Uncomfortable

2018-03-03 03:02

Overall very nice work. I do have a few points to raise, but as it stands you're doing a great job. The issues are less about the exercises themselves, and more in how you approach them.

Your arrows flow really nicely through space, giving a good sense of depth. Your organic forms with contour lines - both ellipses and curves - convey a strong illusion of volume and form. Your dissections are fantastic, with a great variety of texture, as well as a strong grasp of how light plays off those textures to create the little cast shadows that you've drawn there.

Your form intersections are well done, but there are a couple things I want you to avoid in the future:

• Stick to one pen weight (the recommended 0.5, or whatever you have that is closest). Having such a significant margin that comes from using an entirely different pen tramples the subtlety that is inherent in successful weight variation. Additionally, I insist on the same pen tip being used because it forces you to learn to control your use of pressure.

• In the form intersections video, I talk about how to apply weight, and more importantly, how not to apply it. I mention that applying it uniformly to the entirety of a length of line or an entire shape is not how it should be done. Instead you should be applying it specifically to certain local areas, largely to clarify overlaps. You don't want it to become a sort of graphic outline, and you don't want to end up in a situation where you're forced to draw that additional line slowly and carefully because the length of line you're trying to match is rather long. This will make things look stiff. Instead you want to apply that weight the same way you drew the original mark - with a confident, persistent stroke following the ghosting method.

• Do not add rendering (distinguishing between light and shadow) to your drawings. In some cases we use hatching on a specific face - this is not to denote form shading, but rather to distinguish that face from others in order to clarify certain illusions that can occur when we draw through our forms. You'll notice that I don't actually cover any sort of rendering in my lessons - it's because I strongly believe that a student who can learn to convey form without its use is going to be in a much stronger position than one who has learned to use it as a crutch. Nail drawing without shading, and once the time comes to add light and shadow, it'll just be decoration on top of an already strong and solid construction.

Your organic intersections came out fairly well, though a couple of them had contour curves that didn't quite hook around properly (4 stood out in this regard). You generally did capture the interaction between the forms well though. I recommend that when doing this exercise, or really any of the drawabox exercises involving 3D forms, that you give yourself a lot more room to draw. Our brains benefit considerably from being given more room to think through spatial problems, whereas if we force it into a minimal corner of a page, things tend to stiffen up. And of course, none of those little grey shadows, for the same reason mentioned in regards to the form intersections.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-03-04 20:55

Pretty solid work overall. A few things to keep in mind, but generally you're doing quite well.

• Watch the alignment of your contour curves on the organic forms. You want to keep in mind that these curves are just the visible portion of a larger ellipse, and that ellipse must be bisected by the minor axis line, cut into two equal, symmetrical halves. Many of your curves seem to be a little bit off in this regard.

• Same goes for your organic forms with contour ellipses, actually. Take a little more time to think about that alignment. You want the cross-sections you're defining with those ellipses to be cut perpendicular to the overall flow of the form.

• Pretty good work with the arrows, just play a little more with the idea that the arrows are coming out from the depth of your page, rather than flowing over it. It'll help you to explore all three dimensions, rather than just defined by the paper.

• Your dissections are stunning. You've demonstrated fantastic care and patience, as well as a great sense of balance when it comes to presenting your textures in a way that does not become too noisy or contrasty.

• Your form intersections demonstrate a strong grasp of 3D space, and of how all these forms intersect with one another. The intersections themselves were well done too, even though that section goes beyond the scope of this exercise. Overall, your forms feel consistent and cohesive.

• You've demonstrated a good grasp of how those organic forms interact with one another in the organic intersections. My only comment is that you should probably push your line weights a little more to clarify how they overlap each other. Right now it's a mostly uniform collection of lines, and is a little difficult to pick apart at a glance.

Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one. Also, in case you didn't see the recent patreon announcement, just a reminder that the tier system has changed. You've just completed all the eligible lessons for the first tier ($3+). Critiques for lessons 3-4 are available for those pledging $7+, and critiques for lessons 5-7 and available to those pledging $10+.

Uncomfortable

2018-03-04 21:10

That's not really how this works. I told you to move onto the 250 box challenge because you need in order to develop a strong enough grasp of 3D space to move tackle the later lessons. While it its technically an "optional" exercise, I've assigned it to you as a prerequisite to moving onto lesson 2 based on what you require. That direct guidance and instruction is what you're paying for.

Looking over this submission, there are a great many instructions you've missed.

• Not including the minor axis in your organic forms with contour curves and aligning your curves to it

• Your first page of dissections was fine (aside from the missing minor axis) but the rest kind of went off in some other direction.

• Your form intersections are lacking. The one dissection on this page was okay (you drew through your forms, and included a couple of good intersections between forms, though you didn't fill the page as instructed), other pages were half-finished. The lesson asks for 4 filled pages.

Is it fair to assume that since you'd completed this lesson previously on your own, you may not have read the instructions as carefully this time around, and perhaps didn't watch the videos that have been included with each exercise? You seem rather impatient to me, and that is going to bite you in the long run.

Go complete the 250 box challenge, then try this lesson again. I assure you that once you've taken the time to work through that challenge with the care and patience it requires, you'll find yourself much better equipped - not just as far as your understanding of 3D space goes, but also your ability to focus on instructions and complete work without rushing through.

Uncomfortable

2018-03-04 21:20

Pretty good work overall. I was especially impressed with your dissections - you did a fantastic job of capturing a variety of textures, and doing so with clear intention and conscious organization of details to communicate the surface quality rather than just attempting to mindlessly reproduce what was present in the photo. It definitely takes you a step above what I was expecting.

Your organic forms with contour lines were done well, and you managed to capture their volumes and reinforce their solidity to great effect.

For the arrows, I have just one recommendation - try to exaggerate the scale of the ends closer and further away from the viewer. Right now the scale stays fairly consistent throughout - by pushing the far end to be much smaller, and the closer end to be much larger, you can really achieve a stronger sense of depth in your scene.

I do agree that you certainly struggled somewhat with the form intersections, but I think you were allowing the challenge of figuring out how they intersect with one another to distract you from the main focus of the exercise. You'll notice that in the instructions, I talk about laying out all of my forms independently first, focusing only on whether or not their foreshortening feels consistent between them. The intersections themselves come afterwards, and are intentionally beyond what I'd expect you to be able to do right now. I think you focused too much on those intersections, allowing them to become the main challenge of the exercise, to the detriment of the simpler aspect.

I do feel that you managed things reasonably well on this page, though it's clear that your line quality suffered overall (perhaps you didn't pay enough attention to ghosting and drawing with a confident, persistent pace) so your lines stiffened somewhat.

Your organic intersections came along well, and demonstrated a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete. I do think you should try and practice the form intersections a little further for yourself - not to focus on the intersections themselves, but on the actual purpose of the exercise as explained in the instructions. That is up to you however - I think you've demonstrated a good enough grasp of that to move forwards. You'll have plenty of opportunities to test yourself on that when tackling the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as warmups anyway.

Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2018-03-21 22:35

Very nice work! I do have a few things to offer, but overall you're doing a great job. Your organic forms are capturing their volumes quite nicely, and your dissections have an excellent variety of textures, all tackled in a case-by-case fashion rather than attempting to apply the same approach across the board (and you're showing a good deal of improvement between the two pages as well, with the first page being decent and the second being considerably stronger). Your form intersections are also quite consistent and cohesive, with your forms appearing as though they belong within the same scene.

For your arrows, they flow quite nicely, my only recommendation there is to play a little more with exaggerating the scale of the ends of the arrow. That is to say, determine which end is farther from the viewer and which is closer, and ultimately pushing the size of the closer end to be much larger and pushing the farther end to be much smaller. This way we can explore the depth of the scene, rather than trapping our mind within the two dimensional slice of space defined by the page itself.

Admittedly this isn't as big of a deal as it has been for some students that I've seen - you do explore some of the depth to varying degrees (like the bottom left corner of the first page) but exaggerating that scale differential more will help push it much further.

For your organic forms with contour ellipses and curves, try playing with the degrees of your ellipses a little more. The degree communicates the orientation of the cross-section of the form you're defining, and therefore tells the viewer how that overall form is flowing through space (as I describe here). You'll find that your results will look more natural if there is a gradual shift of the degree, getting wider or narrower where appropriate.

I believe your organic intersections were by far the weakest section, for a few reasons. Firstly, while in some areas you have forms wrapping properly around each other, in others you have them cutting across in a manner that neglects their volumes, effectively flattening them out to the viewer's eye. You've also got areas where, for example with the bottom most form, you've allowed the edge to get quite wavy. This kind of visual complexity severely damages the solidity of that form. A sausage form with a completely consistent width defined by smooth lines will maintain its solidity, while allowing the edges to get wavy at this stage undermines that.

I think it's largely a matter of practice. I'd like you to give this exercise one more shot before I mark this lesson as complete. Go ahead and do another two pages of it, after you've had the chance to read through its instructions again, and rewatch the video. Sometimes having the content refreshed, or even visiting it a few times can help clarify some things that may have been missed. Always remember for this exercise that your forms are big and bloated - like balloons filled with water that have been piled on top of one another.

WhoaItsAFactorial

2018-03-22 01:09

2!

2! = 2

Uncomfortable

2018-03-24 01:33

Your arrows are fairly well done, although your little hatching bits are rather sloppy. While it's not part of this exercise, they're exceptionally scribbly, and the pattern of the linework suggests that you're doing it from your wrist when those lines would really benefit from being drawn from the shoulder. The meat of the exercise - the flowing ribbons exploring all three dimensions of space - are pretty solid however.

Pretty good work with your organic forms with contour lines. You'll want to continue working on improving the control of your ellipses, though your confident execution achieves some nice, smooth and even shapes, so be sure to maintain that.

Very nice work on your dissections. Lots of different kinds of textures, and you're exploring them with a great sense of balance between areas of interest and areas of rest. I'm also pleased with the way you're managing light, treating your linework as cast-shadows rather than marks that need to enclose and define every little bit of information.

Your form intersections are somewhat haphazard. I'm not getting a confident sense that you properly understand how these forms relate to one another in space. By this I don't mean the intersections themselves, which from the looks of it, you didn't attempt much of (you should have, but that's not really my concern here).

The bigger issue is that the foreshortening is not consistent between your forms - they get smaller at different rates as they push further back. It's generally better, when dealing with so many different forms together, to keep your foreshortening shallow so as to imply a smaller, more relatable scale. More dramatic foreshortening suggests that objects are quite large.

Also, consider the difference in your cylinders' ellipses - you have your far ends getting considerably wider in their degree. A change this extreme, like dramatic foreshortening, suggests that the form is so long that their orientation relative to the viewer's angle of sight changes a great deal. Your ellipses also struggle in their alignment to your minor axes, and you have minor axes that stop midway through an ellipse, rather than cutting all the way through (making it more difficult to gauge your success in aligning them).

The issue of making your shift in degree more subtle is something I mentioned when critiquing your cylinder challenge.

Funnily enough, while your cylinder challenge submission had you not drawing through your ellipses at all, you're certainly overdoing it here. I recommend drawing through them two full times, three at most. You don't want to end up losing track of the ellipse you're trying to draw.

Your last couple pages do end up getting better (although your cylinders are still out of whack), so you are moving in the right direction. Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two more full pages of form intersections. Before doing so, review the material and watch the video again. I recommend that at least for your first page, you do it with boxes only. I noticed that your boxes were looking somewhat weak as well, so you may want to warm up with some freely rotated boxes on their own, and apply the line-extension method to get a better idea of where those convergences are off.

WhoaItsAFactorial

2018-03-27 02:28

2!

2! = 2

Uncomfortable

2018-03-27 02:49

I was going to leave your submission for tomorrow (11 hours at work, plus an hour of critiques by the time you'd submitted, so I'm definitely tired) - but luckily for me, your work is pretty solid, so it's a fairly easy critique.

Your arrows are flowing quite nicely through 3D space, pushing into the depth of the scene rather than staying trapped in the two dimensions defined by the page itself. You're achieving this by playing with the scale of the two ends, having a clear point that is farther, and a point that is closer to the viewer.

Your organic forms with contour lines are well executed - the cross-sectional cuts defined by the contour lines are aligned fairly well (off in a few places, but generally pretty solid) to keep them running perpendicular to the overall flow of the form. The contour curves specifically are also hooking around the forms very nicely, and I can see the shift in the degree of your various ellipses and curves, which effectively describes the movement through space.

You've tackled a great variety of textures with your dissections, and applied a great many different techniques to achieve them. I'm a little uncertain about the mushroom texture - you mention the hatching lines being part of the texture, but I'm not sure as to how - the lines themselves cut straight across the surface (flattening it out somewhat), which suggests to me that they're not correct. You've wrapped your textures around your sausage forms very well in each other case however, so I'm more than willing to give you the benefit of the doubt here.

Your form intersections demonstrate an exceptional grasp of how these forms all interact with one another. They all feel very consistent within the same space, and the intersections are for the most part well done - which is surprising, since I'd expect that to be beyond most students at this point.

Lastly, your organic intersections show a good grasp of how these forms sag against one another, reacting to their weight being supported (or not). For the most part, you're maintaining a good sense of volume and flexibility without sacrificing their solidity.

Anyway, keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-04-02 20:52

It looks like you cancelled your pledge back in September, so you're not currently eligible for homework critiques. Also, considering that so much time has passed since your last attempts, unless you've actually kept up with the exercises from previous lessons, I strongly recommend going back and starting from the beginning. The material itself has been updated with videos for every exercise in lessons 1 and 2, so you may find things to be a bit clearer now than they were before.

Also, looking back at your previous submissions, I'm a bit confused. It looks like you submitted lessons 1, 2 and 3 all at once, and were assigned the 250 box challenge but never completed it.

Anyway, if you do wish to continue pursuing homework critiques from me, I'd recommend starting over (and of course you'd have to repledge on patreon).

