. You should draw each form in its entirety (as you did in the other page), and the line quality is extremely rough and sloppy.

Aside from that, your work was quite good. Your arrows flow fairly nicely, and your form intersections demonstrate a pretty good grasp of how those forms sit and behave in 3D space.

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

Oh, one last thing - give these notes a read. May help in terms of deciding what degree to choose for a contour ellipse or curve, and what that would suggest about the form itself.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-09 23:44

Pretty nice work. Your form intersections are looking very solid, your dissections explore a healthy variety of textures in a slew of different ways, and your arrows flow nicely through space. Your confidence with your organic forms does improve over the set, but I'd say this is the only area where there's a little bit of weakness.

For most, the issue lies with struggling to get the contour curves to wrap properly around the forms. While this isn't perfect in your work, it's not the actual source of the problem. I think the primary issue is actually in the alignment of those curves (to the minor axis), and also the particular degree you choose to use for a given ellipse or curve.

The alignment of the curve/ellipse comes into play because the further off your alignment is, the more difficult it is to wrap the line around properly on one side. Always ensure that the minor axis cuts your ellipse (in the case of curves, imagine the full ellipse all the way around) into two equal, symmetrical halves.

For the degree issue, give these notes a read. They should help give some context as to what the degree of a given ellipse says about the circular cross-section it represents in 3D space, and how it's oriented relative to the viewer.

This issue does improve as you get into the organic intersections exercise, but I believe you'll benefit from a little more focus in this area. That said, I do get the impression that you fully understand the premise behind it all, that the contour lines need to be running along the surface of a given 3D form.

So, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one, but as always, make sure you incorporate these exercises into a 10-15 minute warmup at the beginning of each sitting.

imguralbumbot

2017-09-10 07:58

^(Hi, I'm a bot for linking direct images of albums with only 1 image)

https://i.imgur.com/Zq4U9nk.jpg

^^Source ^^| ^^Why? ^^| ^^Creator ^^| ^^ignoreme ^^| ^^deletthis

Uncomfortable

2017-09-11 21:55

Generally quite well done! You're doing a great job with all of the exercises. Your arrows flow nicely through 3D space, your organic forms with contour lines show that you seem to understand the purpose behind contour lines themselves, your dissections demonstrate a nice variety of textures, and your form/organic intersections show a well developing grasp of 3D space and how those forms all relate to each other.

There's only one thing that stood out to me, and it's a pretty minor point. In your dissections, I noticed that you were using cross hatching here and there. In general, I'd recommend avoiding any kind of hatching or cross-hatching. It tends to be a sort of generic technique that isn't really specific to any particular material you're trying to capture, and when students use it they have a tendency not to look deeper into the actual textures and patterns that are present in their reference images. If you avoid using this particular technique, you'll find that you'll have to dig deeper, which will benefit you more.

Aside from that, very nicely done. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the nexto ne.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-12 20:53

Overall you're doing a pretty good job. There are a few things I want to stress however:

• For the organic forms with contour curves, treat this just like the contour ellipses, but only drawing the portions of the ellipses that would be visible, and doing so around a central minor axis line. Right now instead of minor axes, you've just got more lines flowing over the form in another direction. The minor axis is still important for aligning your curves, so continue to use it as you did in the previous exercise.

• Your dissections are excellent. You've got a great variety of textures, and you've tackled them with great care and specificity, rather than applying a sort of generic, one-size-fits-all approach.

• For your form intersections, do not draw your initial lines lightly, and then go back over them with a clean-up pass. This results in your initial lines lacking the sort of confidence that keeps your linework smooth and your forms feeling solid. Also draw through all of your boxes - you did this for some, but not others. This exercise is about improving your understanding of how those forms relate to each other in 3D space, not about creating a pretty picture. Hiding some of those lines may result in something that feels cleaner, but it will diminish the value of the exercise itself.

Anyway, keep those points in mind. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. Also, if you want more work on the texture side, be sure to take a look at the texture challenge. It's meant to be done in parallel with other lessons, so you can chip away at it little by little.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-13 19:10

There's definitely some strong stuff here, though there are some core issues that we need to address. Primarily, when it comes to the first half of the lesson, you're being a bit sloppy and not quite following the instructions as carefully as you could.

For your organic forms with contour ellipses, you seem to be drawing your ellipses somewhat timidly - as though you're afraid of putting too much of a mark down. It's important that you draw these confidently, applying the ghosting method. At the same time though, your ellipses end up being really hairy, so it's a bit contradictory. Either way, don't try to hide your lines, and also try to limit yourself to drawing through them two full rounds. That's probably going to be ideal.

Secondly, you seem to have left the minor axes out for some of these. Including them and working around them as a guide for the alignment of your ellipses is part of the exercise, so don't neglect them. Yes, the goal is to be able to align those ellipses without explicitly drawing the minor axis, but doing it a few times is not going to be enough to achieve that. For the forseeable future, when doing this exercise, make sure you include the minor axis.

You definitely got a little bit derailed with the organic forms with contour curves (and I fully understand why - the examples included in the homework section are thoroughly outdated and need to be removed). As a rule, follow the exercise description as closely as possible. In this case, it's the same as the contour ellipses exercise, but you only draw the portion of each ellipse that would be visible (rather than the whole thing wrapping all the way around).

Your dissections are also on the sloppy side, but in this case I'm a little more forgiving, as this was less of a test and more of a way for me to see how you currently approach drawing textures. As you move forwards, it's important that you avoid relying on any kind of randomness or unplanned strokes, especially when it comes to texture. Every texture's got some kind of rhythm and flow to it, even though it may not be immediately apparent. You've got to take your time and really identify what makes a surface appear to be rough, smooth, sticky, wet, bumpy, etc. Find the visual elements that give it that impression, and then consider how they're arranged - are they spread out across the surface evenly, are they grouped into clusters, etc. I go into all of this in much more detail in the texture challenge, so be sure to give those notes a read.

The rest of your exercises were done quite well. The arrows are solid, the form intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how those objects relate to each other in space, and your organic intersections are pretty well done.

I want you to do another page of organic forms with contour ellipses, followed by another page of organic forms with contour curves. With the contour curves, make sure you're pushing the illusion that they wrap around the rounded sausage form. Many students tend to struggle with this, and forget to have their curves accelerate as they reach the edge (to give the impression that they hook back around and continue along the other side).

Uncomfortable

2017-09-17 23:15

Pretty solid work. I do have a slew of tips however:

• For your arrows, they're flowing quite nicely, but one thing to think about is right now they're primarily flowing through the two dimensions of the piece of paper, and not so much through the depth of the scene. Try and consider where the arrow is farther away from the viewer, and where it is closer, and how it moves through all three dimensions of the world to which your page is a window.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along well, though I do recommend that you give [these notes a read]() to help give some context as to what the degrees of your ellipses really tells us about those particular cross-sections of your organic form.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are definitely getting there, but you'll definitely want to keep pushing yourself to get your curves to accelerate as they near an edge and really hook back around. The 'overshooting method' described in these notes can help you to achieve that. Also, make sure your curves align to the central minor axis line, as this will put them in the best position to wrap around successfully.

• Your dissections are very nice, lots of great experimentation. Watch the alignment of your ellipses though (to the minor axis), and also make sure you're remembering that the forms themselves are rounded. If you look at the zebra skin texture, you'll notice that you've drawn the stripes as though the form itself were quite flat. The texture needs to wrap around the form, deforming and distorting around it like wallpaper being wrapped around a tube.

• The form intersections were definitely challenging, but you pushed through and really nailed them by the end. Great work.

• Your organic intersections are alright. There's definitely room for improvement, and that will come with practice as your grasp of 3D space and the relationships between the forms develops, but as it stands you're demonstrating a reasonable understanding of how they support each others' weight. As for the shading, I do have two suggestions. Firstly, decide on where your light is coming from - this is important in establishing a consistent lighting scheme. Think of it as a point in the world, and in your mind, project out how the rays are going to go from that point to your object. Rather than thinking about where the shadow will fall, think about it as where the light falls, and where the object will block that light. Secondly, remember that shadows are cast onto other surfaces. In this case, a lot of shadows would fall onto other rounded organic forms, and so like the contour lines, and like textures, they need to run along those surfaces (like wallpaper wrapped around a tube, using my previous example).

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Be sure to incorporate these exercises into your warmup routine, but feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-18 23:49

Pretty nice work. I do agree that the textures still do leave a fair bit to be desired, but the rest is quite well done. For the textures, one recommendation I have is to stay away from the use of hatching lines, as well as any kind of marks that are at all random or unplanned. It's very easy to get caught up in trying to follow some kind of set pattern (because we can usually draw these on auto-pilot), but that approach really shows through and tends to manifest as sloppiness.

I do believe that tackling the texture challenge is a good idea, but don't grind it all out at once. Instead, try one or two rows at a time, and spread them out. You'll benefit more from it if you allow yourself the chance to slowly absorb the material. For that reason, the challenge is designed to be done in parallel with other lessons.

Definitely read through the notes there a few times though, as it goes over things like the importance of observation, and the two individual stages of learning how to approach texture (first observing all of the detail, then learning to organize it).

The only other thing I wanted to mention was in regards to your arrows. This isn't a huge issue, but I would recommend when practicing these in the future, make a point of trying to explore more of the third dimension (the depth of your scene) with your arrows. That is to say, a lot of these are more restricted to moving across the two dimensions of the page itself, so try and think about how one end of the arrow might be much farther away from us, and the other end might be close. I say this isn't a big issue because you are doing this to an extent, but perhaps not as much as you could. This point becomes quite relevant when dealing with things like leaves.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-09-20 00:10

The good news is that the texture challenge is both optional, and designed to be done in parallel with other lessons (rather than grinding it out first). Taking more time with it, giving yourself lots of opportunities to soak in what you've learned through each step helps you learn it better.

The bad news is that your excitement to move forwards onto more "interesting" subject matter is keeping you from applying yourself here. While there's definite improvements over your last attempt, you're still rushing through the exercises, and going on auto-pilot where you should be thinking about every mark you put down.

Yes, I understand that these exercises are boring, but what is perhaps most important is for you to work on your ability to give something your full attention, even if it isn't interesting.

[Here are some notes about your arrows and your dissections](). I also recommend that you read through the notes on the texture challenge once we're done with this lesson. It'd probably be a good idea to start working on the challenge as well, bit by bit. Again, that's for after this lesson is marked as complete.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• You don't seem to have included the organic forms with contour ellipses or contour curves section at all.

• Your form intersections aren't bad, though when it comes to your ellipses, I'd recommend aiming to draw two full rounds of the shape before lifting your pen. No more, no less. You're definitely drawing through them way too much here, and not at all in your dissections.

• Your organic intersections are in places demonstrating a well developing grasp of the principle of contour lines, but it's not quite there yet. You're also scattering the forms all over the place, rather than maintaining any kind of real structure. When doing this exercise, it's best to create one centralized pile, and try to avoid any sausage forms that are particularly long or stretched out. Also, the minor axis line is very important when it comes to lining up your contour lines. Lastly, when drawing your contour curves, I recommend using the 'overshooting method' described here.

I'd like you to complete the organic forms with contour ellipses/curves (one page with contour ellipses, one page with contour curves), which were skipped here. I also want you to redo the arrows exercise and four pages of organic intersections. With each exercise, be sure to reread the instructions for it, and try to follow along with the steps I outline as closely as possible.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-22 20:39

Alright, you're generally doing better, so I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. That said, you still have a lot of room for improvement, so make sure you're incorporating exercises from lessons 1 and 2 into a regular warmup routine (doing two or three exercises for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each sitting). Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Your ellipses are a little stiff and wobbly. Make sure you're applying the ghosting method to these, and executing the marks with a confident, persistent pace. Don't hesitate once you're actually making the mark, the wobbling generally occurs when students are afraid they're going to make a mistake, so they slow down.

• Your contour curves are getting there, but in a lot of cases you're not quite accelerating the curve enough as it reaches an edge, so it gives the impression that the form is coming to a sharp turn, rather than a rounded transition. You want the curve to accelerate in its curvature and hook back around to continue on along the other side. What I mentioned in my last critique (which you very clearly ignored) would have helped with this:

I recommend using the 'overshooting method' described here.

Following my instructions is extremely important, as one might imagine. You need to get better at reading and following what I write in these critiques.

Oh, lastly, give these notes a read, they should help give some context as to what the degrees of your contour ellipses mean about the cross-sectional circles they represent in 3D space.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-24 03:59

Very nicely done! You're demonstrating a great grasp of the concepts covered in the lesson. Your arrows flow quite nicely through all three dimensions of space and your organic forms with contour lines capture a good sense of volume. You've also got a nice, wide variety of textures with plenty of experimentation, and you're clearly tackling them on a case-by-case basis, rather than trying to shoehorn the same approach into multiple situations. Your form intersections show a well developing sense of 3D space and your organic intersections capture how the sausage forms wrap around each other where their weight is supported, and how they sag when they're not.

Just a couple of recommendations as you move forwards:

• Give these notes a read, should help you get a better grasp of what the degree of your contour ellipses suggests about the cross-sectional circles they represent in 3D space.

• It's pretty normal for contour curves to end up a little deformed (relative to the contour ellipses), but keep striving to mimic the path they'd take if you were drawing full ellipses.

• Remember that your dissections should start out as just regular organic forms with contour lines attempts, with no consideration for the fact that you're going to add texture afterwards. This helps you to start out with a form that is more solid, which in turn helps you when wrapping your textures around it.

• When drawing minor axes for your cylinders/cones/etc, make sure they penetrate all the way through your ellipses, rather than starting from the center point.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-09-26 21:49

Pretty nice work, though I do have a few things to suggest. Before that though, both scanner and camera are fine, but regardless of what you use, please don't combine them into one massive image. There are times where I want to refer to specific pages or drawings, and not being able to link directly is a bit bothersome.

Anyway, here are some things I noticed that are worth mentioning:

• Your arrows are looking good, flowing nicely through all three dimensions of space (rather than just being limited to the two dimensions of your page)

• For your organic forms with contour curves, you're generally doing well but you do need to continue practicing maintaining the ellipse-like curvature of those curves. Remember that they're just like the ellipses, except only a portion of them is visible. More practice will help you solidify your grasp of that. Also, in several cases you do seem to be getting a little sloppy with those, so remember to take your time with each one, applying the ghosting method to prepare beforehand and then drawing each stroke confidently.

• Your dissections have a few issues, but the biggest one that I noticed is that you're not covering all of your surfaces. There are plenty of area that you haven't bothered applying any texture. Remember that you're doing these exercises for your own benefit, so leaving them half done like that is against your own interest. Additionally, take care to spend more time observing your reference images, and make a habit of continually looking back to them. Otherwise you'll end up working from memory, drawing what you think you remember seeing, which is never accurate. I explain this further in the notes on the 25 texture challenge.

• Your form intersections are generally fine, though it's best to do this exercise as a single system of many different forms together filling the page, rather than several smaller ones of a few. I think I mentioned this in the exercise notes. Also, remember that the exercise is about drawing forms that feel consistent together within the same space. The focus is not on the intersections themselves, as those are generally a fairly advanced topic.

• Your organic intersections were well done.

I think you should be okay to move onto the next lesson, but make sure you continue working on these exercises as part of a warmup routine, along with the exercises from lesson 1.

Uncomfortable

2017-09-28 03:28

Very nice work across the board. Your arrows do a great job of flowing through all three dimensions of space. Your organic forms with contour lines establish fantastic, and solid volumes. Your dissections explore a wide variety of textures, and you avoid any sort of one-size-fits all approaches, taking the time to tailor each texture to the effect you're attempting to reproduce.

Your form intersections are generally well done, though I do want to discourage you from using underdrawings as you've done here. I believe I mention it in the instructions - don't get caught up in trying to hide your lines, and don't worry about the permanence of mistakes made in ink. Both of these things will impact the confidence with which you draw, and that is one of the main things we're attempting to develop and train. Your grasp of 3D space is clearly solid, as demonstrated here, so you need to trust in that and draw each mark confidently as you have done with all your other exercises. If you make a mistake, that's fine. It's not the end of the world.

Also, I noticed that for many of your forms, you drew through them (which is fantastic), but there were others where you neglected to do so. Remember that these exercises (both in this lesson, and those in future lessons, even when drawing actual objects) are all about developing one's understanding of 3D space. The end result doesn't matter - we're not here to draw pretty things. We naturally are going to have a desire to make things look nice, and when we're starting out, we may have the sense that all of that extra linework takes away from that - but it's entirely necessary, and a part of what makes the exercise valuable. Anyway, eventually you'll start to realize that this approach to drawing has its own visual appeal, especially as it exhibits the confidence of the artist.

Lastly, your organic intersections are great, and show a good sense of how these forms sag under their own weight when they are not supported by their neighbours.

Keep up the good work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-01 20:20

You're generally demonstrating that you know what you're doing, but one area you seem to struggle with is focus. I know the exercises get boring, but it's extremely important that you not allow yourself to get distracted and go off the rails when completing these exercises, as it becomes rather easy to miss the core of what a given exercise is trying to teach you. Keep in mind this bit from lesson 1:

Approach these exercises with a blank mind. Do not rush. Demonstrate patience. Spend the hours required to give each exercise the attention it requires and deserves. Do each exercise as it is prescribed in the lesson. Often times I see people stray a little, trying to spice things up and make things more fun. While creativity is lovely, you risk missing some of the core concepts that each exercise has been designed to convey. Just be patient - it'll be over soon, and then you'll be able to get to the fun stuff.

It's really important.

With that (mostly) out of the way, you're doing fairly well. Your arrows do a great job of flowing through all three dimensions of space, instead of being restricted to the two dimensions of your page. You're also successfully using contour ellipses and contour curves to capture the volumes of your organic forms.

On the contour lines, there's a few things I wanted to mention:

• I noticed a trend where your contour lines tend to rest slightly outside of the form, rather than directly on the surface - definitely will want to work on this).

• You're also neglecting to draw your central minor axis lines when doing the contour curves. These should not be left out, as it's an important part of correctly aligning those curves.

• In general, making the organic forms complicated doesn't actually make this exercise more helpful, and can potentially become distracting. Sticking to simple sausages is probably best so you can focus on the process of drawing lines that rest along the surface of a given organic form.

Your dissections do have a few issues as well:

• First and foremost, remember that this exercise is meant to be done on a base identical to what one would draw for the organic forms with contour lines exercise. That is, draw that base as though you did not intend to add texture afterwards - don't try to hide the lines, or anything like that.

• In your older dissections, you certainly went pretty crazy with those textures - your direct observation of reference images did need some work (you can read about that in the texture challenge page's notes, but you definitely demonstrated an incredible degree of patience.

• Your first page of newer dissections left a lot to be desired. You did demonstrate greater control as far as keeping your details to the silhouette's edges, and so on, which is definitely good. You also seem to be focusing more on rendering (that is, light and shadow) than texture. Shading is not the goal here. You are meant to attempt to communicate the presence of different surface qualities. You'll find that in these lessons, there is an intentional neglect of dealing with matters of shading, primarily because unlike many other approaches to drawing, we ensure that form is captured in the line phase. This means that shading no longer becomes a necessity to convey the illusion of form, and instead becomes a tool we can use at our leisure to other ends. Shading for shading's sake is not something we do much of.

• This page is much closer to what we're after.

Your form intersections are alright. I'm going to staunchly ignore the page with all the shading, and focus on the other three. This page is fairly successful, though in it you do ignore the instruction to avoid stretched forms and stick to those that are more equilateral. This is because stretching your forms brings far too much foreshortening/perspective into the mix, which complicates an already difficult exercise. Also, on the topic of foreshortening, if you look at the central box, you'll notice that its foreshortening is a little dramatic, and suggests that the box's scale is somewhat inconsistent with the other forms around it. I discuss this a little bit in these notes from lesson 1.

The other two pages are noticeably sketchy and haphazard, especially this page where you've neglected to use the ghosting method in a lot of cases. Maybe your pen is dying, I'm not really sure, but there's a lot of chicken scratching going on. You're also drawing through your forms much less here.

Lastly, your organic intersections are fairly solid and do a good job of conveying how those forms sag on top of each other.

So, things to take away from this critique:

• Don't get distracted. Follow the instructions to the letter, don't add your own frills. You've clearly got a lot of creative energy and enthusiasm, so be sure to channel that into other drawings. Just not here.

• Don't be sketchy. Avoid using scribbly hatching lines, try to avoid adding additional rendering to your forms (cast shadows like in the organic intersections are totally fine, just avoid shading for shading's sake).

• Don't try to purposely draw lines faintly so they won't be visible in the final drawing. The final result does not matter. Each of these drawings is an exercise that is meant to teach you something. The same goes for the drawings in latter lessons - even though you're drawing insects, plants, animals, etc. each one is an exercise to teach you about form, 3D space, construction, etc. Purposely trying to hide your constructional linework will result in you putting focus and energy into something that is not what you're supposed to be learning.

Keep all of that in mind as you continue to move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-09 00:05

Pretty nice work with your arrows. When doing these in the future though, it'd be worthwhile to try and think about which part of the arrow is farther away from you, and which part is closer. Thinking more about the depth of the scene in this way can help you push the development of your mental model of space. Right now many of your arrows tend to move across the two dimensions of your page, but not the third of the world you're drawing in.

For your organic forms with contour ellipses, you're generally doing okay though I do recommend that you give thes notes a read. They should help give a little more context to the degree of your ellipses.

For your organic forms with contour curves, for the most part you do need to work on getting your curves to wrap properly around the form. There was actually one where, aside from forgetting to include your minor axis line, you did great - it's the one at the top right of this page. For your others though, you need to have your contour line's curvature accelerate as it comes towards the edge of the form, so it gives the impression that it's hooking back around and continuing along the other side. Try applying the 'overshooting' method that I describe in these notes. Also, like I mentioned before - don't forget to include your minor axis line. Treat this exercise just like the contour ellipses, except that you're only drawing a portion of each ellipse. The alignment which your minor axis helps with is still important.