Uncomfortable

2018-04-05 16:38

Good work across the board. Your arrows flow nicely through 3D space, and explore all three dimensions (including the depth of the scene). Your organic forms with contour ellipses are fairly well done, though while you are varying the degree of your ellipses in some cases, I think you could stand to push that a little further. There are some (like the one in the bottom right corner) where all the ellipses are the same degree, so it feels kind of stiff.

For your organic forms with contour curves, you're moving in the right direction, but take a look at these notes. You have a bit of a tendency in some places to make your ellipses a little too shallow in their curvature, so it calls into question whether or not that line would continue running along the surface, as the surface turns away. Also watch your alignment to your minor axis.

Phenomenal work on the dissections - you've attacked each texture with a very specific, case-by-case approach, and are clearly paying close attention to your reference images as well as the way light plays across these surfaces. The variety of textures you've attempted is fantastic, and you've really nailed each one.

With both your form and organic intersections, you're demonstrating a strong grasp of 3D space and the interaction of these different forms within the same scene.

Keep up the great work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2018-04-09 22:47

Overall you're doing pretty well. There are some small issues I'd like to point out, but over the course of all the exercises you show considerable improvement with your grasp of form and space, as well as the confidence of your lines.

The first issue I noticed was with your ellipses in your organic forms with contour ellipses. On the first page, you weren't drawing through them (so some of them were rather uneven and stiff) - you did correct this by the second page, though they were still kind of stiff, as though you were hesitating while drawing them and trying to guide your hand with your conscious brain, rather than trusting in muscle memory. Always apply the ghosting method for these, and execute your marks with confidence.

Also, for this exercise as well as the contour curves, watch the degrees of your ellipses/curves. As explained in these notes, you'll want the degrees of the ellipses to change to reflect the orientation of that particular cross-section of your organic form in space. Aside from this issue though, your organic forms with contour curves were quite well done. You wrapped the curves along the forms' surfaces very nicely.

Your careful observation of your textures in the dissections exercise and the care with which you attacked each one with a variety of approaches is great. The only issue here I noticed was that at least for several of these, you didn't follow the instruction in regards to starting the exercise off as an organic form with contour lines like any other. The focus is to create a solid sausage form first, then cut it up and add texture.

Your form intersections establish a really strong grasp of form and space. In the instructions, I did say not to create small groupings of forms and to push yourself to fill the entire page with a single, dense network of forms - but since your forms look solid and cohesive, I'll let it slide. Your organic intersections are also very well done, and show a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another. The last page is especially quite believable, and shows the sagging of the forms under their own weight very nicely.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-04-15 18:30

There's a lot of good stuff here, but there's a few things that caught my eye that are worth mentioning.

• For your organic forms with contour curves, you've got a few places where the alignment of your curves ends up out of whack, and other areas where the curves don't quite hook around enough, which flattens out the form somewhat. You've got a lot of neat experimentation there, but I think that you should stick to the basic rounded sausages for now and really solidify your grasp of that before playing with different kinds of volumes. Here are some notes I made directly on your work. Your organic forms with contour ellipses were generally pretty well done, although I'd like you to think a little more about the degrees of the ellipses (and ultimately curves) that you're drawing. As explained here, the degrees should change slightly as the circular cross-section they represent turn in space relative to the viewer.

• Your dissections are coming along nicely, with a lot of wonderful variety in your textures and how you approach drawing them. I did notice however that you tend to jump into the texture a bit too early - you've got to focus more on constructing a solid sausage form just as you would for the organic forms with contour lines exercises, before even thinking about the dissection/texture part of it. Your forms were definitely more solid on the second page. Also, try to ease up on the use of hatching lines as you did with the NASA Jet plating. You're getting a little too random and haphazard there, rather than focusing in on specific details and shadows cast by the little variation on the surface you're drawing.

• Your form intersections were pretty fantastic. Great line weight, solid forms. My only critique here is to go for shallower foreshortening - right now it's all quite dramatic, where the forms get smaller very quickly, which suggests that each form is actually quite massive in scale. A shallower foreshortening, where the parallel lines converge more slowly suggests that the scale is smaller and more relatable to humans, which also helps keep it all more consistent and cohesive as an overall scene.

• I think you're showing some grasp of the organic intersections, but it's getting quite muddled here. The alignment of your contour curves are off, your line weights are very heavy (which is flattening things out), and overall I don't get the impression that you fully understand how the forms are interacting with one another. I think you may want to do a little more of this, and perhaps review the video and notes on this particular exercise.

I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour curves, followed by another two pages of organic intersections. For both of these exercises, focus on simple sausage forms, on keeping the contour lines running perpendicular to the directional flow of the form (think about that central minor axis line), and ease up on that line weight in the intersections. In my examples, the heavy blacks you see there are cast shadows, and are projected from one form onto the forms beneath it. Give a lot more thought to how these are solid forms sagging against one another - try to picture a bunch of balloons filled with water all piled on top of another.

Uncomfortable

2018-04-16 23:57

Overall you're doing fairly decently, but there are a few things that jump out at me. First and foremost, your ellipses. You need to be drawing through them. All of them. At least, all of the ones you draw for my lessons. This, in combination with applying the ghosting method to them, will help you maintain both an even shape and an accurate execution, which is pretty important when it comes to fitting them inside of organic shapes.

When it comes to the organic forms with contour ellipses, you're also going to want to think a little more about the degree you're using for each ellipse. The degree tells the viewer about the orientation of that circular cross-section of the form, which in turn shows how that form is moving through 3D space. I explain this further in these notes. Also, keep an eye on your alignment to that central minor axis line, and try to stick to simpler sausage forms for this exercise. Branching, or having forms that pinch or swell awkwardly is more likely to distract you from the core of the exercise.

Your dissections were fairly well done, and you demonstrated a good variety of textures and certainly put a great deal of effort into approaching each one. There are a couple things I'd like to mention however. Looking at the roofing tile, it's a good example of somewhere you've thought about each tile as a graphic element - bounded by lines on each side, and stamped down onto the surface of the form. Instead, think about how the tile exists as a form - rather than thinking about the lines that enclose it, think about the shadows it casts, as this is what the lines we see actually are. Depending on how the light hits it, you may end up with a portion of that outline being blasted out completely, or a portion of it being made to stretch further as it casts its shadow down upon the tile beneath it.

Another texture I wanted to point out was the snake skin. You approached this in a way that tackles the texture more as it exists as part of a 2D drawing - that is, you constructed it creating a criss-crossing grid of lines. While this isn't inherently wrong (and is actually a clever technique that can be used to great effect later on, as long as you pay more attention to how that grid should wrap around the form), in this particular case it's causing you to think less about how those scales exist as individuals. Just like the roofing tiles, think about how they exist as little forms, little shifts on the surface of the snake, and how they cast little shadows onto each other.

Your form intersections are definitely a bit of a mess at first, but they do improve over the set. This is something you're definitely going to want to continue working on quite a bit, but you're making progress. Remember that as it stands right now, I'm more interested in how the forms feel within the same scene (whether they feel cohesive or not, and if their sense of scale is consistent), rather than the intersections themselves. On the first page, your boxes are all kinds of off, but by the last page there's a considerably better grasp of space. Of course, you need to be drawing through those ellipses - though I do admit that your ellipses are fairly good, the effort you put into getting each of those in one go would be better spent elsewhere, and the additional muscle-memory training from drawing through them a little more would go a long way.

Though you do need to work on getting your contour ellipses to fit properly within their intended organic forms, the organic intersectiosn came out pretty well and do convey a good grasp of how those forms pile on top of one another, where they ought to sag, and so on.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but keep the points I've raised here in mind as you continue to move forwards.

Uncomfortable

2018-04-18 23:01

These are vastly improved. You're applying the principles of the lesson and demonstrating a significantly better grasp of how the forms sit in space and interact with one another. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2018-04-23 22:34

Really fantastic work. You've nailed each and every exercise, and have demonstrated a phenomenal grasp of 3D space and how to sell the illusion of solid form.

You're showing a good sense of how your arrows flow through all three dimensions of space, and I can see clearly where you've varied the size of each end to show which is farther away from the viewer, and which is closer. I'm also quite pleased with how consistent you've managed to keep their widths - often times matching either edge of the ribbon can be quite tricky.

Your organic forms with contour lines (both ellipses and curves) convey a clear grasp of how those surfaces sit in 3D space. You're wrapping those curves very nicely around the forms, and are also showing a subtle shift in their degree as those cross-sectional slices' orientations change in relation to the viewer.

I did notice that where your sausages turn, you have a tendency to miss the alignment to that central minor axis line by a bit, so you'll want to keep an eye on that.

Your dissections are coming along well - you've got a lot of variety here, and for the most part you're attacking each texture in a manner specific tailored to it, and you're focusing a great deal on the minor forms that come up off their surfaces and the shadows they cast.

One thing that I would like you to tone down however is the use of hatching lines. These can be quite value in a lot of media, but in this case they have a tendency to distract the student from the intricacies of the surfaces. You don't use hatching too much, so like I said, in most cases you're paying more careful attention to the little bumps and divets and scratches, but there are areas where you settle for more this more generic approach.

Also, when filling in something with shadow (like on this page of dissections, the bottom-left form, its upper half), be mindful of two things:

• Firstly, the curvature of that surface. In that particular example, your hatching there ends up functioning as contour lines. Since they are quite visible, they suggest to the viewer how that surface turns in space, and because they were drawn straight across, they end up flattening the form.

• Secondly, the visual noise that can occur when you allow little white slivers to shine through. A brush pen can be quite effective in this regard, in filling areas in with solid black, so as to downplay the contrast of having a lot of white/black areas packed so closely together. This leaves only the edge of your shadow to be considered, and how you craft that shadow shape can imply a lot about the texture hidden beneath it.

Your form intersections are spot on, and I'm very pleased to see that you started off with boxes only. In both pages, you've shown an excellent mental model of 3D space, and your ability to manipulate these forms is going to help you considerably in later lessons.

More of the same for the organic intersections - you've captured the sense of how these forms interact with one another, and how they sag where their weight is not supported, and how they have a tendency to wrap around the things that do support them. Your use of shadow, and how it wraps around the forms upon which it is cast also helps reinforce the illusion that all of this is three dimensional and solid.

Anyway, keep up the fantastic work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I noticed that you submitted lesson 3 as well. Keep in mind that in general, you'll want to submit a lesson as soon as it is finished, so I can address any issues that might be present so they don't trickle into the next lesson. Of course, none of the issues I touched on here had a significant impact on your work in the next lesson, but it could have - so in the future, submit them one at a time.

I'll mark this lesson as complete, and move onto critiquing the next one.

Uncomfortable

2018-04-26 20:25

You made a solid attempt, but there are definitely some issues that need to be addressed. I'll go exercise by exercise.

• Arrows. The arrows themselves are fine. I can see that you're pushing nicely into the third dimension by playing with the scale of either end of your arrows. Your line quality however isn't very good. Your lines are quite wobbly, and there's very clear breaks in the flow. The confidence that you demonstrated in your lesson 1 work as well as your box challenge is mostly gone here - you're drawing more slowly, causing your lines to waver and your hesitation adds a visible degree of stiffness to your marks. The second page is definitely better as far as the breaks in flow go, but you're still not drawing with that same confidence.

• In your organic forms with contour ellipses, I see a few signs that suggest a bit of confusion in regards to what the degree of your ellipses mean, and how those little contour ellipses/circles we add at the end that is facing the viewer really work. Firstly, give these notes a read - they explain how the degree of an ellipse communicates the orientation of the circle in 3D space that it represents. Then, give this a look - I figured it might be easier to explain the contradictions in your use of contour lines right there on your work with some redlining. You may also want to watch the video for this exercise once more. One last thing on this exercise - watch the alignment of your ellipses. They should be aligned to the central minor axis line, such that it cuts each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down their narrower dimension.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are fairly well done. You're wrapping around the form pretty well. A better awareness of the matters of degree that I discuss in regards to the previous exercise will also help here though.

• You've made a pretty great start with your dissections. You're very clearly trying to tailor your texture work to each individual case, which is great to see. You've also got a good deal of variety in your textures. As you continue to work on this, try to spend more time observing your reference. It's a skill that takes time and practice to develop - observation that is - and the more you work at it, the more things you'll start to notice. Try to build up a habit of looking back at your reference to refresh your memory after every couple of marks you put down. Furthermore, try and think about what specific detail or feature each mark is meant to capture.

• In comparison to your box challenge work, your form intersections are again, lacking in some ways. The forms are less solid, the linework is less confident, and I just can't shake the sense that you've let certain things slide a lot more. They're not inherently bad or notably poorly done - just that you haven't put your best into it. One thing that may be a considerable factor here is how you go about applying line weight - I think it might be an issue elsewhere as well. There's a visible break and disjointedness where that line weight ends - you need to work on making it considerably more subtle, executing it with the same kind of ghosting method you're applying everywhere else, and generally blending it back into the rest of your linework. Overall you may be applying too much pressure when drawing. This is a bit of a guess, but I'm saying this because it's a common cause for lines being more uniform, and lacking the kind of tapered ends that give lines a bit more interest and life. Your use of hatching here is also rather sloppy, so you need to be more careful there. Ensure that your hatching lines stretch all the way across the planes from edge to edge, rather than letting them float, arc, or hook at their ends (which I'm seeing a lot of here). I'd also like to see pages of form intersections that are more densely packed with forms, taking greater advantage of the space on the page rather than leaving large areas blank.

• Your organic intersections are okay, they're just suffering from the issues I mentioned about your contour lines section. As far as the understanding of the forms and their relationships go, you're doing reasonably well.

I'd like you to do the following:

• 1 page of organic arrows

• 1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 1 page of form intersections

Before each exercise, I want you to review the specific video made for that exercise. Draw with confidence - don't execute slow and laborous strokes. Apply the ghosting method. Draw from the shoulder. Don't let all these important points raised in lesson 1 slip away.