It's true that the dissections were clearly difficult for you, but that's totally normal. You can think of this particular exercise, at least this first attempt at it, as a sort of test to determine how you handle this particular kind of challenge. Textures are quite difficult, so there's no expectation for you to be able to nail them just yet. I do recommend however that you give the notes on the texture challenge a read, especially on the subject of drawing from careful observation. As it stands right now, you're definitely relying a bit too much on memory, which is why your textures tend to look oversimplified.

Also, keep in mind that your forms are rounded, so the textures themselves have to wrap around. This would make the texture compress along the sides, where the surface turns away from the viewer.

You're making good progress with your form intersections. There certainly is room for growth here, but generally you're heading in the right direction. The only thing I want to stress though is the importance of drawing through your boxes. You usually did, but there was the last two pages where you skipped over that step.

Lastly, your organic intersections are looking solid (aside from the contour curves not quite wrapping around properly).

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

Uncomfortable

2017-10-17 02:33

It's important to follow my instructions in the order they're given. I pointed you to the 250 box challenge because it was meant to prepare you better for the form intersections, and generally improve your grasp of 3D space.

Anyway, your arrows are pretty well done. They look quite dynamic. Your organic forms with contour lines are alright, although they do feel somewhat rushed and sloppy. The grasp of the goal is certainly there, but the forms are sometimes uneven, and the contour lines are a little all over the place. Definitely something you need to work on.

Your dissections' textures are moving in the right direction, though do need to be pushed farther in terms of how carefully you observe. Right now you're observing more than a beginner might, but there are signs that you are filling in some gaps by relying on memory, rather than looking back to your reference often enough. So, things like how various visual elements are distributed across a surface are not always handled as well as they could be (for example, the strawberry's seeds). Your second page definitely is better though, and more complex. On that page, watch how the speaker net wraps around the form along the edges - as the surface turns away, surface detail tends to get compressed. Also, for your reflective metal, your approach resulted in a lot of tiny pockets of white/black, resulting in a very distracting, noisy texture. This is the kind of unintentional use of contrast you should avoid, and you can do so by committing more to solid blacks where possible.

It'd be a good idea to read through the notes over at the 25 texture challenge.

So for the form intersections, as I mentioned, you would have benefited considerably from doing the 250 box challenge as instructed. I'm glad you're drawing through your boxes though, that does definitely help. Your linework is still somewhat sloppy though - definitely need to put more effort into applying the ghosting method. I can see some traces that you have been applying it, but your lines have a tendency to arc here and there, which weakens your forms. Your cylinders' ellipses are not particularly well aligned, and while you used the minor axis in the cone on the first page, the minor axis doesn't cut through the ellipse at all, and doesn't help much. Give the notes on the 250 cylinder challenge a read.

Your organic intersections are demonstrating some of the same kind of sloppiness I mentioned for the organic forms with contour lines. In addition to that though, your forms don't feel grounded on each other - that one across the top is effectively floating there, and there's no sense that any of the others are actually wrapping and sagging around the one underneath them. As mentioned in the instructions, you need to really think about how these forms interact with each other in 3D space, rather than piling them on as though your drawing is two dimensional. It does take time (and again, the 250 box challenge helps develop one's mental model of 3D space), but one of the most important steps one can take is to work towards believing in the illusion they are trying to create. Right now I don't get the impression from the organic intersections specifically that you believe these are forms that exist in a 3D world. What I'm seeing suggests they're still just flat shapes on a flat page.

So, first finish the 250 box challenge. Then I want:

• Two pages of organic forms with contour curves. Focus on building up the illusion of volume, and take your time. You want to make them feel like balloons - if your lines are poorly planned and executed, they won't feel cohesive enough to build any such illusion.

• Two pages of form intersections. Going through the 250 box challenge should help here, as will applying the correction techniques mentioned there.

• Two more pages of organic intersections.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-17 03:29

So there are definitely some things worth bringing to your attention here.

The 250 box challenge:

• Probably should have submitted all of the pages, not just the last two. It's good to show me where you started and how things ended to give me a better sense of your growth, rather than just your currente state.

• When drawing through your boxes, avoid broken lines (you cannot trust their trajectory, as every time a line is broken and resumed, its direction shifts slightly).

• Draw through your boxes all the way, rather than just placing an arbitrary cross-axis in the middle. If you're getting confused by that illusion where when drawing through a box, you can't really tell which side is which, try filling in one of the front-facing faces with tight, consistent, parallel hatching. It'll serve as a visual cue to clarify the confusion.

• You don't seem to have applied any of the correction techniques mentioned in the notes. Read the notes! They're important. Corrections are a solid 50% of the work here.

Cylinders:

• Didn't draw through your ellipses.

• You need to be constructing around the minor axis for all of these cylinders, not just some of them. It's a big part of learning how to align your ellipses.

Lesson 2:

• Nice work with your arrows.

• Not drawing through most of your ellipses in your organic forms.

• Your contour curves generally do wrap decently around the forms, but your alignment isn't always the best. Remember that the contour curves are just visible portions of larger ellipses, and those ellipses should be aligned to the central minor axis line, so the contour curves basically are cross-sections cut perpendicularly to the flow of the form. So minor axes are important! Don't leave them out.

• Your dissections' textures are coming along well. A little scribbly at times (rather than being more intentional and careful with your mark making), but generally moving in the right direction. That said, I do mention in the instructions for this exercise that you need to start it out as though it was an organic form with contour lines. You definitely skipped right over that. Remember that every single drawing you do for my lessons are just exercises - mostly being exercises in understanding how to manipulate forms in 3D space. If you skip linework or steps in favour of keeping your drawings cleaner for the end result, you will be missing out on the purpose of the exercise.

• For your form intersections, drawing through your boxes is hugely beneficial, as it helps you to understand how these major forms sit in space. Also, while the intersections themselves don't matter a whole lot in this exercise, your manner of depicting them by filling them in kinda defeats the purpose of the intersection itself. Soo... don't do that. Oh, and again - draw through your ellipses!

• Your organic intersections are pretty well done.

So, I think the biggest trend I'm seeing overall is that you're not particularly careful about following instructions. Not an uncommon thing to see here, but definitely something you'll want to remedy. There's a lot of content in the lessons, they are quite dense and difficult to work through. It's generally necessary to read and reread the lessons several times to continually refresh your memory.

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

• Two pages of organic forms with contour curves. Don't forget your minor axes, and work on the alignment of your curves.

• Two pages of form intersections. Draw through your boxes, construct all your cylinders around minor axes, draw through your ellipses. It is definitely a good idea to go back over your 250 box challenge work to apply the correction techniques mentioned in the challenge page notes so you can learn from the boxes you've already drawn by identifying where things have gone wrong.

I am going to mark your two challenges as complete, because you met the requirements for them.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-17 04:06

Your arrows certainly are coming along well. If I had to give one recommendation here, it's to consider how your arrows move through all three dimensions of space. Right now you're somewhat restricted to the two dimensions of the page. Try and think of the page as just being a window into a larger, three dimensional world, and consider one end of the arrow as starting from being farther away, and the other end being closer to the viewer.

For your organic forms with contour ellipses, I'd recommend giving these notes a read. Should help you better grasp what the degree of an ellipse conveys about that particular cross-section of the form. Also, try to stick more to basic sausage forms, rather than making things more complicated. A more complex shape won't actually teach you more about the purpose of the exercise, and instead will distract you with unnecessary concerns.

The organic forms with contour curves are generally okay, although I did notice that your line weight is pretty uniform throughout with your lines. This sometimes has to do with pressing a little too hard on your pen tip, but no matter the cause, try and draw so the ends of your lines taper ever so slightly as this will add a little more life to your drawings. I discuss this further at the bottom of these notes. The rest of those notes are also worth reading.

Your dissections are coming along well. I do think that you've left a lot of surfaces blank, which is in no way in your interest, but what you have drawn is coming along decently. I do want you to read through the notes on the texture challenge at some point to further your development in that area, but it's not a high priority right now. I actually realized you had another page of dissections later in the set that definitely are way too simplified - the ones I'm referring to as decent are these.

Overall, another thing I noticed was that your ellipses tend to be very tight. This is fine, and even good, but I believe you may be focusing a little too much on keeping them tight and as a result drawing them a little less confidently. This in turn causes your ellipses to stiffen up a bit. Keep that in mind - confidence is still your first priority, you want to keep your ellipses nice and smooth, even if that means loosening them up a little bit. You'll eventually tighten them back up, but once you're able to do so without getting stiff.

Your form intersections are a little lacking. You're not really filling up the page (there's plenty of blank space). Your box constructions are decent for the most part, though your cylinders and cones should be built around a minor axis line (give the 250 cylinder challenge page a read if you don't know what I mean). The intersections themselves are generally quite far off the mark, though this isn't really a major concern for us right now.

I think doing an intersection with just boxes is definitely a good idea, though in the page you did, your sense of scale seems to be rather inconsistent. This actually relates back to this issue mentioned in lesson 1. Keeping your boxes fairly equilateral (and outright avoiding anything that is remotely stretched in one dimension as mentioned in the instructions) helps.

Your organic intersections are okay, though again - you've got a whole lot of blank space on your page, and that one form laying aside from all the rest seems to be entirely pointless.

I'd like you to do the following:

• One page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• One page of form intersections with only boxes. I want you to try a little harder here with the intersections, as generally box-on-box intersections are easier to wrap one's head around, and this should help you push the bounds of your understanding of space. I want you to fill the entire page, and keep your boxes relatively equilateral. Avoid any boxes that are particularly long in one dimension.

• One page of form intersections with any assortment of forms. Don't forget to use minor axes for anything built off a circular base. Again, keep your forms equilateral.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-18 01:33

Pretty nice work, though I've got a few points to share:

• To help with the organic forms with contour ellipses, give these notes a read. Should help you better grasp what the degree of your ellipses really represents about the orientation of those circular cross-sections in 3D space.

• Your organic forms with contour lines were generally pretty decently done.

• In general, the more complicated organic shapes with branching arms and whatnot don't actually add that much to the exercise, and instead can become distracting. Practicing on basic, plump sausages is generally best.

• Very nice work on your dissections. Lots of varying textures, and you were very patient in executing them. I also like that you're demonstrating an awareness of the form by compressing the textures as they reach the edge of the form (as that surface turns away from the viewer).

• For your form intersections, you definitely missed the instruction about avoiding forms that are stretched in any one dimension. It's best to keep them fairly equilateral (think cubelike proportions, roughly the same in all three dimensions). Stretching them too much brings a lot of perspective and foreshortening into play, which makes the exercise (Which is already difficult) even more challenging, and needlessly so. Also don't forget to draw through your boxes so you better grasp how each one sits in 3D space, and how they sit in relation to one another.

• Pretty good work with your organic intersections. You definitely demonstrate that you understand what you should be aiming for. You'll improve with more practice, but you're heading in the right direction.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Be sure to keep practicing the material from lessons 1 and 2 as part of a warmup routine, but feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-21 02:27

Wow, I was really dropping the ball in regards to your box challenge. Sorry about that!