Uncomfortable

2018-04-30 20:42

Pretty decent work overall, though I do have a few points to address. The biggest one has to do with your linework. I see quite a few signs that when you put your marks down, you're putting more emphasis on their accuracy than their flow, when the order of those priorities really should be reversed. It's extremely important that after applying all of the preparatory measures of the ghosting method, you execute your marks with a confident, persistent pace, driving the motion from your muscle memory rather than your conscious mind, as I explain here. It's normal to worry about accuracy, but it's necessary to accept that your marks may go awry despite all your practice, and that once your pen touches the page, you've committed yourself. There can be no room left for hesitation.

Be sure to keep practicing the exercises from lesson 1 as part of a reuglar warmup to ensure that you keep refining your technique on this front.

As for the specific exercises:

• Your arrows came out well, although the pages were a bit sparse. You definitely could have fit many more. You did however demonstrated a good sense of flow, and I can see that you made an effort to push the scale differential between the different ends of the arrow to give the impression of depth to the scene. Keep pushing on that front.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses were fairly well done, although there were some alignment problems (in regards to your ellipses aligning to the central minor axis line). Also, watch the degrees you use. I think you are demonstrating a developing grasp of how those degrees need to shift along the length of a form, but these notes should help you develop your understanding of how that works.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are pretty well done. Like the previous exercise, keep working on that alignment.

• Nice work on the dissections - you've got a great variety of textures that you've tried to tackle, and you've handled each texture in its own specific fashion (rather than attempting to apply catch-all methods like hatching or relying on randomness/chaos). I did however notice that you weren't drawing through your ellipses here, and you didn't start the exercise as one of the organic forms with contour lines as you were instructed to, in favour of making them cleaner. It's much more important that you have a solid, well defined organic form to work off of, and you'll find in later lessons that aiming for something clean and tidy is not what we're after. Also, if you look at the marble texture, you'll notice that while the texture itself was quite well done, it's very flat and doesn't wrap around the rounded organic form as it should.

• Your form intersections are fairly well done, though the stiffness/wobbling of your lines does show through a bit more clearly here than it does in some of the other exercises, and it does have an impact. That said, the main core of the exercise (drawing forms in the same space that feel cohesive as though they belong to the same scene) has been done fairly well. The intersections (which as mentioned in the instructions is really an additional, much more challenging thing that I just wanted you to try) has room for improvement, but you're heading in the right direction. It's really just a matter of continuing to develop your understanding of 3D space, and the relationships between these forms through practice.

• Very nice work on the organic intersections - you do a good job of capturing how these forms interact with one another, where their weight is supported, and when they sag from lack of support.

While there are certainly issues you need to address, these are the sort of things you'll need to tackle through continued practice. As I mentioned before, the exercises from lesson 1 (and now, lesson 2) should be practiced continually, picking two or three at the beginning of each drawing session to do as a 10-15 minute warmup. This will help you build confidence with your linework, and develop your understanding of 3D space. Be sure to keep up with this, even through periods where you can't work on other lessons, so as to keep your skills from getting rusty.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-04-30 22:47

Unfortunately before I can critique your lesson 2 work, you're going to have to start by submitting lesson 1. Each lesson is designed to emphasize certain kinds of issues, so it's important that I critique them in order.

Uncomfortable

2018-05-01 20:53

Pretty well done. Your arrows flow quite nicely and demonstrate a good grasp of the depth of the scene, with how you've exaggerated the scale differential of the two ends of each arrow. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are quite well done, with a few areas where the alignment of your ellipses could be better (for example, the bottom left of the first page of the exercise). I definitely would have liked to have seen more organic forms with contour curves (you only drew two), though they're coming along well. You've got a good grasp of how those curves need to wrap around the surface of each form.

You've handled the various textures on the dissections quite nicely. It's clear that you're tackling each one in a manner tailored to the specific features you're trying to capture, rather than applying a sort of one-size-fits-all approach. You're also balancing your details fairly well, and avoiding any considerable areas of visual noise.

Your form intersections are alright, though there's definitely room for improvement here. As far as the grasp of space goes, that's fine, though the bigger issue is the quality of your lines. At times they're a bit sloppy, and at others you indulge in bad habits like reinforcing lines or correcting mistakes (adding more ink to a problematic area is only going to draw more attention to it, it's often best just to leave it be). You do have some solid, confident lines, but there are a lot that need work. Also, in regards to your use of line weight, you should not be adding weight to the internal lines of your boxes. When the lines inside of the silhouette of a form are heavier than those that define the silhouette, it ends up feeling more like a loosely associated collection of lines. Generally it's those outer edges of the silhouette which should be a little heavier (keep your line weight subtle, mind you) - this creates an enclosing effect which makes the form feel more cohesive.

Very nice work on the organic intersections - you've done a great job of capturing the interaction between the forms, and how their weight is supported in certain spots, and how they sag in others.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete (though I'd still like you to tackle the 250 box challenge next). It looks like you're using a ballpoint pen. Once you move onto lesson 3, you'll want to pick up some fineliners (specifically the 0.5 size), as ballpoint pen is only allowed for lessons 1 and 2 (and the box/cylinder challenges).

CommonMisspellingBot

2018-05-02 16:14

Hey, LMD_DAISY, just a quick heads-up:

alot is actually spelled a lot. You can remember it by it is one lot, 'a lot'.

Have a nice day!

^^^^The ^^^^parent ^^^^commenter ^^^^can ^^^^reply ^^^^with ^^^^'delete' ^^^^to ^^^^delete ^^^^this ^^^^comment.

Uncomfortable

2018-05-02 16:21

I don't currently have you down as being eligible for private homework critiques (that's reserved for those who help keep drawabox going through patreon, though if you are a recent patron be sure to check your inbox, as I send out messages to gather peoples' reddit info). You're welcome to post your work to the main subreddit to get your work critiqued by the community.

After glancing at your work though, I think you may want to get your lesson 1 homework reviewed first - especially the ellipses section. I require my own students (the patreon supporters) to start at lesson 1, as the lessons are designed to highlight certain mistakes people tend to make, making them easier to diagnose. Jumping in later on before those earlier issues have been addressed can make it harder to pinpoint those problems.

Uncomfortable

2018-05-04 01:26

Ah! Sorry about that. A few of the threads had been locked due to age. I've created new ones, but I'll go ahead and write my critique here.

You've definitely got a lot of great analyses here, but there are also a great many cases where you went a bit off track with what was intended. You certainly did learn from them regardless, but there's an important distinction that I need to emphasize that you'll be able to make use of as you continue on.

In many of these - like the tire, snake, feather, mushroom, pine cone, rose, etc, you didn't follow the instructions of the exercise. Rather than simply doing an extremely detailed drawing of the object in question, the point is to set aside any of its major form information (like the cylinder of the tire), and focus purely on the little bumps and irregularities on the surface of that core form. Think of it as though you're skinning the object and laying that skin flat. The original form is entirely irrelevant - we want to study the texture so we can then wrap it around any form we wish (as we do in the dissections exercise).

Now you do have a lot of instances where you've done the exercise correctly (at least in that regard). Another issue that I see more commonly done though is that you're not always respecting the purpose of that block of solid black on the left side of the longer rectangle in each row. The point there is that I want you to have a sort of goal to aim for when it comes to the sheer density of your texture towards that left side. You need to blend your texture into it to the point that the solid black's border is no longer discernible.

In some cases you did work towards this, like that first hessian texture, but you didn't push the density far enough for it to blend into the solid black. There's still a very clear jump. If you look at my example, you'll see that the texture flows right into it, and you can't actually pinpoint where that border once was.

The reason this is an important skill to develop is that we can't always put in every little scratch and mark when adding texture to a drawing. We can't always record every little bit of visual information, because this is going to make things distractingly noisy, and will result in a lot of unintended focal areas and different portions of the drawing competing for the viewer's attention.

By learning to control our density like this, we can allow the majority of that textured area to become a solid black or white, and focus our texture only in the transition area between. Texture itself just becomes a way of creating a value scale (the greys between white and black). We end up being able to communicate the overall surface texture of a form in this transitional area without being overly distracting or noisy.

Anyway, I hope this clears up some issues. You certainly have put the work in, and have done a lot of intense studying of various textures, so I am going to give you the badge for this challenge.

CommonMisspellingBot

2018-05-04 12:29

Hey, boxstudent, just a quick heads-up:

begining is actually spelled beginning. You can remember it by double n before the -ing.

Have a nice day!

^^^^The ^^^^parent ^^^^commenter ^^^^can ^^^^reply ^^^^with ^^^^'delete' ^^^^to ^^^^delete ^^^^this ^^^^comment.

Uncomfortable

2018-05-05 00:36

I'm not sure anyone truly enjoys failure, but you've definitely found the part in which one can find enjoyment. What you're saying certainly does make sense.

Overall, you've done a pretty fantastic job. I have a couple suggestions to make, but all in all you've done better than most at this stage, and have demonstrated an exceptional grasp of the material, especially towards the end. Like many people, you may have gotten a little trapped in your own head, a little too caught up in your self doubts, to see that you were doing just fine all along.

You've captured an excellent sense of flow with your arrows, and your organic forms with contour lines establish a strong sense of volume. You're doing a pretty good job of following the surface of your forms, and describing how that surface distorts through space in doing so. My only recommendation here is specific to the contour curves - don't leave the central minor axis line out. You'll notice that in the demonstrations, I still utilize it. It's important because it serves as a guide for how your ellipses should be aligned. When you leave it out, you become more susceptible to having your contour curves slant so they no longer run perpendicular to the overall flow of the form, which itself can cause other issues.

Your dissections are well balanced, and you're doing a pretty good job of paying attention to the textures you're trying to capture. What I do want to recommend here however is to steer clear of using those overly hatchy lines. They end up being quite chaotic and uncontrolled, and generally will drive one away from thinking about what kind of marks can be used to capture the specific details they're seeing. You always want your linework to be intentional, the result of clear forethought and consideration, rather than allowing repetition to do the work for you. Fortunately your use of hatching was minimal, though it certainly was present.

Your form intersections were fantastic, and you did a great job of capturing the solidity of the forms, and also demonstrated a great understanding of how they sit in 3D space and relate to one another. The only thing I wanted to point out was that with your spheres in particular, you'd draw through those ellipses too many times (go around 2-3 times total, no more and no less - and 2 is frankly better than 3), resulting in your lines getting quite loose and losing the ellipse you were trying to nail. As a result, you'd go back over it to replace the rougher sphere with a single clearer mark. This is something I advise you not to do in the form intersection video, because attempting to replace linework with a "clean-up" pass tends to result in stiffer lines. By eschewing the clean-up pass, you force yourself to work on tightening up those initial lines without giving up the confidence that keeps them smooth and even.

Lastly, your organic intersections were excellent. You really nailed how those forms sag against one another, and captured their complex interactions.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-05-08 00:16

I've got quite a few submissions that were dropped on me today, so I'm going to try and focus on the meat of my critique and dispense with some of the filler:

• For your arrows, you've got some nice confidence and consistency to your lines for the most part, but the arrows do feel like they're somewhat trapped in the two dimensions of your page. Try playing with the scale of either end (picking one to be farther away and the other to be closer) and exaggerate them to be larger/smaller to really capture the sense that they're moving through all three dimensions of space. Additionally, vary things up more - you tend to be repeating sets of the same flow, you'll definitely want to change things up more. Actually, as I reached the last page of arrows, I noticed that you were starting to exaggerate your scale and push into the depth of the scene more - so keep that up.

• Organic forms with contour ellipses are generally looking pretty good. You're showing some awareness of how the degree of your ellipses should shift over the set, so that's good to see. Just in case, I'm going to toss you these notes, but from what I'm seeing you probably already understand the principles presented there.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are okay, I'm glad that you're overshooting them slightly to get the sense of them wrapping around. That said, you definitely have some serious stiffness to those curves, while also suffering from somewhat poor accuracy. This suggests to me that you're applying the ghosting method and that you're trying to draw them confidently, but you're hesitating at the last second, kind of getting the worst of both worlds. Keep trying to find your rhythm with the ghosting method, taking your time to really drill that repeated motion into your muscle memory. Once you do execute though, trust in your arms and don't worry about mistakes. You've got some curves that are actually very smooth and confident, so and they also tend to be among the more accurate, so just trust yourself a little more.

• Damnit. I should have looked through all of your pages for that exercise. You definitely improve on that front, although I'm noticing that at times your alignment with that minor axis line can be a little off, so keep that in mind.

• You've got an interesting variety of textures in your dissections, and some are definitely more successful than others. I think what's important to note right now is that you're jumping into the simplification of your textures without fully absorbing what it is that you're meant to observe. So when you go to simplify, you're only working from part of the total amount of information, leaving you with textures that sometimes feel a little cartoony. I recommend that you read the notes on the texture challenge page - there I break things up into phases of learning how to approach this kind of material, and it should help clarify these principles. Antoher thing worth remind you of - on this page, if you look at the texture that looks kind of like cracked glass towards the upper right, remember that you still want your textures to wrap around the rounded form - here you've drawn it mostly as though the surface were flat.

• Your form intersections are pretty solid. You're doing a great job of demonstrating a strong understanding of 3D space and how these forms interact with each other within it. You've also done a pretty great job with the intersections themselves (which are admittedly especially challenging, and not really the focus of this lesson due to their difficulty).

• Your organic intersections are a little mixed. Pages like this one are pretty well done, aside from the tiny bean towards the upper left (when the page is turned rightside up), as it's unclear what that is even resting on. If it were resting on the larger form in front of it, it would be positioned a little differently, wrapping around its surface. Also worth mentioning there - the shadow that larger form casts down towards the left should turn to follow the surface upon which it's cast. It's cast first on another organic form, but then the shadow falls across the floor, so there should be a clear change. This page on the other hand, is extremely confusing to look at, and likely doesn't actually make that much sense. It's important that you keep the structure of forms straight in your head as you draw them - unless you're aiming to be MC Escher :P

Anyway, overall you're doing a pretty good job. Keep up the good work, and be sure to continue incorporating these exercises into a regular warmup routine, along with those from lesson 1. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2018-05-08 01:40

Pretty good work overall! Your arrows flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space, and you're avoiding the common issue where they get a bit trapped in the two dimensions of the page. I'm very pleased to see how you're exploring the depth of the scene, and treating the page as though it were a window, rather than the bounds of what you have to work with.