Your lesson 2 work is quite well done. Your arrows flow pretty nicely - though right now we can see that most of that flow happens across the two dimensions defined by the page. It's a good idea to try and push into the third dimension by playing with depth, setting one end of the arrow as being farther away, and the other as being closer.

Solid work with your organic forms with contour lines. My only recommendation there is to ensure that you're aligning your ellipses/curves to the central minor axis line.

Your dissections are coming along well - plenty of room to improve your observational skills, but you're heading along the right track. You're demonstrating that you've moved well past the tendency to draw strictly from memory with a few minor glances at one's reference. You're definitely looking at your reference frequently. As you continue to build upon this habit, the amount of detail you start to notice, and aspects of how it is organized, will certainly continue to improve.

When it comes to textures that perhaps seem a little too much like pattern (like the brick wall), we have a tendency to revert back to following what we already know about brick walls (which isn't a whole lot). So in those cases, you may still want to kind of force yourself to pay closer attention to your reference.

Your form intersections are solid in the areas I'm looking for, which is primarily being able to draw forms together within the space so it feels consistent and cohesive. The intersections themselves do need work, but this is totally normal at this point. It's going to require more development of your understanding of 3D space, which will take time.

Lastly, your organic intersections are looking good. They convey the sense of how they sag over each other quite nicely. My only critique there is to keep the lines of your forms smoother - right now there's definitely a wobble to them, so you'll want to work on executing those marks more confidently, and with a more persistent pace. It's not just a matter of aesthetics, but the additional complexity that comes from a wobbly line tends to undermine the solidity of the form.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-10-27 00:14

Generally you're doing pretty well, but I do have several points of advice to offer, so you get the most out of these exercises in the future.

• For your arrows, I highly recommend that you draw a little larger and make your arrows longer. We have a natural tendency to draw a smaller when we're less confident in our abilities, but this has the negative impact of causing us to stiffen up. When dealing with spatial problems (like understanding how these arrows should flow through space), we benefit considerably from giving ourselves a lot more room to work.

• You are demonstrating a good grasp of the contour lines, but you're also skipping steps at times and perhaps overcomplicating things. Firstly, the minor axes lines are important, so be sure to include them in all of your organic forms. Secondly, there isn't necessarily too much to be gained by making your organic forms all kinds of wacky and complicated. When it comes to grasping the purpose of the exercise - which is a matter of simply drawing lines so they sit on the surface of a form and describe it as it curves through space, a simple sausage is generally best.

• Nice work on your dissections. You've got a lot of great variety here with your textures. If you'd like to explore this further (which you don't necessarily need to do now), give the notes on the texture challenge page a read, where I go further in depth into observation and how to organize visual details.

• Nice work with your form intersections. You're grasping the core concepts well, though I have one major suggestion - don't draw lightly, then go back over your lines to replace them with a cleaner stroke. The reason this is not a good approach is that when you go back over those lines, you're bound to do so with a lower, more deliberate and belaboured motion. This is entirely contrary to the principles of the ghosting method, which are all about executing your marks with confidence in order to keep them smooth and maintain their flow. When it comes to line weight, it is not about replacing your linework - it's about clarifying specific things. We don't apply line weight to the entirety of a line, but rather to specific localities, mainly to clarify how forms overlap one another.

• Also, for the form intersections exercise, I did recommend in the instructions that forms that are too long in any one dimension should be avoided, to keep the exercise focused on a certain set of challenges without introducing further complications.

• Nice work on your organic intersections - you're nailing the idea here, your forms give a good sense of how they all relate to one another. I did notice however that your lines are quite rough and a little hairy, which suggests that you may have grown a little lax in your use of the ghosting method, and generally focusing on confident executions of individual, planned strokes.

Anyway, there's a lot here to keep in mind, so try to apply it when attempting these exercises in the future (as you should be adding them to those from lesson 1 to make up a regular warmup routine, picking two or three out of the set to do for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of a sitting). I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-28 04:04

Pretty nice work overall. Your form intersections were especially well done, despite the challenge they posed. Here are a few tips:

• For your arrows, try and play a little more with perspective, with one end being closer to the viewer (larger) and one end being farther away (smaller).

• Your dissections are pretty good, albeit they do feel a little half-assed. It's not that they weren't done well, but rather that they seem a little rushed and you didn't really cover as much surface area as you could have to get more out of the exercise. That said, the areas you did cover convey good observational skills, and a good sense of how those details need to be organized.

• Your organic intersections are honestly a little bit iffy. More than anything, the dropshadow with the scribbly hatching really takes away from the overall drawing. If you lay down a shadow shape, fill it in completely. Leaving areas of white amongst the dark becomes quite distracting. I also get more of a sense that your organic forms are cutting through one another, rather than resting on top and sagging around each other.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to take another stab at the organic intersections, once you've had a chance to look at my example for that exercise again.

Uncomfortable

2017-10-30 04:35

So while you're generally doing okay, there are some major things I want to address.

• If you'd only included the organic forms with shading/rendering, I'd have asked you to redo it. In general though, I prefer that the exercises not stray from the instructions. It's totally fine to draw whatever makes you happy separately, but I don't want students getting distracted from the purpose of each exercise. In this case, we really don't want to be relying prematurely on light/shadow to convey the illusion of form. We need to be doing that purely through the methods outlined in the lessons (like contour lines).

• Don't leave the minor axis lines out of your organic forms with contour curves, and don't get too complicated with the forms themselves either. Even just drawing regular sausage forms with no branching is likely to help you keep focused on the task of wrapping those contour curves snugly around the forms in a way that reinforces their curvature.

• Your dissections are excellent. Great texture, great experimentation, great balance of detail without getting too noisy and distracting. At least, in that first and third pages. The next page has next to no texture, but I'm willing to forgive that.

• Your form intersections are well done, but your line quality is not. You're being very sketchy, and lack the kind of deliberateness that comes from the use of the ghosting method. Ghosting each and every line is extremely important - you need to break the habit of automatically reinforcing your lines, and get used to executing each mark separately, as the result of clear planning and preparation.

• Your organic intersections are okay. They definitely do demonstrate a general grasp of how these forms sit on top of each other, and sag where their weight is not supported. That said, I do believe you could have probably done better.

Overall, I definitely got the impression that you were distracted throughout the set. You're demonstrating enough of each concept for me to mark this lesson as complete, so I will - but you should know that I am well aware of the fact that you can do much better if you focus on following the instructions to the letter. Yes, the exercises can be dry and boring - but they are laid out in a particular fashion for a reason.

Try not to bite off more than you can chew - do a page a day if you have to, and spend the rest of your time drawing things that are fun. What matters though is that the time you spend on these exercises are spent applying them as they're meant to be done.

If you'd like to try this work again, you're welcome to. If you want to move onto lesson 3, feel free. But either way, keep in mind that this point forward, you should be incorporating the exercises from lesson 1 and 2 into a regular warmup, picking two or three exercises to do for 10-15 minutes each day.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-07 06:54

Phenomenal work. Your confidence in your linework and your construction of forms is stunning. Overall you're doing extremely well, and are applying the principles of the lessons quite well. I just have a couple of small suggestions to make:

• For your form intersections, draw through your boxes, as covered in the 250 box challenge (which I assume you did, based on the quality of your box constructions - though you should have submitted that before moving onto lesson 2).

• For your cylinders in the form intersections, extend the minor axis so it goes through both ellipses entirely, rather than going from center to center.

• For the organic intersections, I definitely highly recommend sticking to simple sausage forms throughout, so you can focus primarily on how those forms interact with each other, rather than the complexity of each individual form.

Other than that, very well done. I especially liked your dissections, which have a great balance of well observed and studied detail, and clear focal areas. Texture and detail is as much about what you choose to display as it is about what you choose to simplify or hide, and you've leveraged that very nicely.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-11-11 00:22

Sorry about the delay - things have been busy at work.

In general I'm not entirely in favour of adding colours and such, but I won't stress it as you mentioned that it helped you understand your intersections better. That said, there probably was no reason to add colour to the arrows (and the colouring was pretty scribbly and sloppy, so keep that in mind).

Generally you did a pretty good job, but I do have a few key things to mention:

• For your arrows, they're flowing quite nicely. In the future, try and think about one end of each arrow being positioned farther away in space from the viewer, and the other end being closer. This will force you to think more about the depth of the space in which you're working.

• For your organic forms with contour curves, I noticed that your contour curves generally maintained the same degree throughout their lengths in a lot of cases (imagine that the curves are in fact full ellipses - their degree represents the orientation of that cross-section relative to the viewer. This would not generally remain consistent, and would shift slightly over the course of the form. I expand on this a little more in these notes so give them a read.

• Your dissections are coming along quite nicely. I especially love the onion texture, and the fruit that went with it on its cut surface. There were some other areas where the texture wasn't quite observed as carefully, and seemed to rely a little more on your memory rather than direct observation and study. This is pretty normal at this stage, but is something to look out for. Give the notes over on the texture challenge a read, as they expand on the idea of observing vs. relying on faulty memory.

Aside from that, very well done. Your form intersections demonstrate a well developing grasp of 3D space, and your organic intersections show a good sense of how these sausage forms interact with one another. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-11 01:02

Nice work! I do have a few suggestions though that should help as you continue to move forwards:

• For your arrows, right now they do feel a little like they flow largely across the 2D plane of the piece of paper you're drawing on. Try and think about one end of the arrow sitting farther away from the viewer, and the other sitting much closer, and try to push through the depth of that scene as you connect those points. Exaggerate the difference in scale as the arrow moves towards the viewer. Be dynamic.

• Great work with the organic forms with contour curves - just don't forget to include the central minor axis line, as it is still important when determining the alignment of your contour lines. Ideally you want them to represent cross-sections that run perpendicular to the flow of the overall form.

• Your dissections are coming along well. One thing I did notice is that some of them are a little more cartoony - this is totally normal and expected at this stage, and generally comes from the way one approaches observational drawing. We have a habit of relying more on memory rather than direct observation, and that is what is happening here. You'll find some helpful notes explaining the idea and how to improve on the texture challenge page notes. That said, you're absolutely heading in the right direction with these.

• A couple things for your form intersections. First, try to fill the page more - large blank areas are missed opportunities for further development. Second, when adding line weight, try to avoid applying it to the entirety of a line. This usually causes us to stress too much over keeping it accurately in line with the mark we're trying to add weight to. As a result, we stiffen up and wobble. Instead, you want to apply line weight locally, to specific areas so we can clarify particular overlaps. Lastly, draw through your boxes as mentioned in the 250 box challenge page so you can better grasp how each form sits in 3D space.

• Very nice work with your organic intersections, I get a strong impression that you fully understand how these forms relate to one another, and how they rest upon their neighbouring forms, sagging where appropriate.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. Just be sure to keep up with the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of a regular warmup routine.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-12 01:41

Definitely a good start.

• Nice work on the arrows, they flow nicely through space. To help reinforce the idea that you're pushing them through the depth of the scene, consider exaggerating the change in scale (getting much larger as they get closer to the viewer, and much smaller as they move away.