Your shifting of the degrees of your ellipses in the organic forms with contour ellipses is quite telling - it suggests that you've got a pretty good grasp of how those cross-sections turn in space, and work towards establishing a good sense of the volumes of those sausages.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are alright, though I do believe that you may want to try overshooting those curves as they hook back around at the edges of your organic forms to really drill that kind of curvature into your mind. At the moment they're falling a little short. Also keep an eye on their alignment to the central minor axis line - many of them are slightly slanted, which tends to help the illusion of the curve wrapping around on one side, but breaks it on the other.

You've definitely made a good start with the dissections, with a good variety of textures, but I can definitely see what you're saying about struggling with having them wrap around the form. The bottom half of the second page was definitely more successful than the top half of that same page, and I can certainly understand why. When it comes to the smaller scales, what you're missing there is the compression that happens when a surface turns away from the viewer.

For clarity's sake, I'm talking about the top left of this page. The scales towards the center (or around the center), where the surface is facing us head-on are drawn at the same size as those closer to the edges. The surface itself however turns away at the edges, which should cause that detail to compress due to this fact. That's why the illusion is not quite selling here. Same goes for the bricks.

It's the same principle as a circle in 3D space. When drawn, it's represented by an ellipse - and as that circle's face turns away from us, the ellipse decreases in its degree, getting narrower and narrower until it flattens into a line.

Here's an example of what I mean.

Moving on, your form intersections are quite well done. You're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, and how they all sit in 3D space. Your intersections themselves are also fairly well done, though they're more of something I wanted students to try, with no real expectation of success. There were a few issues that I wouldn't usually pick at, but since you were almost there, I figured I might as well point them out: https://i.imgur.com/2ipB3ry.png

Your organic intersections were pretty well done as well, though keep in mind that those drop shadows are cast upon the surfaces of forms - so when the shadow transitions from being cast upon one form to another, there's going to be an obvious change. I went over your page here, you can compare the shadows in mine to yours to see what I mean.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-05-09 22:37

Here are some things I noticed while looking over your work:

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along okay, though I noticed that you weren't drawing through the majority of your ellipses as instructed. As a result your ellipses tended to be a little stiff at times - not too bad, but definitely something that needs to be improved upon.

• I also noticed that there isn't too much shifting in the degrees of your ellipses, so they read as being at the same orientation relative to the viewer. Generally you'll have a bit of a shift in that degree as you look at different cross-sections of an organic form, as I describe in these notes.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are coming along well. The only thing I notice issues with is the alignment of those curves. If you picture the full ellipse of which each curve is just a portion, that central minor axis line ought to be cutting it into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension.

• You've made a lot of good pushes into handling texture with your dissections. You've tackled a number of different textures, and have used close observation to inform the kinds of marks you've made (as opposed to less thoughtful approaches). I did notice a little bit of sloppy/random behaviour in the prata bread texture, but overall you're trying to be intentional with your mark making. Keep that up.

• Your form intersections are pretty good, though your use of hatching is pretty sloppy and haphazard, at least on the first page. It gets somewhat better in the later ones.

• Your organic intersections definitely need work. To start with, your contour curves are nowhere near as strong as they are in the earlier exercise. Secondly, I can see that you're not actually drawing each form in its entirety, which stunts your ability to understand how each form sits in space. If you look at my demonstrations and instructions, you'll see that I draw each and every one individually and completely, unconcerned with what would generally be hidden - I use line weight in a few key areas to help clarify the overlaps afterwards. Try to think of it as though, one by one, you're piling water balloons on top of one another, and watching how they sag over each other. Stick to the same, simple sausage forms for each one, rather than varying them too much in scale. You are getting there, but I think instead of thinking more about each individual one, you focus on increasing the quantity of forms.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to try two more pages of organic intersections.

Uncomfortable

2018-05-19 21:06

Really, really phenomenal work. You've clearly paid a great deal of attention to the instructions and have approached each exercise with patience and care. Your arrows flow smoothly through all three dimensions of space, your organic forms with contour ellipses and curves capture a strong sense of volume and accentuate the curvature of the forms' surfaces, and your dissections show great variety in approach and careful observation.

I'm really pleased to see that you decided to tackle your form intersections first with boxes alone to get a sense of how things sit in 3D space. As you progressed onto different forms, you carried over the same grasp of space, and showed that you were able to place these different forms, all rotated in an arbitrary fashion, within the same space with a great degree of cohesion and success. Lastly, your organic intersections show a clear grasp of how these sausage forms sag and slump against one another, with an understanding of where their weight would be supported and where it would not. Your first attempt was decent, but your second was far better.

I have just a couple things to mention, though it occurs to me that the first is already a moot point. I was going to talk about how useful it can be to draw a contour ellipse as the "pole" at the end of an organic form, but you seem to have understood that yourself and applied it to your organic intersections.

The other point was that in your organic intersections, it's important to keep in mind that the shadows cast by each form are cast upon the form underneath it. Therefore that shadow should be warping to the surface it is cast upon. Right now your cast shadows don't seem to take much of the curvature of those underlying surfaces into consideration, so in that regard they don't read as strongly as they could have.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-05-24 23:58

You've got a mix of work here, with some exercises being done quite well, and others being a little more sloppy.

To start with, your arrows came out quite well. Aside from the awkward shapes of the heads (where they're not really triangular as arrows generally are), you've achieved a good sense that each ribbon form is flowing smoothly through 3D space.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are a mixed bag, but I think you make it clear that you're entirely capable of drawing contour ellipses properly, and you've got plenty of examples to that effect. That said, you also have a number of ellipses that were drawn somewhat sloppily - where they're floating arbitrarily inside of the forms. Consider what a contour line actually is - it's a line that runs along the surface of a 3D form. When your ellipses end up floating inside of the form (rather than fitting snugly against the edges), this illusion breaks completely.

With this exercise, it's best to focus on simple sausage forms, as shown in the lesson. Avoid any extravagant branching, or any swelling or pinching. Just stick to a simple sausage that is fairly consistent in width through its length. Going any more complex than that is really just going to distract you from the main focus of the exercise, and you won't get as much out of it.

This applies to your organic forms with contour curves as well. These were a little less solid than your contour ellipses, and I think one of the issues is that you didn't treat that central line that flows through the length of your forms correctly. From your drawings, it appears that you were trying to have the line flow over the surface of the forms (as though it was a contour line as well). That is not its purpose. Instead, we want it to pierce through the center of your sausage form. This allows us to use it to help align our contour ellipses and curves (remember that when we draw contour curves, it's basically the same as contour ellipses, except we don't draw the portion that runs along the opposite side of the form - so when we align our curves to that central minor axis line, we treat it as though it's a full ellipse).

The dissections exercise brings to light a few important points - which is exactly what it's designed to do. I haven't really taught you much at all about texture, my expectation with this exercise is to see how students handle the subject, and what they need to focus on. Here's what I noticed:

• You rely very heavily on your memory. That is to say, you'll look a little at a reference image, then spend most of your time drawing without looking back. Because of this, your textures tend to come out very simplified, and built up from symbols rather than actually reflecting what you saw. The reason for this is that our brains are not well built for remembering all the complex visual information we see with every glance. Instead, the second we look away, our brains go to work throwing the vast majority of that information away, clinging only to the very core of it. I explain this in greater detail in the texture challenge page's notes, so I highly recommend that you read it. But the short of it is that you need to spend much, much more time looking at your reference. Draw less, observe more, and don't make more than a couple marks before looking back at your reference. Try and make every mark you put down represent something specific you see in your reference image.

• When you tackle things like fur - which has a lot going on - you fall back to relying on chaotic scribbling. This is never the solution. Everything you draw should be the result of forethought and consideration, relying on chaos is only going to make your drawing look messy. Instead, when you look at a reference image, try and ask yourself how things are arranged and grouped. There's always some sort of structure or rhythm, regardless how crazy something may look. It just takes a lot of patience to identify it.

• We're drawing things with line - so it's normal that you think of the marks you're putting down in those simple terms. Instead of thinking of them as being lines that mark the edges of things, try and think as though what you're drawing as shadows. That's ultimately what texture is - it's the little shadows cast by the tiny forms that make a surface feel rough, or bumpy, or whatever else. How those shadows are arranged is what gives it that sort of impression. The thing about shadows is that they're not all simple lines - they can get fatter and thicker, and they can vary. They can even come together to fuse into larger shadow shapes. And depending on how light hits a surface, shadows can be completely blasted away, to the point that a scaly surface under harsh light may result in some scales casting no shadow at all.

• Always remember that texture wraps around a form - kind of like applying wrapping paper to an awkwardly shaped gift, it conforms to the object to which it is applied. Take a look at your brick texture - see how it feels very flat? This is because you drew the bricks as though they were applied to a flat wall. Instead, the lines you've drawn should curve along the surface of the rounded form. Similarly, your fish scales should compress as they reach the edges of the form, where that surface turns away from the viewer.

Moving onto your form intersections, while these are somewhat sloppy at times, you are demonstrating the core of what I'm looking for. That said, there are two things you totally missed from the instructions:

• You were instructed not to use forms that are stretched (like long cylinders), and stick to those that are more equilateral. You instead used a lot of stretched forms, which brought a lot of foreshortening into the mix and made things considerably more challenging than they should have been, and distracted you from the core of what you should have been focusing on.

• You didn't actually try any of the intersections at all. Now, this wasn't the core of what I was interested in with this exercise, but I expect students to still try them.

Your organic intersections are really sloppy. While you do demonstrate a grasp of how the forms wrap around each other and interact with one another, your lines are basically falling apart. This completely eradicates the illusion of solidity and form. This makes it very difficult to critique, as there is definitely issues with the alignment of your contour curves throughout, but the specifics of those problems are obscured by the fact that they tend to fall out of the forms altogether. Your cast shadows are also really messy, and I honestly don't know why. It's not a question of the shadows being wrong, it's just that when you fill them in, you end up spilling your strokes all over the place.

There are a lot of signs that you understood the concepts in most of these exercises, but that you didn't give the exercises the time they required. So, there's going to be a great deal to repeat, as I want you to show me that you can capture the illusion of cohesion and solidity that comes from a far better control over your linework. I want you to do the following:

• 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves. Rewatch the video and reread the notes for this exercise before starting the work.

• 1 page of dissections, after you've had the chance to read through the texture challenge notes. Remember, you need to spend most of your time observing your reference, and draw marks that correspond to specific things that you observe. Do not rely on memory.

• 1 page of form intersections. Stick to equilateral forms that are not stretched in any one dimension, try and control your linework better (avoid gaps where lines should be connecting, as these drastically weaken the illusion of solidity). Lastly, actually try drawing the intersections between your forms.

• 1 page of organic intersections. Again, take your time, focus on making every form feel solid.

Uncomfortable

2018-05-26 17:32

Your arrows are generally pretty good, in that they flow nicely through space. The one issue here that I do want to mention though is that the way they flow is limited largely to the two dimensions of the page, rather than all three. What this tells me is that you are still thinking as though you are drawing lines on a flat, 2D page. What you want to push yourself to think and believe is that the page is just a window to a larger, limitless three dimensional space where objects can also move through the depth of a scene. While drawing your arrows, try and think about one end being farther away from the viewer, and the other being much closer. As we know from perspective, this would mean that as you draw your arrow, you'd exaggerate the scale on either end, making the farther end smaller and the closer end larger.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally pretty good, though the ellipses themselves tend to be a little stiff which results in them coming out somewhat unevenly. Remember to apply the ghosting method - which means taking the time to prepare and plan before each stroke, and then executing the mark with a confident, persistent pace. Do not hesitate, do not worry about making mistakes - once your pen touches the page, you're locked in, and need to follow through. If you mess up, that's fine, it's an accepted risk. I can also see a few places here and there where the alignment to your minor axis is off, though for the most part you're doing a pretty good job on that front.

I'm pleased to see that you applied the overshooting method to your contour curves. That said, your organic forms with contour curves are a bit weaker than the contour ellipses, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, unlike your ellipses, your curves here do not shift in their degree over the course of the form. In the contour ellipses, we can see them transitioning from being wider, to narrower, and so on, as the angle relative to the viewer shifts. With your contour curves, they stay the same, which suggests to the viewer that something is wrong. The other issue is that I believe you may be applying too much pressure to the pen as you draw your contour lines. What suggests this to me is the fact that there's very little nuance or tapering to the ends of those lines as your pen lifts off, which is a common thing both when a student presses too hard on their pen (which also plays the risk of damaging the tip), and when they fail to draw confidently enough.

Your dissections are a bit of a mixed bag, but that's not a bad thing. It means you're experimenting, trying to figure out what works best and what doesn't. I think your most successful set was the right side of this page (when it's rotated properly). So, the black mould and snake scales. You've shown here much more patience when observing your reference image, and a better awareness of how light plays across the surface. The most important thing with texture is to be aware of the fact that the lines we draw are really the shadows cast by the various small forms present on a surface. In that we don't capture an individual bump by enclosing it in a circle, but by focusing on the shadow it casts. You demonstrate a better sense of this in these texture, rather than the others.

Your second page is mostly a big mess though. I can see that your attempt at what looks like fur went pretty catastrophically. The reason for this is that you tried to rely on chaos, scribbling and randomness. This never works. In every single texture, there is some manner of rhythm and flow, even in hair and fur. You can think of it a lot like how the wind seems random and chaotic, but if you zoom way out and look at a map of weather patterns, you can see how they follow their own logical path. It's just a matter of pinning that path down, which can take a great deal of observation, practice and most importantly: patience.

Your form intersections, while certainly dense, suggest to me one thing: similarly to the arrows, you've drawn these more as though you were drawing lines on a flat page, than solid forms constructed in 3D space. You seem to have gone more for quantity over quality, and didn't take the time with each form to ensure that it felt solid before moving onto the next. You also ignored the instruction on avoiding stretched forms (like long cylinders) in favour of sticking to more equilateral forms. Lastly, you didn't make any attempts at the intersections themselves from what I can see, which while being a lesser focus of this exercise, is still something I want you to try.

The organic intersections are somewhat similar, in the whole quantity over quality deal, along with suffering from the issues I mentioned in regards to your organic forms with contour curves. You are however starting to show a grasp of how those forms wrap around and interact with each other, but there's still a great deal missing.

Try and think about how each form actually sits in all three dimensions of space. Think of the forms as though they're waterballoons that are being stacked on each other (and how gravity impacts them), and focus on convincing yourself that each one you draw is solid and three dimensional. Also, be careful with the little contour ellipses you draw at the poles - it's good that you're drawing them, but you're frequently getting their degrees wrong - for example, when the pole would be facing away from the viewer, it ought to be quite narrow, but you've drawn it as a near circle.

Here are some notes that should help in areas that you're struggling with:

• http://i.imgur.com/1rv8Qb4.jpg

• https://i.imgur.com/vjh13A3.png

I'd like you to do the following:

• One page of organic forms with contour curves

• One page of form intersections

• One page of organic intersections

With the last two there, I don't want you to go nearly as dense as you have here. Focus on making each form feel solid, and understanding the relationships between them. You should also rewatch the video for each exercise before starting on it.

Uncomfortable

2018-05-26 18:52

You've got a lot of excellent stuff here, but I did catch some minor things that are worth mentioning and should help you solidify overall.

• Your arrows are looking good, and you're exploring all three dimensions of space quite nicely with one end clearly being farther from the viewer than the other. They are however rather samey, repeating the same kind of flows frequently. Try and play with variety.

• One thing I caught in your organic forms with contour lines and curves is that there isn't much shift in the degrees of your contours. I can see some in your contour curves, but your contour ellipses are mostly the same degree. Now, everything else in those exercises is spot on, but capturing that shift is important. I explain this further in these notes.

• You've got a great variety of textures and experimentation in your dissections, and that's great to see. One thing that I really, really want you to stay clear of is any sort of hatching lines or scribbling. Hatching is a filler texture that people use when they don't actually care what texture is present. It gives them a way to capture lighting/shading without having to observe their references closely. We are not doing any sort of shading here. You'll notice that my lessons don't touch upon it at all. This is because while most drawing courses will teach you all the arts of rendering things like a sphere, and about how light bounces around and such, I find that it's a distraction, and a crutch. If a drawing of theirs feels flat, they figure the solution is to shade more. The solidity of a form comes its construction - the decisions made when constructing its silhouette, defining the distinction between its faces and any contour lines they may add to it. If that is solid, any amount of shading will still look good (as long as it doesn't contradict what the construction declares). Anyway, since we're not doing shading, then hatching lines serve no purpose here. We either want to capture the texture of a surface, in which case we observe it carefully and draw marks that correspond to what we see, or we leave the surface blank.

• The other point is to avoid scribbling, randomness and chaos. Often we'll see a texture that seems to be erratic at first glance. But there is always some kind of structure, flow or rhythm to it that can be identifier through careful observation. Therefore relying on randomness and scribbling is never an appropriate solution. If you want to scribble, stop yourself, and look at your reference again.

• In addition to this, it's definitely worth mentioning that "beetle" is not a texture. A beetle's shell has a texture, but beetle itself is an object composed of lots of major forms and volumes. The texture is that which is wrapped around a larger form, and while it is itself composed of many little bumps and microforms that cast the shadows we perceive, those little features flow along the surface of a larger form.

• Worth mentioning, I think you did a great job with the armadillo texture. The sand was quite well done too, and the log was fairly successful. Some of the others were decent, but things like coke were too focused on shading, and the skin was drawn more from memory rather than attempting to capture specific features with each stroke. Also, your stone wall doesn't wrap around the organic form, so it ends up flattening out completely.

• Your form intersections are really good (though again, stop shading things. It's totally okay to fill one face of a box or cylinder with some tight, consistent hatching, but that's not for the purpose of shading - it's to serve as a visual cue, telling us which side of the form is facing towards us. In other situations, cast shadows are the only kinds of shadows we deal in, though usually as solid black shapes (like in the organic intersections) rather than soft-edged hatching.

• Your organic intersections were very well done. You've done a great job of capturing how those forms interact with one another, and how they have a tendency to sag on whatever is supporting their weight.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one. It does look like you may have been using a ballpoint pen for these (correct me if I'm wrong, it's sometimes hard to tell as some felt tip pens can simply be running low on ink). Lessons 3 onwards should be done with fineliners.

Uncomfortable

2018-05-26 19:41

Your organic forms with contour curves look much better, so I'll check that off. Of course, there's room for improvement, but you're on the right track now and the rest is a matter of practice.

Your dissections are pretty close to where they were before. On the matter of shadows, picking a different pen thickness was not a great idea. Not only does it break the requirement of "do these exercises with a 0.5 fineliner", you've also thrown any subtlety and nuance completely out of the window in the interest of a quick solution. That's not how this works. You also missed several points I raised in my last critique:

• Compressing your textures along the edges of the form as that surface turns away from the viewer (for example, your fish scales)

• Avoiding working from memory (for example, your cheetah fur, where you looked at the texture, saw that it's made up of spots, and then went on to draw a bunch of spots without taking into consideration how they're arranged).

Here's how I would have tackled these textures: https://i.imgur.com/qRqChhd.png

Your form intersections are basically the same as before. You didn't make any effort to change either of the points I mentioned in my critique, which were regarding the fact that you used stretched forms instead of sticking to equilateral ones, and the fact that you didn't make any attempts to explore the actual intersections between the forms.

Your organic intersections are less sloppy than before, and definitely improved, though the ones at the bottom of the page are definitely better than those at the top. That said, those cast shadows are still extremely hamfisted, which is no doubt in part due to the fact that you switched to a different pen to draw them. Now, I'm not actually against using a brush pen to fill in the dark areas, but only if you're able to control it well enough. And even then, you should still draw the cast shadow shape with your initial pen.

I know you're trying to rush through to get to lesson 4, and I'm strongly against any kind of rushing. These lessons are extremely important, and while they may not be as interesting as the later content, if you cannot demonstrate the patience to read through the content and critiques, you will crash and burn later on. You're already putting the time into completing these exercises, so you owe it yourself to invest what is required to do it correctly. Otherwise you'll end up spending more time overall on redoing things, than you would have in the first place had you decided not to rush.

I want you to do:

• One page of dissections (i don't actually expect these to come out well, I just want to see you applying the concepts I've covered in my critiques - and don't switch pens, stick to one weight throughout).

• One page of form intersections. Again, like I said before, avoid stretched forms like long cylinders, stick to approximately equilateral forms (which are roughly the same size in all three dimensions), and actually try to draw the intersections between the forms as shown in the demonstration for this exercise.

• One page of organic intersections. You are doing better on these, but I want to see you do those cast shadows correctly. Right now they are very sloppy and quite detrimental to your result. Being able to control how you fill in cast shadow shapes will be extremely important later on, so you need to be able to get it down now.

Uncomfortable

2018-05-26 22:27

• You're definitely still rushing.

• I don't see a single attempt at intersections on your form intersections page.

• Your cheetah texture looks more or less the same as the one you drew previously (just arranging them in a pretty regular pattern that looks nothing like how a cheetah's spots are arranged).

• While you say you're trying to make those fish scales compress at the edges, which at least shows awareness of the point, they don't actually look any different.

Do these pages again, and do not submit them to me until May 31st. It seems that you really need to be forced to actually slow down and take your time with each of these exercises. I absolutely do not want to see rushed work again, as it is a complete waste of my time to have to point out the same issues again and again because you didn't take the time to slow down, absorb the critique, reread the pertinent parts of the lesson and invest the time that is actually required.

Oh, also for the dissections, draw bigger. You're giving yourself virtually no room to work, so all your linework ends up extremely cramped and awkward.

Uncomfortable

2018-06-04 21:45

I definitely agree that your arrows are coming along pretty well, especially when it comes to getting them to flow through 3D space. Leaves follow the same principle, but they're harder not just for the reason you stated, but also because they tend to start and end at a point - so getting that sense of scale across (with the farther end being smaller and the closer end being larger) isn't really doable.

The thing about the arrows exercise however is not so much about how the arrow is drawn that can be applied to your leaves, but more about how the exercise makes you think about 3D space - how you can envision things moving through the depth of the scene, and how you can see the page as a window out onto a larger world.

When it comes to leaves, it all comes down to that initial arrow. It determines the flow of the whole thing, so the majority of your thought and effort needs to be geared towards it. A lot of people will draw something more arbitrary and expect the later steps to play a greater role, which is what ends up screwing them up. As a rule, the construction method's efforts are always invested heavily up-front.

Now, you can't show scale when you're drawing what is basically a line on the page, but again it comes down to how your brain is perceiving it. All of this is a big farce into tricking you into believing that what you're drawing is three dimensional. Same goes for contour lines, drawing through forms, etc. They're all tricks that convince you of the illusion.

One thing that personally helps me, and I actually do this quite frequently, is that when I'm drawing that initial flow line, I'll put a tiny arrow head at the end to really drill into my mind the fact that this is a directional thing, that something is flowing from one end to the other through space.

When you yourself are properly convinced of this crazy lie, that is when your drawings start to become more convincing for others. It tends to be in subtle, unquantifiable ways, (which itself is harder to teach, which is why we aim for the tricks that'll make you believe in the lie instead) - but a good way to think about it is if you draw a circle on a page and someone tells you to draw a line across it, you'll draw a straight line. But if you believe that this circle is in fact a sphere, then the line you draw across it will in fact curve along its three dimensional surface, because you know damn well you can't just draw a straight stroke through a 3D object. This is all despite the fact that what is present is a circle - your perception as the person doing the drawing matters a lot.

Anyway, i'm getting very far off track from the lesson critique. Your arrows are definitely looking good. Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well, though there's two things I want to stress with this.

• Firstly, when you draw your sausage forms/shapes (before adding the contour lines) you have a tendency to leave a sizeable gap where the two ends of the line should meet. Admittedly it's not easy to have your lines come together, but that's something you're going to want to work on. The gap left there goes a long way to undermine the solidity of the resulting sausage form.

• Secondly, keep working on getting the ellipses and curves to fit snugly between the edges of a given sausage form. It all comes back down to building that illusion - if the lines end up going outside the bounds of the form (or even if they end up falling short) it'll break the illusion that the ellipse or curve is a stroke running along the surface of this rounded form. None of this is easy of course - balancing the confidence of your stroke to keep it smooth and even, with the control necessary to keep it snugly where you need it to go is hard and takes practice. But these are the goals we're aiming for. Currently you've got confidence aplenty, which is great. And your control isn't far off - but keep working at it.

For your dissections, there's one major thing worth mentioning that I noticed. When you draw a single element in your texture - like a kernel of corn, a single scale, etc. you're usually doing so with lines that fully enclose it. You're treating those lines as the bounds of each object. This is a rather inflexible way of capturing something, and we see this best when you try to transition into a fully blank space.

Instead, it's important to regard those lines as being the shadows cast by those forms - be they bumps, scales, kernels, or whatever else. They each cast a little shadow. Shadows, unlike rigid enclosing lines (that technically don't exist in the world around us) are quite flexible. They aren't necessarily just a thin, uniform thing. They can get very thick, and fuse together with neighbouring shadows, or if the light is close enough, they can be blasted out altogether. That's what the "blank" area on your objects is meant to be - an area where the light hits your object so directly that it blasts the shadows out. And on the fringes of this area, you have the little cast shadows gradually coming back, first as minute little shadows, growing denser and denser.

The texture challenge is all about this, and the exercise specifically has you practice getting your various textures transitioning from highly dense to extremely sparse. While in some of these textures you do show a grasp of the whole shadow thing, it's the ability to transition from dense to sparse that you're currently lacking, due to the rigidity of these gapless line-enclosures.

Your form intersections start off a little weak, but by the end there you're demonstrating a pretty good grasp of how these forms exist in space and how they relate to one another. Your organic intersections are okay, but what requires work here is your grasp of how the shadows are cast. The main thing you seem to be missing is that a shadow is cast upon another surface. Similar to how you wrap a texture around a sausage form, when a shadow is cast, it is going to warp to the surface it is cast upon. Currently your shadows are still very much tied to the objects that are casting them.

Now, there's clearly areas to work on, so I fully expect you'll continue to work on these exercises (as well as those from lesson 1) as part of a regular warmup routine. But I think you should be good to move onto the next lesson. Definitely take some time to absorb what I've said here in this critique though, and maybe read through it a couple times over the course of a few days.

Uncomfortable

2018-06-05 23:35

Overall you're doing a pretty solid job here. There are a few things I want to mention, and one issue worth visiting, but overall you're demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space, a great deal of patience, and a good deal of care with how you approach the material covered in this lesson.

For your arrows, you're doing a good job of capturing how they flow through all three dimensions of space, and avoiding the tendency some people have to stay within the bounds of the flat piece of paper upon which they're drawing. My only concern here is the use of line weight - it's way too much, and it results in a fairly cartoony, graphic appearance that'll bite you when used to draw anything more realistic. With line weight, subtlety is always key - just a little extra weight here and there tends to read quite strongly. It does seem to me that you've probably switched to a different thickness of pen, which should generally be avoided. Aside from cases where shadow shapes need to be filled in (where a brush pen is quite helpful), all your linework should be drawn with the same pen (ideally a 0.5 or equivalent).