• Your ellipses in your organic forms with contour ellipses exercise are coming along alright, though they are definitely looking a little stiff. You need to be drawing through them more confidently, focusing on executing them with a confident, persistent pace. If you hesitate, they will wobble, and they'll lose their shape.

• For the organic forms with contour curves, remember that the curves are really just the visible portion of a larger ellipse. As the curve reaches the edge of your shape, you really need to push the sense that it's hooking back around and continuing along the other side. Consider applying the 'overshooting' method described on these notes. Also remember to keep the curves aligned to that central minor axis line, as though they were ellipses.

• Nice work with your dissections - lots of interesting experimentation. While there is room for improvement, you're exhibiting a lot of good habits. Not a lot of scribbling (though work on reducing what scribbling is there!), and not shying away from really looking and studying your reference. Practice will improve things, but you're heading in the right direction.

• Your form intersections generally came out pretty well. I think drawing through your boxes definitely helped give you a better sense of how they all sit in 3D space and how they relate to one another.

• Also good work with your organic intersections. The sense of piling the forms up comes through quite nicely.

I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour ellipses, then two more pages of organic forms with contour curves.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-13 21:28

Excellent work! Overall you've done extremely well, I just have one thing to point out with your organic forms with contour curves. Looking at those curves, their degree (if you imagined that each one was actually a complete ellipse) all remain pretty consistent through the length of the forms. This makes them feel a little odd. The degree tells the viewer the orientation of that cross-sectional circle as it sits in 3D space. I explain that a little further here.

On the same point, watch how your curves hook around as they reach the edge of the form - you're not always wrapping them around the rounded form as well as you could. One thing that can help with this is to 'overshoot' your curves as described here.

Aside from that, excellent work. Your form intersections and organic intersections are especially well done, and demonstrate a great grasp of 3D space. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

As for your question, I'd focus more on applying the principles of each exercise - for example, the rotated boxes is more about having boxes relate to one another in a specific manner. So you could alternatively apply the idea by trying to draw a series of boxes connected by an imaginary "string", snaking their way through space. That's the sort of thing you could squeeze into a fairly limited amount of time.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-14 20:23

https://i.imgur.com/HziPyHp.jpg

Uncomfortable

2017-11-15 19:19

Your work is coming along well, but I do have a few things to point out.

• For your organic forms with contour ellipses, just make sure you work towards fitting them more snugly inside of the organic shape - contour lines run along the surface of the form, so they've got to touch the actual edges (otherwise they're going to feel like they're sitting inside of the form, or outside of it, as the case may be. The confidence/evenness of your ellipses is great, so it is important to keep that up (and not slow down/hesitate) so really the only thing here will be to continue practicing executing them (after applying the ghosting method) in order to improve overall accuracy/control.

• Your contour curves aren't quite wrapping around the forms properly. One thing that's very important to remember is that the contour curves are really just contour ellipses where a portion is hidden (because they continue along the other side of the form). If you compare your curves to your ellipses, you'll notice that the curves end up following a much shallower curvature, and also don't quite 'hook around' as they come to the edge. Also watch their alignment relative to the central minor axis line. One good way of getting a hang of this idea of 'hooking around' is to overshoot your curves a little as demonstrated here.

• You've got a lot of great experimentation and interesting observations in your dissections. One suggestion that I have is to avoid hatching/crosshatching when drawing these textures, as it's a technique people often end up using instead of really looking more carefully at the details that are actually present, and when they're focusing more on rendering light/shadow rather than capturing the surface quality of a form. Forcing yourself to avoid hatching takes away a likely crutch and really ends up pushing you further in your understanding of texture.

• Your form intersections are quite well done, just watch your use of line weight. We don't want to use line weight as a sort of 'clean up' pass - line weight is used to clarify specific, local overlaps, to show where one form is in front of another. We don't want to apply line weight to the entirety of a line, but rather only to the relevant portion of it. This makes the line a little more dynamic (transitioning from one weight to another), and also makes it easier to apply them because we don't have to worry about following the entirety of a line - just a portion - and can do so more confidently and more smoothly. Also, as far as cones and pyramids go, I've got demos on constructing those inside of boxes in the big demo dump from the sidebar.

• Fundamentally your organic intersections are okay, although they do suffer from some of the same problems as your organic forms with contour curves. That said, you are demonstrating an understanding of how those forms sit in 3D space, and how they interact with each other, which is the main purpose of 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

2017-11-15 19:44

Definitely looking better, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Just don't forget to include the central minor axis line, as it helps considerably to align your contour curves so they run as cross-sections perpendicular to the flow of the overall form.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-23 01:27

You've done a pretty good job with the form intersections, but your organic forms/intersections are not reflecting a good grasp of the fact that you're meant to be drawing three dimensional forms in 3D space. From what I can see, you're not actually convinced of that.

Ultimately what we're doing here is telling a lie, and in order to tell it as convincingly as possible, you yourself must believe it. This is easier said than done, and takes time to develop, but the first step is to properly grasp what it is you're attempting to do.

Your marks currently read as just being a set of lines loosely related to one another, on a flat piece of paper. Instead, I want you to think about the fact that you're creating a plump sausage form, either floating in space or sitting on a surface. Draw with your whole arm, not just your wrist, and keep the form simple. Your current lines for the shape's outline tend to be a little stiff and at times a little uneven or wobbly - this adds complexity, which in turn undermines the illusion of form. Keep it as simple and smooth as you can.

Next, for your contour curves, you've got to apply the ghosting method more, and generally take more time planning them out. You also need to think more about how those circular cross-sections are oriented relative to the viewer. The degree of the ellipse used to represent the orientation cross-section, as described here.

Lastly, make sure you keep the alignment of your contour curves in mind as well - that central line is the minor axis, so keep that in mind.

Once you have a better grasp of the volumes you're actually trying to construct, and start to believe in those illusions, the organic intersections should get better as well, as it relies heavily on you respecting the solidity of each form (so they don't interpenetrate).

Soooo, I'd like you to try another four pages of organic forms with contour curves, then two pages of organic intersections. Also, when doing the forms with contour curves, don't just arrange them all the same way. That's going to immediately make you think robotically, like they're just flat things on a flat page.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-23 01:34

Pretty nice work! Just a couple tips:

• For your arrows, try and think about one end being farther away from the viewer and the other being closer. This will help you explore the depth of your space more. Right now your arrows flow very nicely, but stay fairly limited to the space defined by the page, rather than treating the page like a window that looks out onto an infinite space.

• Your dissections tend to be a little timid - try and push yourself to experiment more. Your second page is definitely much better (though still not pushing any boundaries), but the first has very little texture at all.

Aside from that, very well done. Your organic forms are solid, your form intersections demonstrate a good grasp of 3D space and your organic intersections demonstrate the interaction between volumes very well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-23 01:55

Very nice work! You've got some excellent volumes in your organic forms with contour ellipses/curves, your dissections show a lot of great experimentation and exploration, your form intersections demonstrate a nicely developing understanding of 3D space and your organic intersections convincingly create the illusion that these forms are sagging and resting on top of each other without interpenetrating.

Just a few tips:

• When doing arrows, it helps to think about the position of the two ends in space (being closer or further away from the viewer), so you can really push the exploration of the depth of the scene.

• When drawing cylinders, push that minor axis line so it cuts through both ellipses.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-11-24 05:50

Nice work! Your arrows flow very nicely through space, your organic forms capture a good sense of volume, and your dissections demonstrate a lot of excellent experimentation and exploration. Your form intersections are well done too - you're showing a well developing grasp of 3D space. Your organic intersections are alright - definitely good enough for the lesson, though you should work on getting them to feel more fluid and somewhat less stiff. Try and think of them like balloons filled with water sagging on top of each other.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-11-27 03:47

Here you go. I threw a few tips in there and also demonstrated how I'd make one of your organic intersections better.

I'd like you to do two pages of organic forms and one more page of organic intersections. You reaaally still aren't taking your time with each one. A lot of your lines are stiff and awkward, and you're not really leveraging your line weight (but you are putting down super heavy shadows which is fine if you have the additional line weight to kind of help bridge the gap).

You're not that far off, I just think you're rushing needlessly, like you're focusing more on quantity over quality. Both are important, and you're only going to learn if you focus on doing your current best for each attempt.

Uncomfortable

2017-11-29 00:10

The vast majority of this is really, really well done. The arrows flow nicely through space, your dissections have a lot of great experimentation going on with a large variety of textures, your form intersections demonstrate a solid grasp of 3D space and your organic intersections show that you understand how those forms would interact with one anothers' volumes.

The only area that worries me is your organic forms with contour curves, as they are very clearly not wrapping around the forms all that well. Now, I think that you may have figured that stuff out by the time you reached the organic intersections, but I still want to point you to these notes. Try applying the 'overshooting' method described there to help bridge the difference between drawing a full ellipse and drawing just a partial curve.

Because you demonstrate a good grasp of that material in the organic intersections exercise, and everything else is very solid, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2017-12-02 21:30

They're getting there, so I'm going to ask you to move on. You still need to practice the fuck out of these as warmups though, especially with aligning the curves/ellipses properly to the minor axis.

Uncomfortable

2017-12-10 19:17

Overall you did a pretty good job, and while your form intersections started off quite timid and uncertain, they improved considerably and ended up coming out rather solid by the end. I also noticed that you had some struggles with your organic forms with contour curves (making sure that the curves wrap convincingly around the forms) - you were making good progress and were kind of riding the fence on that one, so just keep on top of it as you continue to practice in your warmups. It's pretty easy to slip back into forgetting about wrapping the lines along the surface of the form, so you've got to make sure that you remain consciously aware of that.

Your arrows are pretty good, but I do want to recommend that you note which end of the arrow is farther from the viewer and which end is closer, and try to exaggerate the perspective/foreshortening of that. This will help you explore all three dimensions of space, rather than sticking to just the two dimensions of the page.

Your dissections are a good start - I do think that you'll want to work on your observational skills more. Give the notes on the 25 texture challenge a read, as they go over this in more detail. This is more or less what I expect to see from the dissections at this point - they're an exercise that are meant to show me where you are with your observation rather than expecting you to achieve some kind of particular standard.

Lastly, watch your linework in some places - when you're uncertain of yourself, you tend to get quite sketchy, and fall into the bad habit of reflexively correcting mistakes, resulting in messier results and a lot more attention being drawn to your blunders (since they've been darkened with extra marks). Every mark you put down should be the result of forethought and planning - fight against the desire to draw more instinctually.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-12-13 22:00

Overall you're doing pretty well, though I do have a few things I can point out.

• For your arrows, try and consider one end of the arrow as being farther away from the viewer, and the other end being closer. Right now your arrows move to a limited degree through the depth of the scene, but generally stick to the two dimensions defined by the page itself. By thinking about one end as being situated much farther away, you can explore that depth to a much greater degree.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well, and you clearly understand what you should be aiming for. There are however some places where your contour curves do not quite hook back around enough as they reach the edge of the form. This suggests that you're still getting used to the idea, and need to continue to be mindful of it as you practice. It can be quite easy to slip back if you don't keep your mind on the need to accelerate that curvature. The overshooting method I describe in these notes can definitely help.