I did however notice that you had a tendency to blend your areas of heavy weight in quite nicely with those of lighter weight, demonstrating a good control over the tapering of your lines. This is excellent - be sure to do the same, just with considerably less thickness.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally pretty solid. One area where they could improve is with the alignment to that central minor axis line. You're on point more often than you're not, but you do have a handful where the ellipse is not running perpendicular to the general flow of the sausage form. Remember that the minor axis should be cutting each ellipse into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension.

Oh, also worth mentioning: give these notes a read. Right now the degree of your ellipses tends to stay fairly samey. Consider how the angle at which the viewer would see each cross-section changes, resulting in a slightly shifting degree through the course of an organic form.

Your organic forms with contour curves is one area that is going to need some work. Overall, I get the impression that you need some more practice with getting your contour curves to wrap around the form convincingly - often times the curves don't quite accelerate enough as they reach the edges, and fail to give the impression that they continue along the opposite side of a rounded form. For this, I generally recommend overshooting the curve slightly as it hooks back around, as described here.

Additionally, focus on using simple sausage forms, as shown in my demonstration. You've got some weird ones here, with branching and a fat end leading into a smaller end, and so on. This has a tendency of distracting you from the core of this exercise.

Everything else is really well done. Your eye for texture and your approach to each one was fantastic. You handle the overwhelming amount of visual information with a great deal of structure and care. Your form intersections are solid, and demonstrate a good grasp of 3D space (and your use of line weight here is spot on). Finally, your organic intersections show that you grasp of the forms interact with one another is coming along well (though it also suffers from the same contour curve issue).

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do one more page of organic forms with contour curves. You're very close, but this last bit is definitely important.

imguralbumbot

2018-06-06 05:03

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

https://i.imgur.com/R2zd5eV.jpg

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

Uncomfortable

2018-06-06 19:57

Definitely much better. Two things:

• Keep working on nailing the alignment to the minor axis (you have a tendency to slip slightly where the forms turn).

• When drawing your contour curves, and really any lines, try not to press too hard. Ideally you want your lines to taper slightly at the ends, and when we see the lines come out rather uniformly, it's a result of either pressing too hard or drawing too slowly (usually a combination of the two).

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep practicing the exercises from the first two lessons as part of a regular 10-15 minute warm up routine, but feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-06-12 20:19

Really phenomenal work! You're demonstrating an excellent grasp of space here, as well as the relationships between forms. You're also showing that you're very patient and careful in your observation when it comes to the textures of the dissections, and and are clearly developing a good sense of how to organize the overwhelming amount of visual information to properly convey each surface without getting into visual noise and distraction.

To be completely honest with you, I can see only two areas that are worth mentioning, as places that could see improvement, and it's honestly very minor. They're both related to the organic forms with contour lines.

• Firstly, watch the angles of your contour ellipses/curves when your form is twisting/turning drastically. You have a tendency to be slightly off from the alignment with the minor axis line.

• Secondly, when drawing your contour curves, continue to work on getting the curve to sit snugly between both edges of the form. This is obviously quite challenging as it requires a good deal of precision and you're honestly not that far off. That said, having a little gap there breaks the illusion that the curve is sitting on the surface of the form, so it's an important place to focus your efforts.

Aside from that, you're really doing very well. Keep up the fantastic work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-06-12 20:55

So you've definitely got some good here, as well as areas that need a little more work. It's clear though that you've worked pretty hard at this.

• Your arrows flow pretty well through space, but I definitely think you show improvement on your second page. On the first they feel a bit stiff (mostly because they're pretty small). You do need to work on how you're applying additional weight here and there though - you shouldn't be able to see where the additional stroke starts or ends, it needs to blend into the original line more smoothly.

• Your dissections are coming along pretty nicely. There's definitely room for improvement, but as far as what I'd expect at this stage, you're showing a lot of patience and care with how you approach each one. You're not afraid of taking your time. The next step is going to be a matter of spending less of your time drawing and more studying your reference continually (only looking away for a couple moments at a time, to put down a few lines that directly correspond with some feature on your reference ). Right now I can see signs that you're working a lot more from memory, where you look away for longer periods and rely on what you can remember. Our human memories aren't really designed for this kind of task, as they're prone to throwing out huge swathes of information in interest of simplifying things. Over time your memory will improve as your brain rewires itself to focus on what is actually important, but for now you've got to continually look back at your reference and refresh yourself. This kind of thing is totally normal to see though - if you want to read more about it, you can check out the notes on the texture challenge. I did notice areas where you were trying to compress the texture towards the edges to show how the surface turned away - great work there, keep it up.

• Your form intersections with boxes only came out pretty nicely - you show a good understanding of how they all relate to one another in space. The only issue here is that the foreshortening on the boxes is a bit too dramatic, and it throws off the sense of scale. Try to keep your foreshortening fairly shallow when you're handling a lot of forms together within the same scene.

• Your second page of form intersections is definitely more of a struggle, but there are a couple things that would have helped. Firstly, draw bigger - you were a little overwhelmed by the challenge involved here, so you cramped up and ended up drawing things quite small. This had an adverse effect on your ability to think through the spatial problems involved. Secondly, I mentioned in the instructions that you should avoid forms that are stretched in any one dimension, and to stick to those that are more equilateral (roughly the same in all three dimensions). The extra stretch brings perspective into the equation a fair bit, and increases the complexity of an already difficult exercise.

• Jumping back to your organic forms with contour lines, your second page of contour ellipses is much better, though you'll want to keep working on drawing those ellipses with more confidence (to alleviate that last bit of stiffness you've got there).

• Your organic forms with contour curves specifically do need some work. Firstly, it looks like for the most part you're using the same degree for each of your contour curves. As I explain in these notes, you need to factor in how the orientation of each cross-section changes relative to the viewer as you move along the length of a form. Shifting the degree to be narrower/wider as needed helps give a better sense of perspective and space. Secondly, you need to work on getting those contour curves to fit snugly between the edges of the given form. The illusion we're trying to produce is that the line runs along the surface of the form, so if it ends up outside of it, or inside, it'll break that illusion immediately. I know it can be tough to have that kind of control over the curve, but it's an important part of this effect.

• One other thing to pile onto the organic forms with contour curves, is that when you're drawing your curves (and frankly, lines in general), try not to apply too much pressure, and where possible, try and have your lines taper a little on the ends. If we press too hard, or draw too slowly, the weight throughout the line ends up really uniform, and the strokes feel like they've come to a sudden and abrupt stop. Getting used to lifting the pen slightly as you come off a stroke (where appropriate, of course) can help give more subtlety to a mark and make it feel livelier. It also becomes quite handy when you need to add line weight, as it allows you to blend your strokes into each other.

• Your organic intersections suffer from similar issues, but there are a couple additional things worth mentioning. When doing this exercise, try and think that you're piling up water balloons. Keep the forms simple, just big sausage forms. Avoid having them pinch through their middle, or swell awkwardly. Also, when drawing the cast shadows, remember that shadows are cast upon other objects. The shadow is not tied to the object that casts them (which seems to be more of what you're doing), but they instead run along these other surfaces.

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

• 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves.

• 1 page of organic intersections

• 1 page of form intersections with a variety of types of forms. Remember what I said - keep your foreshortening shallow, draw bigger and don't stretch your cylinders.

Uncomfortable

2018-06-30 01:01

Excellent work! I noticed when you started out that a lot of your arrows looked kind of samey - they were good, but kind of repetitious. You seemed to notice the same thing, and into the second page you included a lot more variety.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along well. You're maintaining some really nice, smooth, even ellipses. You will want to continue working on your ability to control those marks however without losing that confidence - one of the key aspects of this technique is to give the impression that your ellipse runs along the surface of this sausage form, so having the ellipse fit snugly between either side is pretty important, as is gradually tightening the ellipses up. You're heading in the right direction though, and you'll continue to improve simply by incorporating this exercise into a regular warmup routine.

It does appear that you're being somewhat more mindful of controlling your contour curves, in terms of getting them to sit on the surface of the forms. They slip outside here and there, so it's still something to work on, but it's definitely an improvement over the previous exercise.

Really phenomenal work with your dissections. You tackled a great many different kinds of surfaces, and tackled each in a manner tailored to its needs. You demonstrated excellent observational skills, along with a lot of patience and forethought towards how the details were organized. Very, very well done.

One thing I noticed towards the lower sausage on this page was that while you seem to be aware of how the surface turns away from the viewer towards the sides of the form, you definitely could have stood to flatten out the pentagons/circles of the various textures more. As that surface turns, flattening shapes like these out is a great way to sell the idea that it exists in three dimensions, so it's worth really pushing that aspect.

Your form intersections are coming along great. You're demonstrating a solid grasp of how these forms exist together within the same space, and have gone as far as managing the intersections themselves with great success (despite it being generally more challenging than most students at this stage can manage).

And finally, your organic intersections are pretty good. The main thing I feel that is missing is more focused towards the top of the little tower - that's where the illusion that each of these forms is weighed down by its own mass starts to break. With so little support, I'd expect some of these lone sausages to sag more - but that's really a pretty minor point. The only other thing I'd mention is to watch where you put those contour ellipses (the ones at the ends of each form). Remember that if that ellipse has a small degree, that tells us that this end of the form is mostly turned away from the viewer, so the ellipse itself would sit quite close to the edge. And similarly, if it's quite wide, it'd sit further from that edge. There are a couple here where the ellipse is at a middling degree, but far enough to the edge where it feels that it ought to be more or less a full circle.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-07-01 19:29

Overall you've done a pretty good job. I do have a few things to suggest, but you're headed in the right direction.

• Your arrows are coming along quite nicely. You're showing a good grasp of 3D space with how you're twisting and turning the arrows (rather than having the flat of the arrow face the viewer directly, you're playing a lot with having it facing in other directions). To push this exploration of the depth of the scene further, I'd recommend picking one end of each arrow and situating it as much farther from the viewer, and putting the opposite end much closer. This'll force you to play with the scale and foreshortening of your arrows and penetrate through all three dimensions of space even more.

• I noticed something similar with your organic forms - they have a tendency to run across the picture frame, rather than into it. As a result, most of your contour ellipses and curves have a fairly narrow degree. Try playing around with having more organic forms that move through the depth of the scene - the sort that would require contour curves and ellipses with a much wider, more circular degree.

• You're making a pretty good start with your dissection textures. There's plenty of room for growth, but you're heading in the right direction and are demonstrating a well developing eye for detail and are mostly avoiding oversimplification. As you continue to tackle this, you'll benefit from looking over the notes on the texture challenge page.

• Now fundamentally your form intersections are fine - you're demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space, and you're able to depict these various forms existing cohesively within the same space. The problem here is how you approach drawing them. I see a lot of scratchy, rough marks which fundamentally contradicts the methodology we're drilling through all of these exercises. We are not being explorative here, and we are not sketching. Each mark must be drawn using the ghosting method, and must involve forethought, planning and ultimately confident execution and commitment. There will always be challenges that are overwhelming, and that will tempt you into falling back on old habits - you need to push back on them. When something feels like it's too much, stop and take a step back. Think through the problem, break it down into smaller steps, rather than trying to do all your problem solving directly on the page. I also see this issue in the organic intersections and to smaller degrees in other exercises.

Aside from that, you're doing fine. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2018-07-03 21:11

Pretty good work, but there are a couple things I want to recommend.

• Your arrows are looking great. They flow very nicely and tend to explore the full bounds of 3D space, rather than focusing only on the two dimensions of the page.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well, but there's two points I want to raise here. Firstly, avoid having those forms that pinch in the middle (you actually did quite a few of those). Focus purely on simple sausage forms that are fairly consistent in their widths through their lengths. Secondly, always think about how the degree of your ellipses/curves will differ as you move from cross-section to cross-section, as explained here. In some cases I could see shifting of the degrees, but in quite a few it seemed to stay the same, even though the angle of sight from the viewer's eye to that cross-section would generally be changing.

• For your dissections, you have a lot of variety and took quite a bit of care as far as observation goes with each texture. One thing I did notice though is that you have a tendency to shift from full density to nothing very quickly, and will want to practice your ability to demonstrate a texture in varying levels of density. This is something the texture challenge goes over quite a bit.

• Your form intersections are pretty solid. Your linework does seem a little weak though, so you may want to work on how you apply the ghosting method a little more. Might be rushing just a tad.

• Nice work with the organic intersections - you're demonstrating a good grasp of how the forms bend around each other, and how they generally interact. The only thing that caught my eye though was how it'd be a particularly difficult arrangement to pull off physically. I usually like to picture this exercise as though I'm piling water balloons on top of each other, so gravity and physics in general tends to come into play a fair bit. But either way, you did a good job.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-07-08 23:57

Overall you did a really solid job. Your arrows flow nicely through space, your organic forms with contour lines convey a strong illusion of form and volume, your form intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how the various forms relate to each other in space in a cohesive and consistent manner, and the interactions between your organic intersections are coming along well.

I have just a few things to mention:

• On this page, the use of line weight wasn't the best. The dark internal lines with relatively light external lines (those that define the silhouette of the object) broke the cohesion of the overall form. Generally you want line weight variation to be quite subtle, and you want the silhouette to be heavy enough to maintain the idea that all the lines make up a single form. With all these overly dark lines sitting inside, it ends up feeling more like a collection of loosely related lines rather than a single solid form.

• Also for your organic forms with contour lines, I highly recommend that you not break away from using a central minor axis line, as it plays an important role in helping one to align contour ellipses and curves.

• Your second set of dissections (where you didn't modify the underlying form) were definitely more in line in terms of approach. The point of texture is that while it is made up of smaller forms, they are meant to simply wrap around another form as needed. So an "ear of corn" is not a texture - the corn kernels themselves can be, but the sheaf would not be included in that. On the note that textures wrap around their base forms, keep that in mind. You often manage it just fine, but the "car hood surface" texture jumped out at me because your lines did not wrap around the rounded form, which largely fought against the illusion that the form is three dimensional.