• Your dissections were well done. You've got a lot of great variety and experimentation going on here, which is exactly what I want to see.

• Your grasp of 3D space is demonstrated well by your form intersections - the only thing I want to draw your attention to here is the way you drew a lighter underdrawing, and then cleaned up your lines with a darker pass. Throughout my lessons, I want you to avoid drawing in this two-phase manner. Adding line weight is perfectly fine and encouraged, but keep in mind that line weight should be applied locally - not to the entirety of a shape or line, but to a section of a line in order to demonstrate how it overlaps another form. Also, make sure that you do not dedicate any focus to drawing your lines lighter at any point. Each and every mark should be executed with confidence - if you're worried about keeping it light so you can clean up later, you'll be devoting fewer mental resources to keeping your forms solid and consistent. You can always add dimension and draw attention to the 'important' lines with line weight later on, but while you're constructing you should be purely focused on construction only.

• Nice work with the organic intersections - the contour curves here are hooking around nicely, and you're capturing both nice volumes and a good sense of how these forms interact with one another.

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

Uncomfortable

2017-12-22 01:19

Solid work overall. You're demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space and are showing that you are convincing yourself of the illusion of form - which is the first step to convincing others of it as well.

I do have a couple things to draw your attention to however:

• You ultimately ended up getting a good handle on the arrows. One thing that will help push things further in this area is to think about one end of the arrow sitting farther away from the viewer, and another end sitting closer. This allows you to focus on how the arrow moves through all three dimensions of space, rather than falling into the trap of restricting it mostly to the two dimensions of your piece of paper. The page is a window into a larger 3D space, so do what you can to break into that mode of thinking.

• Remember that the dissections start out as organic forms with contour lines. Don't think about texture until the form is constructed and solid, with whatever contour curves are necessary for this. That said, your textures are very well done - you've demonstrated a great degree of variety and a lot of care/patience with each and every one.

• In the instructions, I mention that you should keep away from overly stretched forms for your form intersections. The exercise is difficult enough, bringing in a lot of foreshortening only makes it that much worse and splits your focus. Keep your forms more equilateral. That said you've done pretty well, but always follow the instructions to the letter.

• Your organic intersections are alright, but there's definitely room for improvement here. Your forms feel a bit stiff, and don't always carry the sense of sagging flesh that we're after here. Try and think of these each as being water balloons piled on top of one another. Where they are supported, they'll wrap around the form underneath them, but where they aren't, they'll sag. Keep your forms simple in order to maintain their solidity and focus on conveying their tension and flaccidity.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You've generally done a good job, and can focus on the points I've mentioned above as you continue to practice the exercises as part of a warmup routine. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-02 02:18

Overall you're doing well. The sense of solidity of your boxes improves over the set, as does the confidence of your lines. I do have a couple recommendations though:

• If ever you find yourself getting confused when looking at one of your boxes (with that illusion where we're not sure which side of the box faces towards us), try filling one of the front-facing faces of your boxes with some tight, consistent hatching to serve as a visual cue.

• Right now you're extending your lines in both directions - you only really benefit from extending them towards their implied vanishing point. If you extend both ways, it can get confusing sometimes, as you may see convergence in the wrong direction and end up thinking it's still correct. Always think about which side goes towards the VP.

Aside from that, great work! Keep it up. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-06 22:31

You've done very well here. Just about all of the exercises have been executed exactly as I've instructed, and you've done so with a great degree of success. Your arrows initially were somewhat restricted to the two dimensions of the page, but as you continued to practice them, you started breaking more into the third dimension, exploring more of the depth of the larger 'space' available to you.

Your organic forms with contour lines are solid - the only recommendation I have here is that you stick to simpler forms, rather than going particularly wacky with lots of branches and such. Reason being, when we get into constructional drawing, you'll find that we'd never construct a form in that way - we'd build it up as many simpler forms which would then be connected together. Also, don't forget to leverage that minor axis line - it's important for ensuring your alignment, so don't be so quick to abandon it. The long-term goal is to internalize these concepts, but you should be continuing to draw with them for a while to come.

Your dissections are great - lots of variation in your textures, and none of them get particularly busy or distracting. You're also demonstrating strong observational skills, as well as a good sense of how to organize the hierarchy of visual information.

You continue the trend with your form intersections. Your forms come out looking quite solid, and most of your intersections are spot on. In general, I do recommend starting pyramids off as boxes (I discuss this in the new form intersections video), so it's completely fine for you to approach them in that manner. After all, this is all about construction - we start out from the simplest possible form and work our way up. Starting out with a box is entirely normal, and not something you should be so eager to 'practice away'. Like the minor axis, you'll eventually internalize that understanding of 3D form, but I still want to see you starting everything dead simple and working your way up for all of my lessons.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a good job of demonstrating your understanding of how all these forms relate to one another, how they sag under their own weight when they are not supported and so on.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3. You can tackle the texture challenge as well, but that one should be done in parallel with the other lessons, rather than all at once like the box/cylinder challenges. Same goes for the chest challenge, which you'll see is a great deal of work.

As for your other question, those kinds of form studies are great, and won't hinder anything. Feel free to do them as you please.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-06 23:03

You've done a pretty solid job across the board. Just a few things I wanted to bring your attention for the future:

• For the arrows, right now you're mostly restricting yourself to the two dimensions of the page, and having your arrows flow within them. You don't experiment a whole lot with the depth of the scene, so there isn't very much variation in the exaggeration of foreshortening. Try to play with thinking about one side being closer to the viewer, and the other being farther - and exaggerate the sizes of those ends (closer being much larger, farther being much smaller).

• Great work for your organic forms with contour lines. Just try to avoid overly complicated forms. Sticking to simple sausages will generally allow you to focus most on the important parts of the exercise.

• Your dissections are a good start, but they do highlight a need to work on your observational skills. What I'm seeing is somewhat cartoony textures - they tend to be oversimplified, which comes from not looking at your reference frequently enough, and relying too much on your memory. I explain the issues with this in the texture challenge so give the notes there a read.

Your form intersections are solid - you've done a great job at establishing your forms so they feel consistent and cohesive within the same scene.

Finally, your organic intersections demonstrate a good sense of how those different sausage forms interact with one another.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3. You should absolutely continue doing these exercises (along with those from lesson 1) as part of a regular warmup routine. You can also tackle the texture challenge, but keep in mind that unlike the box and cylinder challenges, that one should be done in parallel with other lessons over a longer period of time.

imguralbumbot

2018-01-10 22:59

^(Hi, I'm a bot for linking direct images of albums with only 1 image)

https://i.imgur.com/YCpdKAr.jpg

^^Source ^^| ^^Why? ^^| ^^Creator ^^| ^^ignoreme ^^| ^^deletthis

Uncomfortable

2018-01-11 01:08

Since it's been a while since your last submission, I hope you've had a chance to look through the newer videos I've posted (I mean, they were very recent, but it's been a couple weeks).

Your arrows flow quite nicely, so that's great. The only recommendation I'd make here is to play a little more with the exaggeration of foreshortening - pick which end of the arrow is farther and which is closer, and play with their relative scale, so as to really push the sense of depth across which the arrow is traversing.

Your organic forms with contour lines are just about spot on. Here and there with your curves they fly a little bit off the surface of the form, but that's no big issue. The main thing is that they're wrapping around the forms convincingly, so keep up the good work there.

For your dissections, one thing that jumps out at me is that for the most part, you skipped over the step of reinforcing your forms to start with. That is, each form in this exercise should start off as a run-of-the-mill organic form with contour lines. You appear to have skipped over that for most of them, in favour of keeping those extra lines off your drawings. Don't do that.

As far as texture goes, I am pleased to see that you did a lot of experimentation and didn't rely at all on any kind of scribbling or generic hatching. You applied specific patterns and textures carefully from each subject matter, and pushed yourself to observe more carefully. There is plenty of room for improvement, but you're on the right track. I recommend giving the notes on the 25 texture challenge a read to further explore how to approach texture and specifically observational drawing.

One thing I did want to mention in regards to the dissections though is that there are places where you allowed the texture to flatten out your forms. Keep in mind that texture should always follow the surface of the form - if you have a rounded form but draw the texture as though it were resting flat, it will flatten out your form.

Your form intersections are alright, though you missed one key point that I mentioned in the lesson - don't include forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension. Reason being, it's a difficult exercise already, and introducing additional foreshortening only makes it harder in a way that doesn't help you work on the main point of the exercise. You certainly could use more work in this area, but that said things are coming along okay. I do recommend you watch the new form intersections video though.

Lastly, your organic intersections are alright, but it'd be a good idea to watch the new video for that s well. You do seem to demonstrate a reasonable grasp of how those forms are interacting with each other in 3D space, though the quality of the individual forms themselves doesn't quite match up to your earlier organic forms with contour lines.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, but make sure to incorporate them, along with the lesson 1 exercises, into a regular warmup routine. This will ensure that you keep sharpening this basic, most important of skills over time, rather than letting them get rusty with disuse.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-16 01:28

Pretty decent work, though I did catch a few things that I'd like you to keep in mind:

• For your arrows, they're pretty good, but you are running into a tendency to construct them within the limited space of your 2D page. That is to say, there's not a whole lot of exploration of depth. Try to play around with thinking about which end of the arrow is farther away from the viewer and which is closer, and exaggerate the width as it moves through that depth of the scene (closer should be much wider, farther should be much more narrow).

• You've got those contour curves running quite nicely over the surface of your organic forms, and you're capturing the illusion of them hooking back around to the other side well. I do however want you to refrain from neglecting to draw the central minor axis line that I mention in the instructions. It's still important here when it comes to the alignment of these contour lines.

• The portion of the dissections that you completed are definitely a good start. Quite dense, but they demonstrate good observational skills. The only thing that jumps out at me is that you clearly didn't push through to cover all your surfaces. That's something that you yourself should think about. The amount of the exercise that was assigned is not that important, but there is no real reason not to complete it. All it takes is time and patience, and giving up on that for whatever reason suggests that it's something you should come back and consider a little more.

• For your form intersections, I'm glad that after those first two pages, you did end up drawing through those forms properly, and as a result they came out much better.

On Christmas, I released videos pertaining to each individual exercise in lessons 1 and 2. Some of the issues I've mentioned here were mentioned in greater detail in that video content, so I recommend that you give them a look.

So, as I said - keep these points in mind as you continue to move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-16 02:19

Unfortunately, you're becoming a real problem for me. Your work is basically flawless. Okay, flawless might be a bit of an exaggeration, but as far as the concepts that I'm looking for in this lesson, you've nailed them all, and you've followed my instructions to a tee. It kinda makes my critiques a little pointless, and makes me wonder why you're paying for them at all :P

Your arrows flow smoothly through all three dimensions of space, exploring the depth of the scene and not being limited to the two dimensions of the page you're drawing on. Your contour lines do a great job of fleshing out the volumes of your organic forms, and the contour curve specifically really push the illusion that they're hooking back around along the edges and continuing along the other side. Your dissections are all quite varied and show a great deal of experimentation with many different surface types, and your form intersections capture a solid grasp of how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, and your spheres are eerily clean and tidy. Lastly, your organic intersections superbly capture a deep understanding of how these various forms sag and slump against one another, and where their weight is supported and when it is not.