• Also worth mentioning, when handling textures, avoid scribbling or using hatching lines. You didn't for the most part, but there were a few areas (ear of corn, soda can) where you didn't really pay attention to the texture and seemed to be more interested in filling the surface with something. Hatching is usually just a filler texture when people aren't interested in looking deeper to actually find the texture that is present (usually because they're more interested in just shading an object, which is not what we're doing here).

• Worth mentioning, your use of line weight in the form intersections was pretty solid (in comparison to the issue I raised with your organic forms with contour ellipses). The forms feel very cohesive. Going around the ellipses you did stiffen up a little though (when adding the additional weight) so remember to work on applying that weight with as confident a stroke as you would when drawing it initially.

• Your organic intersections are coming along well. There is room for improvement, but that'll come with continued practice. It's mostly a matter of always pushing yourself to imagine as though you're piling a bunch of water balloons on top of one another, thinking about how they're going to sag against one another. You're doing a pretty good job as it is, but a couple of the forms (the squiggly one towards the top left, and the leftmost one resting on top of the big bottom one) are still a bit weak and don't quite sell the illusion.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-07-09 00:14

You definitely start off strong. Your arrows flow really nicely through 3D space, and your organic forms with contour ellipses show a good grasp of how the lines need to wrap around the forms and how the ellipses' degrees shift over the form's length.

Once you hit the organic forms with contour curves however, you start to stray pretty far from the instructions (making all kinds of overly complex, loopy forms and neglecting to utilize the minor axis as instructed. The further you go, the more you push away from the focus of the exercise.

I do feel that for the most part you understand what contour lines are for and how they're meant to be used, but you definitely get pretty sloppy here.

With your dissections, you've got a lot of interesting textures and a lot of great experimentation. As far as my expectations for this lesson goes, you're doing a great job. There are a few places where you can work on these however - for example, making sure the textures wrap around the rounded form (like your metal texture), working on your choice of what constitutes a texture (grass can be a texture, but the blade of grass itself is a form - the texture is what exists on the form, that's what we're interested in removing from the blade and applying to these sausage forms). Also, I noticed that you are struggling with varying the density of your textures - you tend to go from full texture to none, with no transition between them. Give the notes on the texture challenge a read, and try the exercise. It should help you develop in this area.

Your form intersections is where the hiatus starts to show. Your linework's a bit scratchy at times, the perspective on the boxes is a bit wonky, and overall I'm not entirely sure you read the instructions or watched the video for this exercise as carefully as you could have. One big thing I recommend in the instructions is that you stay away from long tubes or other overly stretched forms, sticking to forms that are more equilateral instead. As you continue to work on this, you tend to stray more from the instructions, and end up going off on a tangent.

Your organic intersections are coming along pretty well. You demonstrate a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, so you end on a good note.

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

• One page of organic forms with contour curves. Stick to simple sausage forms, use your central minor axis lines, etc.

• Two pages of form intersections. You may want to review the material on the 250 box challenge page, as it's definitely been a while since you last completed that (and the video there has been updated).

Before tackling each of these exercises, be sure to review the instructions and watch the videos. I know there's all kinds of ways one can modify these exercises to take them in all different kinds of directions, but when submitting them for critique here, you need to follow the instructions to the letter. Each exercise has a specific focus, and by allowing yourself to deviate, you risk missing out on it.

Uncomfortable

2018-07-09 00:34

Pretty nice work! Overall you did a solid job. You're conveying a good sense of form, and I especially liked your form intersections and organic intersections. Your linework tends to be very confident and bold, which helps keep everything nice and smooth.

There were a few things that I noticed that I'd like to mention:

• Your organic forms with contour lines tended to be a little bit loose. This comes down to that confidence which I like, though it can be a bit of a double edged sword. While execution needs to be confident in order to maintain that smooth flow, it's important that you exert control over it by applying the ghosting method before executing the mark. This hit you particularly hard with the contour curves, where the majority of your curves tended to sit outside of the form. Since we're trying to sell the illusion that these lines run along the surface of a three dimensional form, it's really important that the curves stay snug between the edges - not falling outside or floating inside.

• You've got a lot of great experimentation with different kinds of textures in your dissections. The only issue I wanted to remark upon was with how you struggle to achieve transition from areas of dense texture to rest areas where that texture is relatively sparse. I recommend that you take a look at the 25 texture challenge, and try doing it in parallel with the other lessons. It's the sort of exercise that is meant to be stretched over a fairly long period of time, and it drills a lot with the ability to control density and transition from one end of the spectrum to the other.

• Overall your form intersections were really solid. Just two points that can help here - firstly, your foreshortening on these forms tended to be a little dramatic at times. This can throw the sense of scale off and lead to some general inconsistencies which a viewer will pick up on, even though they can't entirely express what's wrong. Secondly, a bit of line weight around the silhouettes of your forms will definitely help to pump up the illusion of solidity by quite a bit. It doesn't need to be heavy - in fact, it should be quite subtle, but ensuring that the silhouettes of each form gets just a little bit of weight will help make each form feel more cohesive and sturdy.

Anyway, overall you've done really well. Keep up the good work and consider this lesson complete. Feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2018-07-09 23:18

You start off pretty well with some arrows that flow nicely through space. Through the rest of this submission however, your work feels somewhat haphazard and rather sloppy. You've got a lot of great confidence to your linework, but the issue lies with your control. It suggests that you didn't necessarily put enough focus on the use of the ghosting method for each and every mark you put down.

This hit in a number of ways.

Your contour lines definitely hook around well, but more often than not they fall outside of the edges of the form. As the technique is all about giving the impression that the line runs along the surface of this rounded form, the illusion is quickly lost if the line doesn't fit snugly between the edges. The alignment of the ellipses and curves to the central minor axis line was frequently off as well, which also undermined the illusion we're trying to produce.

Your dissections are a good start, but there are two things that jump out at me. Firstly, keep pushing yourself to observe your reference more closely and more frequently. It's normal to start out relying quite heavily on one's memory - that means spending a good long while studying your reference at first, and then spending a good long while drawing what you saw. The problem is that humans aren't great at remembering a lot of information. We tend to throw out the bulk of that information, so it's important to keep looking back and trying to ensure that every mark we put down captures a specific feature present in our reference. When looking at a reference, focus on things like how certain details are grouped or spread out over a surface (is it an even coverage, or do they cluster in certain ways), and always ask yourself questions about what makes a surface appear to be rough, smooth, wet, sticky, etc.

Secondly, you do tend to get a little scratchy at times, and often let your brain go a little bit on auto-pilot when tackling things with a lot of complexity, or high detail density. Auto-pilot can seem rather attractive, but it causes us to draw in highly predictable patterns that make a drawing feel stiff and unrealistic. It's true that there are always rhythms and patterns to the way textures work (and that chaos/scribbling is never the answer) - but the patterns present on a reference usually have a great deal of nuance to them that quickly get lost if we don't continually go back to study them. This really comes back to the first point, of not trusting your memory.

There are a few things that jump out at me with your form intersections. First and foremost, your individual forms lack solidity. This comes from the little gaps you sometimes leave near the corners, where a line has failed to reach all the way to the point you laid down before ghosting. Your ellipses also contribute to this, especially where you fail to draw through them (remember, you need to be drawing through all the ellipses you draw for these lessons, ideally two full times around the shape before lifting the pen) or where you don't keep them tight resulting in all kinds of holes and gaps). The lack of line weight also tends to make the forms feel more like loosely related collections of lines, which is something I mentioned when critiquing your 250 box challenge.

In the instructions, I do mention that you should focus on drawing a single contiguous network of forms, and that upon finishing the addition of a new form, all those present should feel solid and cohesive. Don't move onto a subsequent form until you've achieved this, and don't focus on individual groupings of forms.

Overall I don't get the impression that you yourself are buying into the illusion you're trying to create - that's one of the most important things we work towards, buying into our own lie that these two dimensional drawings are actually solid, three dimensional forms. If you believe this to be the case, then it becomes considerably more difficult to draw loosely, to leave gaps that result in forms that feel flimsy or uncommitted. Remember that we're not loosely sketching or exploring - we're constructing individual forms within that space.

All in all, I feel that you can do far better than this. All you need to do is put more time towards each exercise, and really push yourself to buy into the illusion you're selling. I'd like you to do the following:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves

• 1 page of dissections

• 1 page of form intersections

• 1 page of organic intersections

Before tackling each exercise, I want you to go back and reread that exercise's instructions and watch its video. Pay special attention to how I execute my linework - I'm not being loose or careless with my marks. I'm not always 100% accurate, but I am putting in as much time as I require to be as accurate as I can be.

Uncomfortable

2018-07-21 23:52

Overall you've done an excellent job, and very clearly show a strong understanding of 3D space through these exercises. I do have a few things to point out though that you'll want to mind as you continue to move forwards.

• For your arrows, while they flow quite nicely, one thing I noticed was that they tend to restrict themselves in the most part to the two major dimensions of your piece of paper, with only a limited deviation through the depth of the scene. When doing this exercise in the future, I want you to think about one end of a given arrow as sitting farther away in the scene, and the other end sitting closer to the viewer, and exaggerating the scales of these different ends accordingly (with the closer end being very large and the farther end being much smaller) to achieve a sense of depth.

• Your organic forms with contour lines improved over the set, but overall I get the impression that you're being a bit loose with them. Your first page of contour curves especially seemed extremely rushed, showing no sign of applying the ghosting method to achieve any real control over your mark. Further on you do improve in regards to this, but you still need to work on getting your curves and ellipses to fit snugly between the two edges of the form. This can be tricky while maintaining the confidence necessarily to ensure a smooth stroke, which is why the ghosting method is incredibly valuable here.

• Your dissections are coming along nicely, with a good deal of observation and careful study of a variety of textures. The only thing I want to mention here is that you should try and set aside the urge to use any kind of hatching lines - that is, the sort of lines we put down when we're not really sure what we want to draw on a surface, but dont' want to leave it blank. It's a sort of fallback to focusing more on shading-for-shading's-sake, which is something I entirely neglect to cover in these lessons. Always resist the urge to just shade, unless that shading is intentionally conveying some sort of textural information. The only place hatching is accepted in my lessons is how you used it in the form intersections - that is, separating faces and serving as a visual cue, rather than trying to show form.

• Your form intersections are extremely solid. You're demonstrating an exceptional understanding of 3D space with these.

• Your organic intersections are much the same - you're doing a great job here of showing how these forms sag against one another, and how they interact in 3D space. Your contour curves here are also considerably better than they were earlier.

So, all in all, there's definitely things to keep in mind, but you're doing a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-07-22 19:11

Overall you're doing alright, but I can see a number of places where you've not quite followed the instructions.

• You skipped the organic forms with contour ellipses

• In the form intersections exercise, you ignored the instruction about not using overly stretched forms (like long tubes) and sticking to largely equilateral ones in order to help keep the exercise as focused on the construction of forms that feel cohesive within the same space (without bringing too much foreshortening into it).

That said, the rest of the exercises are fairly well done. I do have a few suggestions to make though:

• For your arrows, try playing a little more with depth. They're flowing quite nicely right now, but by exaggerating the ends as being closer or farther away from the viewer (and therefore much larger or much smaller) you can give the impression that the arrow is flowing through the depth of the scene.

• For your organic forms with contour curves, you definitely need to work on getting the curves to sit snugly between the edges of the form. Having them fall outside as they are right now breaks the illusion that these lines are running along the surface of the form.

• Your dissections certainly are a good start, though I recommend that when you get the chance, you read the notes on the 25 texture challenge. One thing I did want to mention though is in regards to the "rusty pipe" texture. A rusty pipe's texture is really just rust - the welding lines, the rivets, etc. aren't actually a part of it. So when drawing it, you'd really want to study the way the surface of the rusted metal has chipped and flaked away, how it transitions from being smooth and polished to rough and uneven.

• You did a pretty good job in showing how your organic intersections interact with one another, and how they sag against one another. There is room for improvement, but that'll largely come with continued practice. You're headed in the right direction here.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do one page of organic forms with contour ellipse (the exercise you missed) and one page of form intersections (where you should be ensuring that you stick to equilateral forms which are roughly the same size in all three dimensions).

As for your new years resolution, having a set goal and timeline can definitely be very helpful in a lot of areas, but it's not something I recommend here. It's just so important that we go through the exercises and read the instructions with patience and care, and afford the work the time we require to do them to the best of our ability. That feeling that we're running behind encourages us to rush through things and skip steps which will ultimately come back to bite us in the future. Don't worry about completing all of this by December - just focus on learning from the exercises and lessons. Think instead of December as a set time where you can look back on what you've accomplished and get a sense of whether or not drawabox has worked well for you.

Uncomfortable

2018-07-24 20:46

Overall you're doing a pretty good job, though I do have a couple things to point out that you're going to want to focus on as you continue to move forwards.

Firstly, your arrows flow quite confidently, which is great. My only recommendation here is to try and think more about how those arrows flow through all three dimensions of space. Currently it does feel as though they're mostly moving across the two dimensions of your page. Thinking about one point of the arrow being farther away and the other being closer, and then exaggerating the scale of each end to match (with the closer being much larger and the farther being much smaller) can help you achieve a greater sense of depth.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses came out very solid. Your contour curves were considerably less so however. I can see signs that you understand that you want to get them to wrap around at the edges, as they continue along to the other side of the rounded form, but yours struggle at times to properly hook around.

Part of it has to do with how they're aligned (or rather, not aligned) to the minor axis, so definitely keep an eye on that. You may also want to try employing the overshooting method mentioned here.

Your dissections were a pretty solid start. You've demonstrated a good deal of patience and care as you observed and studied a variety of textures, and you did a good job of applying those texture to these general forms. One thing you will want to look at is how you approach the transition from dense to sparse when it comes to scales. Right now you're enclosing each scale in a solid line. It helps to think of the marks you're drawing as being cast shadows rather than actual physical demarcations. Based on how much light is being shined on a surface and at which angle, shadows can grow to be very thick and fuse with their neighbours to create larger shapes (which you were experimenting with), but it can also cause shadows to be blasted out, reducing them to minimal marks hinting at the form features present. I talk more about this sort of thing in the texture challenge page's notes.

Your form intersections were okay, but they were lacking in a couple areas:

• You didn't really fill in the pages by any stretch.

• Your boxes definitely continue to need a great deal of work, so you're going to want to continue practicing them with particular focus on how your lines converge consistenty (my guess is that since you focused primarily on boxes with vanishing points that were quite close in the box challenge, you were left without as much experience with boxes where the VPs are much further away, and the foreshortening is considerably shallower).

• Your spheres were definitely lumpy and uneven, so work on drawing ellipses - specifically circles - from your shoulder. I often see people who draw more from their elbow or wrists running into problems when they try to scale their ellipses up.

And to finish, your organic intersections were quite well done, and demonstrated a good understanding of how the forms interact with one another in space. Your contour curves were a little better here, though they still demonstrated some issues in hooking around at the edges.

I will mark this lesson as complete, but I want you to keep on top of this stuff. It's expected that students are to continue practicing the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 as part of a regular warm up routine (picking 2-3 exercises to do for 10-15 minutes at the beginning of each sitting), but I want you to pay special attention to the issues I've mentioned here until you're able to sort them out.

That said, as I have marked the lesson as complete, you may feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2018-07-27 02:05

Your first few seconds are looking really good. Your arrows flow nicely, you capture a strong sense of 3D space with your organic forms with contour lines, and your dissections explore a nice variety of textures and demonstrate a a well development approach to observational drawing. There's certainly room for improvement, but you're headed at significant speed in the right direction, so keep it up.

When you get into the form intersections though, the confidence of your linework drops quite a bit, and as a result, so does the solidity and overall quality of your form intersections. You are demonstrating an understanding of the exercise itself, but you're allowing your hesitation and fear to command how you draw your lines, and it really diminishes your results.

For example, you completely stop drawing through your ellipses (you should be doing this for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons without exception). Your start drawing your lines less confidently, and they start to waver as a result. In response to all of this, you try and apply some manner of shading with a pencil (which you should not be doing, considering that the instructions for this lesson state to use a pen only) to compensate.

Of course, nothing can compensate for a lack of confidence in your execution.

Your organic intersections come out a little better, but there is still some shakiness to how you're applying the additional line weight. Because you're very preoccupied with outlining each form completely, and matching the lines perfectly, you slow down and your lines waver once again. Line weight must be applied with the same confidence as your initial marks. You also shouldn't be looking to apply weight to the entirety of a line - it should only be applied to specific areas of lines to clarify specific overlaps of form. I talk about this in the form intersections video.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to try one more page of form intersections. Make sure you apply the ghosting method to each and every mark you put down (so you can separate the process of planning/preparing from executing with confidence), and make sure you draw through each and every ellipse. Before you start this page, I want you to reread the notes and rewatch the video for that exercise.

Uncomfortable

2018-07-29 21:20

On your arrows, you've got a lot of visible attempts at trying to show the depth of the scene and have them flow towards/away from the viewer. That's fantastic - one thing I'd recommend on this front is to play with the scale of either end of the arrow. Pick one as being closer and the other as being farther, and really exaggerate their scale, making the closer end considerably larger. This will help create that illusion that it's covering a much larger space. Aside from that though, you're doing a great job in how your arrows are flowing fluidly.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along well, though your control over each ellipse (and your ability to keep them snug between the edges of the forms) will definitely improve with continued practice. Also, I'm noticing many places where you're considering how the degree of the contour ellipses shifts between narrow to wider, which is great - but there are also a number of places where you think less about this, so definitely keep an eye on that. Lastly, I can see some struggles with keeping your ellipses aligned, especially when you're dealing with wider ellipses of a greater degree.

I'm writing this as I scroll through - I just noticed the later page of arrows, these definitely push scale a lot more. That's great.

From there on, you're doing quite well. Your dissections show a lot of great textures, which you're tackling in a variety of ways and demonstrating considerable observation and patience. Your form intersections are very consistent and show a well developed sense of 3D space, with clear understanding of how the forms relate to one another. Same goes for your organic intersections, where I'm very pleased t osee how each form sags over its neighbours, wherever its weight is not quite supported.

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

2018-07-29 21:47

On the bright side, your absence has not dulled your skills. Unless it has, in which case you were probably in a position to teach me - because your work is fantastic. I could just leave it at that and call the lesson complete, but I'll elaborate a little for the sake of your moneys!

Your submission is basically spot on, and touches all the points I wanted to see. Your arrows flow very smoothly through 3D space and explore the full depth of the space they occupy (I'm very pleased to see you playing with the scale of either end of each arrow to push the illusion of perspective). Your contour lines wrap marvelously around your organic forms, accelerating and curving nightly along the edges. The contour ellipses also are drawn with a great deal of control, and you're clearly aware (either consciously or subconsciously) of the shift in degree for these cross-sectional cuts as their orientation changes relative to the viewer.

Your dissections play with a great variety of textures, and for each one, you apply patient observation and very specific marks to best reflect exactly it is what you're trying to capture. There's no falling back to generic hatching or any kind of chaos - you take your time, and to great effect. You're also showing a fantastic use of detail density, running all around the spectrum of dense to sparse as needed to convey exactly what you're trying to communicate about the surface in question.

Continuing on, your form intersections show a solid understanding of 3D space. I would recommend drawing through all of your boxes (you certainly do it for at least a couple of them), as well as drawing around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen to ensure that they stay as even as possible (a few were a tad lumpy in certain areas). Still, you clearly understand how these forms exist within space.

And lastly, your organic intersections are much the same (on the positive points that is). The way your forms sag and lump on top of each other conveys a good sense of just how their weight is supported (and where it is not), and paints a very convincing picture of volume and mass.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-08-06 01:32

Overall youre doing a pretty solid job! I especially loved your organic intersections. Your form intersections are also looking great.

There were really only two areas where I wanted to offer some feedback. With your arrows exercise, youve got a lot of great flow to them, but as it stands theyre mostly doing their movement through a limited slice of space - mostly the one defined by the two dimensions of the page youre drawing on. When doing this exercise, its important to really push through the bounds of depth. We do that by thinking of one end of our arrow as being situated physically farther from our viewer, and the other end being placed closer - and exaggerating the scale of those ends. This means really pushing the closer end to be very large and the farther end to be much smaller.

Secondly, a more minor point - I noticed that youre not really drawing through the ellipses you drew for your organic forms with contour ellipses, or even in your dissections. Make sure you draw through all of the ellipses you draw for my lessons, as I dont want you getting too caught up in keeping them extremely neat to the detriment of their smoothness, flow and general confidence.

Your dissections are definitely a great start though. I noticed a lot of interesting textures that you were experimenting with, along with a variety of different approaches to suit each texture.

Keep up the great work. Ill go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-08-13 18:10

Really nice work! You're showing a good grasp of each exercise, and are taking each one in the right direction. In your arrows, they flow nicely through space and explore all three dimensions of it (depth included) rather than sticking to those defined by the page itself. Your organic forms with contour lines establish a good sense of volume, with your contour curves wrapping around the form confidently in a way that conveys how each line continues on along the opposite side.

Your dissections were generally pretty good (with some variance). I do want to stress the importance of generally not falling into the hatching-trap. Sticking to other textures to convey the transition from light to dark is a lot more meaningful, and will teach you a great deal more about how to render long term, while hatching tends to be an easier fallback.

Overall though you did a good job, aside from the snake skin, where you didn't allow your texture to just go to full black. This resulted in the texture coming out quite noisy and distracting, and also flattened it out a great deal. Don't be afraid to let your texture get swallowed by by large, expansive shadow shapes.

Your form and organic intersections are both well done. You've demonstrated a good grasp of both 3D space, how those forms exist within it, and how they interact with one another.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-08-18 21:27

Nice work overall. As you mentioned, your organic form-based exercises were pretty solidly done, and generally captured a good sense of volume. The only thing I want to mention on that front is that with the contour curves, you waffle back and forth between showing a good grasp of how those curves need to wrap around the form convincingly (to give the impression that they run along the surface of the form), and failing to quite hook around at the edges. You've got a number of these that are very successful, but the fact that there are as many that don't quite make it suggests that you're still riding the cusp of grasping this. I recommend that you apply the overshooting method described here. Also, pay a little more mind to the alignment of your curves - I find that you tend to struggle more with the issue of wrapping them around convincingly when your alignment is a little off.

For your arrows, you've got them flowing quite nicely - I do want to recommend however that you play a little more with the sense of depth. Try and figure out which end of the arrow is going to sit closer to the viewer and which is farther away, and exaggerate their scale to match (closer end being much larger and farther being smaller). This will help you establish the depth of the scene, and play with dimensions beyond just those defined by the paper on which you are drawing.

Your dissections show a good deal of improvement over the set, though they start out pretty nicely to begin with. Your last page there shows a lot of fantastic use of texture and detail, and a good sense of how to transition from dense to sparse while retaining the essence of each texture.

Now, I definitely agree that your form intersections are your weakest point. They're not horribly done or anything, you're just not taking them quite far enough. You're only attempting the intersections themselves (which help us to start understanding how the forms relate to one another in 3D space - the main thing you're missing right now). When you actually do the intersections, you're rather timid about it.

As I mention in the instructions, the intersections are hard, and I don't expect you to be able to nail them just yet. They require a well developed understanding of how everything sits in space - but we develop that by jumping in and trying it out boldly and confidently. If you approach it timidly, you're not going to learn quite as much. You've got to be much more willing to fail - so when you do these in the future (and I insist that you do as part of your warmup routine), make sure you focus on how these forms actually relate to one another in space. Don't be afraid to get them to overlap more frequently, and to give yourself more spatial problems to solve.

Aside from that, fantastic work. I will go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, as I trust you'll continue working on those weak points yourself. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-08-18 21:52

Overall nice work! I do have a few suggestions however that will help you iron out some of the challenges you may be facing, or otherwise help you get more out of these exercises as you continue to move forwards.

You've done some great stuff with your arrows - they flow quite nicely, and explore a great deal of the depth of the scene, pushing past the dimensions defined by the page.

For your organic forms with contour lines, my biggest suggestion is to stick to simple sausage forms rather than having your forms swell and taper all over the place. Adding more complexity here serves more to distract you from the core of the exercise (capturing the illusion that these contour lines run along the surface of each form), and don't contribute a whole lot. A simple sausage form with a consistent width throughout its length will be considerably more helpful. Other than that however, you are wrapping the curves around quite well.

Your dissections are looking good, and you're showing a good grasp of how we need to be able to transition from dense detail to sparse rest areas. I did notice however that you're using a lot of simple hatching in places to achieve that transition, and I want to encourage you to try and play with different kinds of patterns, more informed by what you see in your reference images. Hatching is rarely present, and is usually more found when an artist is trying to achieve shading for shading's sake, rather than to convey a specific texture. The textures themselves in your reference image will often have much subtler patterns that you can find if you look more closely - but if you use hatching instinctively, you'll be more likely to ignore them. So I recommend that you set hatching aside for now.

Your form intersections demonstrate a solid grasp of form and how they relate to one another - the only thing I want to underline here is that I did mention in this instructions that you should not draw individual sets of a few forms intersecting at a time, but rather to fill each page with a single expansive network of forms. This forces you to think a lot harder about how they all relate to one another. Also try to stick to more equilateral forms (rather than having long cylinders for example), as keeping foreshortening as limited as possible can be very helpful towards focusing on the core of this exercise.

For your organic intersections, they're generally done well, though as I mentioned above, sticking to simpler sausage forms would definitely have been beneficial.

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

2018-08-23 23:38

Hot damn, nice work! You did a pretty great job across the board. There are a few minor things worth mentioning here, but overall it's really well done.

Your arrows show a solid exploration of all three dimensions of space - by playing with the scale of either end, you show penetration into the depth of the scene, rather than being limited to the two dimensions defined by the page you're drawing on. Your organic forms with contour lines show both a good grasp of how the degrees of your contour ellipses shift over the length of a form, as well as of the purpose of the contour lines themselves - that is, having features that run directly along the surface of the form, describing it as they do so. I'm pleased to see that you kept your contour lines quite snugly within the shape, helping push the illusion that they run along its surface rather than floating inside or outside of the form.

The only thing I wanted to mention in regards to that was specifically for your contour curves - watch their alignment relative to the minor axis. In some places, you had them slanted slightly. Still, you're clearly showing that you understand the goal of the exercise, and the use of the technique.

Your dissections - especially that first page - show a lot of attention to detail, and careful consideration of your reference images. Overall I don't see a whole lot of cases where you ignored the underlying form, but in some cases it could just be luck that you didn't accidentally flatten things out. Your second page of dissections are a bit weaker than the first - largely that it seems you got a little lazy, relied more on hatching, and perhaps didn't observe your reference as closely.

Your form intersections show a good grasp of space and the relationships between your primitives. I did notice a few things however:

• In the instructions, I mentioned that you should stick to equilateral forms and avoid things like long tubes, to keep overly complex foreshortening out of the exercise.

• I can see places where you've added additional weight with the purpose of replacing whole lines. In the video for this exercise, I mention that line weight should only be used in specific local areas (emphasizing parts of lines, not replacing them entirely) to clarify overlaps. Straight up replacing lines results in drawing a secondary pass that is usually a lot more stiff and less confident, which diminishes your results.

• For your cylinders, watch how you draw the ends. The ellipse closer to us should have a narrower degree than the one farther away.

Lastly, you did a pretty good job of capturing how the organic forms interact with one another in the organic intersections. Towards the bottom you did end up going more for flattened balls, which can feel a little stiff, but the sausages on top look nice and flexible, while maintaining their solidity quite well.

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