If I had one thing to point out, it'd be a few minor errors in your form intersections, regarding the construction of some of your forms. Issues like the convergences of some forms (like the top left box on the second page of the exercise, and on that same page, the second cylinder from the bottom (down the dead center of the page)'s farther ellipse seems to be overly wide in its degree. These are the kinds of mistakes I'd expect to see however if only because of the perils of working in such a permanent medium. If anything, the fact that you did not allow such mistakes phase you and kept pushing forwards with the drawing was excellent.

All I can really say is - keep up the great work, and I hope you give me something to tear into a little in the next lesson, instead of this iron-clad sort of submission.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-17 00:44

Pretty good work! There are a few areas that I want to direct your attention to, but overall you're doing quite well and show a long of great development in each area.

One thing that did stand out to me though was that your organic forms with contour curves kinda waffle back and forth between wrapping properly around the rounded forms (hooking back around at the edges to give the impression that they continue along the other side) and looking more like they're about to fly off the surface of the form. This suggests that you still need to quite actively think about how they need to wrap around and keep pushing that 'overshooting' method where you hook back around just a little bit more before lifting your pen.

Most of your dissections are really well done, but this page falls quite short, both with all of the blank surfaces, as well as the forms themselves. Stick to simple sausage forms.

Aside from that, everything else is solid. I especially liked your form intersections and organic intersections, as they feel like they convey a strong sense of weight.

Keep what I've mentioned here in mind as you continue to move forwards. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-25 21:21

As a rule, I'd be a little concerned if I received a homework submission a few months after receiving the last. Now, I'm not sure when you submitted your lesson 1 work, but given that I started tracking things back in September of 2015, and you're not in my records...

I was needlessly worried.

Thankfully it looks like I had no reason to be. Your work is excellent. As far as the things I watch out for from not having submitted in a while, you're showing some very confident linework with no real signs of wobbling or hesitation (for the most part). Your grasp of 3D space is strong, your organic forms flow nicely and your geometric ones feel solid.

Your dissections look good, with lots of careful consideration of the textures present on each object, and a lot of great experimentation. I did mention that wobbling wasn't present for the most part - the only area where this was a little weaker was in the dissections, where we can see you trying to perhaps put more weight than you should on the accuracy of your strokes. As a result, places like that thin lemon slice have edges that don't quite hold together, which undermines the solidity of the whole form. Just something to keep in mind.

For the arrows, I do have one recommendation - try to play with considering where the end points sit relative to the viewer. That is to say, place one end of the arrow farther away, and the other closer, and try and push the foreshortening (making the closer end seem exaggeratedly larger and the farther end feel much smaller). This will help you push into that depth dimension of space, where right now you are mostly moving along the two dimensions of the page with only a little bit of deviation into the third.

For the organic forms with contour curves, I do think it's pretty important to continue to work around a minor axis line that actually punches through the form (right now you've transitioned to having your lines run lengthwise along the surface of the form). The minor axis helps you when aligning those curves so they run perpendicular to the flow of the form. This in turn makes it easier to ensure that the curves wrap properly around the form. You're doing reasonably well at this, but I do see a bit of weakness with that alignment.

Your form intersections are very well done and demonstrate, as I mentioned before, an excellent grasp of 3D space. The only thing I want to pick at here is that it's a great idea to draw through your forms. This will help you better grasp how each box sits in 3D space, and how they relate to one another. Your organic intersections are well done too, though I'd recommend focusing on simple sausage forms (not too long or stretched) and piling all of them together on one page, rather than having smaller groupings of them.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-01-27 01:32

There's a lot of good work here. There are also a few things I want to comment on.

• Great work with the arrows, they flow quite nicely through 3D space.

• Things got a little weird with a lot of your organic forms with contour curves - specifically where they got all bulbous, where you broke them down into sections, pinching them at each contour line rather than having those lines rest on the surface. At the end you did it better - this is what you should be aiming for (although don't leave out your minor axis).

• The dissections started off a little weaker, but you showed a lot of promise throughout, exhibiting far more patience and care with your observation. By the end you were much more deliberate with your marks. The one thing I do want to call out though is that you always want to make sure that the texture does not contradict or undermine the form it's being applied to. For example, your stone wall ended up flattening out the form entirely, rather than wrapping around the rounded form. Remember that this exercise needs to start out with solid forms created identically to the organic forms with contour lines. You don't at any point change the underlying form for the sake of the texture (aside from playing with the silhouette in small ways). The texture should always be subordinate to the underlying form.

• Like the rest, your form intersections start out weak but definitely get better. One major issue however is a matter of following the instructions - I specifically stated that you should avoid forms that are very long or stretched in any one dimension, as this brings more complexity by way of foreshortening, making a difficult exercise even more challenging. Always read the material as carefully as you can. I'm glad though that by the end of this, you demonstrated a much more solid grasp of form.

• Great work with the organic intersections - you capture the relationships between these sagging forms quite well.

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.

I gotta say though - I'm a but surprised you missed the videos, considering that I critiqued your box challenge work well after they were integrated into the lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-27 01:40

Frankly you're doing a pretty solid job. You're exhibiting a strong grasp of 3D space (aside from a box here or there that went a bit awry), and even the texture work is coming along well. Some of your choices are at times questionable though - for example, applying the kiwi texture in the way you did is really weird. You didn't wrap it around the rounded form (texture is always subordinate to the form it's applied to and should never contradict it) and it seems to have been applied across the edge between the rounded section and the flat end.

Another thing that jumps out at me with that kiwi texture is that your lines feel very uniform, with not much tapering on their ends. This often happens when a student is generally applying too much pressure, so try and ease up there. It may also just be your scanner being set to pick things up too harshly, which is at least playing at least a partial role.

In your form intersections, one thing that may help give your spheres a greater sense of form is to apply a little elliptical/circular contour line around one of the 'poles'. That is, a tight, small contour ellipse that runs directly along the surface of the form on a side pointing towards us. You can see me demonstrating this right here (59 seconds in).

Oh, and don't forget to draw through your ellipses for those organic forms with contour ellipses. Ultimately you should be working towards tightening them up so the lines line up neatly. If you're prone to trying to hit them in one round, you'll end up missing out on that part of the training.

Beyond that, all I can say is to keep up the good work. The warmups are helping, and while there's always room to grow, you're making good headway.

Uncomfortable

2018-01-30 22:14

• For your arrows, you effectively repeated the same arrow eighteen times, with no variation whatsoever. You also didn't explore any of the exaggerations of perspective mentioned in the video (establishing one end as being further from the viewer, the other end as being closer and pushing the scale of the end that is closer), and as a result your arrows feel fairly limited to the two dimensions of the page with fairly little movement through the depth of the scene. That said, the flow of the arrows and how they bend and twist is well done - it's just that repetition that calls into question the actual understanding of the exercise itself.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are decently done. I do want to point out however that your contour curves have a bit of wobble to them, so keep working on executing your marks with confident, persistent strokes.

• The dissections are reasonably well done. Some demonstrate a greater reliance on memory (drawing what you think you saw rather than what you're actually seeing), while others are coming along much better. I think youre most successful ones were generally the scalier textures.

• Your form intersections are coming along, though they do feel somewhat haphazard at the moment. One thing that jumps out at me is that you've got a few longer cylinders in there - one of the instructions was to specifically avoid forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension, as this brings too much foreshortening into the mix, making a challenging exercise that much harder. While the forms themselves are mostly alright, I think the greater issue is the execution of your marks. You've got some definite wobble here and there, which undermines the solidity of your forms. You're heading in the right direction, but you definitely need to work on your linework.

• Your organic intersections are coming along fairly well, and they demonstrate a good grasp of the interaction between these various sausage forms.

Overall I think you've got a lot of room for improvement, but you are demonstrating a reasonable grasp of the material. Be sure to incorporate the exercises from this lesson as well as the previous one into a regular warmup routine as you continue to move forwards through the lesson. Also, take more care in following the instructions. Revisit the lesson content and the videos as much as is needed in order to ensure that when you work on a particular exercise, you haven't forgotten anything important.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-02-03 17:48

Really solid work on your arrows and organic forms with contour lines. You're demonstrating a nicely developing grasp of all three dimensions of space, and these exercises really demonstrate how your brain is able to explore them fluidly, and establish volumes within them.

While the dissections were certainly challenging, they're meant to be - and you did an admirable job with them. You were distinctly intentional in your approach to each texture, demonstrating a great deal of focus and observation. Your first page was definitely stronger, but you may have simply been getting tired by the second and it was still pretty well done too.

Your form intersections are pretty nicely done - your forms feel confident and solid, and they all sit consistently within the space. You also nailed most of your instructions, and while some of those cones/cylinders are getting a bit too stretched (something I mentioned you should avoid in the instructions, as adding additional complexity to an already challenging exercise can be counter productive), you seem to have handled them just fine. Those first three pages were very successful, though the fourth felt like you may have been losing focus.

For the organic intersections, there's a couple things I wanted to mention that you can keep in mind as you move forwards:

• Keep the forms simple. A consistent sausage form is all you want, no waviness to them as this can undermine their solidity. No pinching through their lengths either, for the same reason. Just a consistent width. Many of your forms were just fine, but the two leftmost are the real culprits of those issues.

• I think you may grasp this already, but it's a little uncertain from the work here so I figure I should mention it. When drawing those cast shadows, always remember that the shadows are cast upon the surface beneath the object, so very much like your contour lines, they need to flow along that surface. They need to reinforce the roundedness of that form. The particularly larger cast shadow towards the right of the drawing is probably the only one that throws this into question, as it doesn't follow the curvature of the form it's cast upon.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-02-06 21:56

Really, really phenomenal work. The amount of effort, time and patience expended in doing this lesson definitely shows, and it paid off. Your experimentation with how arrows flow demonstrate a really well developed grasp of three dimensional space. Your use of contour lines captures the volumes of your organic forms quite convincingly.

Your dissections are mind-blowingly detailed without becoming overwhelmingly noisy to the eye (at least in most cases). You've got a good sense of how to fuse key areas of information in order to reduce the visual stress. There's a few places where things do get a little cluttered, but for the most part your sense of balance is spot on.

Your form intersections are coming along well. You could use a little practice on your application of line weight (that is, maintaining a confident stroke when doing so - right now your lines stiffen up a little when you're trying to follow the original mark). The forms however are very consistent and cohesive within the scene.

Your organic intersections are good as well - I can see that they certainly have room for improvement, but you are absolutely establishing a good sense of how these forms interact with one another, where their weights are supported by their neighbours, and where they sag. I think the key thing to work on here is to get your sausages to fit more snugly together.

More than anything, your biggest weakness is definitely your own self confidence. Your work here excellent, and while being aware of your weaknesses is important, you must respect your accomplishments and your strengths. Take care to appreciate what you've been able to nail, and more important than that - become aware of it.

While I wouldn't describe you as wearing a shield of self-deprecation as some do to protect themselves from the sting of outside criticism, there is something to be said about your eagerness to point out your mistakes rather than letting me weigh your successes and failures against my own rubric. You'll find that I ignored the vast majority of your personal concerns, and judged you according to my own standards which likely differed considerably form yours. This is because I'm not looking at you as a finished work of art - you are a work in progress, and I can see the potential that you demonstrate. The rest is a matter of practice and time spent walking down the path you're already on.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-02-10 19:04

I think you just linked me to your google photos home page, not the album :P

Let me know when you've got that fixed.

Uncomfortable

2018-02-11 20:58

Overall, pretty well done! I do have a few things to mention but you're definitely moving in the right direction.

• Your arrows are very confidently done. The only issue I noticed was that right now they're primarily flowing in the limited space defined by the two dimensions of the page itself - they don't explore the depth of the scene very much. In the video for this exercise, I mention how you can try and think about which end of the arrow is closer and which is further away from the viewer, and in turn try and exaggerate the scale of those ends to reinforce the illusion of foreshortening to push into that third dimension more.

• For your organic forms with contour curves, you actually did a great job - but you should feel bad about neglecting to include the minor axis lines, as instructed. Bad! Bad you! They're an important component to aligning your curves, so even if you're confident in your ability to work without them, I don't want you leaving them out of this exercise.

• Your second page of form intersections were considerably better than your first. I would have loved to see more sausages per page, but you did pretty well as is. My only recommendation there is that when you want something to be solid black, actually make it solid black. Brush pens can be useful for this. If you allow little unintentional slivers of white to show through, they will generate a lot of visual noise and become quite distracting.

• Your form intersections are spot on. Really excellent grasp of 3D space, and how those forms interact with one another, and it's very clear that you were enjoying yourself while drawing these. Your organic intersections were also well done.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-02-12 21:27

Overall, I think you're showing a lot of signs of skimming over the instructions, rather than following them as carefully as you ought to. The majority of the issues here relate more to you either rushing, being sloppy, not following the instructions or a combination of all three. Very little of it has anything to do with your actual abilities or skill level - you're just not paying enough attention to what the lesson tells you to do.

Here are a few things I noticed when looking through your work:

• For your arrows, they're flowing quite well, but they are doing so in a space limited by the bounds of your flat piece of paper. That is, they're moving across the two dimensions of space of the page, without pushing very much into the third dimension and playing with the depth of the scene. This is something I mentioned in the video for this exercise - that you should decide which end of the arrow is closer and which is farther from the viewer, and then exaggerate the scale of those ends to match (so the end closer to you would be much bigger, the end farther away would be much smaller). I also recommend that you draw these much larger. Since this exercise (and most of the exercises in drawabox) are about understanding how things sit in and move through 3D space, giving our brains more room to think through these spatial problems tends to be very helpful.

• There are a few issues in your organic forms with contour ellipses, so I'm breaking them into multiple points:

1. The minor axis line. You seem to have thrown aside what you learned in lesson 1 about how to draw lines, and chicken scratched all of your central minor axis lines. Don't ever do that. It's an awful habit, and one you need to break sooner rather than later. Every time you chicken scratch, you make the conscious decision to do so, so that's all on you.

2. The linework for your ellipses (while infinitely better than that chicken scratch) is still looking a little stiff. They're not awful, but there is some noticeable hesitation that causes your lines to wobble as you draw a bit as you draw them, so that's something you're going to want to keep in mind. Always push yourself to draw confidently - once your pen touches the page, the chance to avoid inaccuracies is over. Now you must commit to the line you've ghosted and all of your preparation. Make the mark, and if you make a mistake, it's not that big of a deal.

3. I noticed that some of your sausage forms here got a little weird, getting pinched/skinnier through their lengths. Most are okay, but you've got a few that get a little weirdly complicated. I highly recommend that you stick to simple sausage forms that stay consistent in their widths through their lengths, and taper down like the halves of a ball on their ends. At the bottom left of this page, you've got one that's very much like a stretched ball. It's not far off, but notice how it gets fatter the closer you move in towards the center? Instead, I want you to keep that middle section consistent, like a tube. As though you took a ball, cut it down the middle, and fit a tube in between them. The one directly above it is much better.

• I don't see a single page of organic forms with contour curves, so you seem to have skipped that section.

• There's both good and bad in your dissections. I really liked the one on the top right of this page, and I appreciate that you experimented with concentrating more detail towards the sides, and having more of a rest area towards the center. The kiwi texture there also came out quite nicely. The top left of that page however didn't go nearly as well. You chicken-scratched your contour curves and you left the vast majority of the surface devoid of any texture (effectively ignoring the point of the exercise). Now, the citrus-fruit texture you added there is overly simplified and cartoony (which comes from you drawing more from what you think you remember seeing, rather than directly observing your reference - basically, you need to build up the habit of looking at your reference 90% of the time, constantly going back to it and refreshing your memory). That said, the quality of your texture is totally normal at this point. I don't expect you to be able to draw exceptional textures at all, and symbol drawing from memory as you did there is pretty much what I'd expect from a student at this stage. It's the chicken scratching, the leaving of surfaces blank, and so on which is a case of you being sloppy.

• I also noticed that your contour curves were almost always too shallow and didn't give the impression that they wrap around the object and run along its surface. This is in all likelihood because you skipped that exercise entirely.

• Lastly for the dissections - don't use hatching lines. When a person uses hatching lines, it's usually for two reasons. First, they're not bothering to look at what texture is actually present (which defeats the purpose of this exercise altogether) and secondly, it's because they're trying to apply shading. You'll find that nowhere in any of my lessons do I even mention shading - it's because worrying about light and shadow right now is a distraction. We do play with the shadows objects might cast onto each other, but when it comes to shading itself (how light hits a surface) we are not worrying about that at all.

• On the point of hatching lines, we sometimes use it when we're drawing basic geometric forms (especially when we're drawing through them), not to serve as lighting information, but to help separate planes from one another. In that situation, you should be drawing those hatching lines so they are parallel, consistent and stretch all the way from edge to edge, filling up the whole plane. The way you've drawn them in various places in this lesson has always been sloppy and rushed. Don't do that.

• Your form intersections have many of the same issues I've mentioned before. You're not applying the ghosting method, you're chicken scratching your lines, you're ignoring instructions (like the one to avoid stretched forms like long cylinders). You at least draw through most of your forms, though not all of them.

I'm going to stop this critique here. It's clear that you missed a great deal of information from the lesson, and I'm really not sure if you watched any of the videos I included explaining each exercise individually. Like I said before - the vast majority of the issues here have nothing to do with your ability to draw, but rather your ability to follow the instructions.

Go back and do this lesson again. And remember - at the beginning of each sitting, you should be doing exercises from lesson 1 as part of a warmup routine, picking two or three and doing them for 10-15 minutes. Reread the instructions for whatever exercise you're going to do before you start it, and if there's a video available, rewatch it. Don't rely on memory, make sure everything is fresh in your mind.

One last thing - it'd be better if you uploaded your work somewhere it can all be seen at the same time. Imgur is what most people here use, and it allows the entire submission to be viewed on the same page.

[deleted]

2018-02-14 22:41

Meanwhile it looks like I'm not even trying to learn how to draw. Your drawings are amazing. I feel like a failure now.

Uncomfortable

2018-02-15 01:21

Overall, pretty good but I do have a few points to raise:

• Don't neglect to draw the minor axis lines for your organic forms with contour curves. From the looks of this, you caught this issue on your own and used them throughout once a couple without went awry. Minor axes are very important when it comes to figuring out how to align those curves. I do want to stress though, the importance of sticking to simple sausages for this exercise. Don't push the complexity, it'll distract you from the main focus that is wrapping your contour lines around the surface of the form.

• Really great stuff for your dissections. Lots of excellent experimentation with different kinds of textures.

• For your form intersections, I have three concerns. Firstly, I did mention in the instructions to avoid forms that are overly stretched, and to stick to those that are more equilateral. Meaning, no long tubes. Secondly, for your cylinders and cones, it's important to build them around a minor axis. Take a look at the notes on the cylinder challenge page. Lastly, in the video I explain matters of not applying line weight to the entirety of lines, to use them locally to clarify specific overlaps and in lengths that do not force you to draw slowly and carefully. Adding weight with a stiff, careful stroke undoes the benefits of having drawn the mark with any confidence in the first place. You want to maintain that flow throughout the entire drawing, from beginning to end. Please watch that video again.

• Nice work with the organic intersections - you capture a good sense for the most part of how those forms interact with one another.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to keep the points I've raised in mind.

Uncomfortable

2018-02-20 00:12

Very nice work! Your arrows flow very nicely through space. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along well, and convey the illusion of volume. You will want to continue to work on tightening up those ellipses, but I like the confidence with which they've been drawn, it keeps them nice and even.

Your organic forms with contour curves are pretty good, though watch their alignment relative to that central minor axis line. Take a little more time when drawing each one, I think you might be rushing them a little bit, which results in the alignment being off in many cases, along with a few common results of not pacing yourself properly.

Your dissections are quite lovely. Lots of great variety and you've clearly tried to tackle each one in a manner tailored to your goal, rather than applying the same technique across the board. A few things here - firstly, always remember that these textures wrap around the form, so you'll want to ensure that they follow along. For example, the bottom right of the first page of dissections, form #3. That (octopus tentacle/sucker?) texture does not follow the form. Secondly, the midsection of #3 has got some definite scribbling going on, where you start to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of detail in there. If ever you find yourself wanting to scribble or rely on some kind of randomness, stop. Think about how else you might tackle that texture, perhaps in a way that can take advantage of focusing on specific details present in your reference and implying the rest. After all, our job here is not to reproduce something fully, but rather to communicate the presence of a certain texture, and allow the viewer's brain to fill in the rest.

Your second page of dissections feels considerably more confident, so I think you've shown a great deal of improvement on this front.

The main focus of the form intersections is to construct forms that feel consistent within the same space and scene. The intersections themselves are definitely way more advanced, and I don't expect you to be able to nail them just yet. Most of your intersections involving flat planes (so boxes with boxes, cylinders or spheres with boxes, etc.) came out quite nicely. You're definitely struggling with intersections involving two rounded forms however. On the first page of intersections, towards the upper left, you've got a cone stabbing into a sphere. You've got the same deal on the second page, towards the bottom right of the second page. The former intersection is incorrect, the latter is how it should be done.

Additionally, I do want to warn you away from being quite so haphazard at times with your hatching. Keep your lines parallel and have them stretch all the way across the plane from edge to edge. Try not to go crazy with it, and definitely don't go in all different directions, as it tends to make things look messy and unstructured.

Your organic intersections are coming along, although I think you may not have thought quite as clearly as you could have, as your overlaps are a bit weird. Where part of a form should tuck behind another, you've drawn it as being on top - and you've done this a couple of times. You may have attempted this one while tired, or otherwise distracted, but the layering is definitely wrong. That said the forms themselves are well drawn. Just try and think more about how a form would wrap around another, and how part of it would sit in front and the other half would tuck behind, rather than putting the entirety of a form completely on top of the others.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-02-20 01:15

Let's start at the beginning. Go ahead and submit lesson 1.