Uncomfortable

2018-09-05 18:32

You're doing a pretty solid job with your arrows - they're flowing well across the page, and explore all three dimensions of 3D space (including the depth of the scene), so that's great to see. You're not limiting yourself to the space defined by the flat page you're drawing on, which is one of the things I look out for here.

Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well too, and I'm pleased to see you applying the overshooting method to your contour curves, which helps you maintain the correct curvature as they hook around at the edges to continue along the other side.

Your dissections are a good start, but they're definitely a little simplistic at times. A few of them are better, but overall it shows that you'll want to keep pushing yourself to observe your reference not only more carefully, but also more frequently. It's easy to get caught up in studying it for a whole and then drawing for an extended period of time, relying on what you remember. Our memory isn't that reliable, especially early on - we have a tendency to oversimplify things in our heads and to throw away important details about what kinds of elements are present, and how they're arranged on the surface of the form. Getting in the habit of continually looking back at our reference so as to refresh our memory and ensure that every mark we put down reflects something present in that reference is a good idea. Try to only put down a couple marks at a time, and look back at your reference in between.

Your form intersections are coming along, but that's definitely an area you'll want to continue practicing. Specifically, I get the feeling while looking at your work that your understanding of how the forms you've drawn actually relate to each other in space is not quite there yet. This comes through in your constructions being a little less confident and self-assured.

It comes down to thinking more about what you're doing at a given moment. It seems that you might be getting a little more distracted, trying to process the full scope of what is in front of you at every moment. Instead, think only about the form you're adding to the scene, draw it to be solid, confident and complete - then sort out (using line weight, the actual intersectional cuts, etc) how it relates to all the surrounding forms. While at times we're forced to make assertions or guesses, don't draw anything you don't feel committed to - and when you do draw a mark, regardless of whether it's right or wrong, impose it onto the drawing. The act of making a mark should not be seen as an exploration or a question - asking "is this right". It is a statement that this is the case.

This may result in a page with many contradictory truths, but while that has many of its own problems, it is still better than a page full of hypotheses.

Your organic intersections have their weaknesses, but altogether they're not too badly done. A few questionable decisions (like the one towards the upper left seemingly existing on an entirely different ground plane than the others and even casting a shadow on seemingly nothing), and overall you should stick to simpler sausage forms (avoiding wavy forms which can be considerably more difficult to give the impression of solidity), but many of the interactions between the forms convey a grasp of how they relate to each other, how they sag on top of one another and so on.

Just keep in mind the idea that you're piling up actual solid forms inside of a 3D space. Once you establish where the ground is, you need to respect that and try not to contradict it (as you did in the upper left). Consider the fact that these sausages are flexible and will droop along either side of the one beneath them, and that the shadows each one casts is to be wrapped around the form underneath.

Like the form intersections, this is certainly something you'll want to continue focusing on as you move forwards, but you're making headway as it is. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you're free to move onto lesson 3. Make sure you continue practicing the exercises from lesson 1 and 2 as warmups however, and for the time being, focus more on the exercises and issues I've raised here when doing so.

Uncomfortable

2018-09-12 01:35

Overall, nice works! A few areas are better than others, but all in all you're demonstrating a really well developing grasp of 3D space, and the relationships between your various forms. Your arrows flow well, and demonstrate a full grasp of all three dimensions, with the exaggeration of scale delving nicely into the depth of your scene.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally decent, though on a couple your alignment is a little slanted relative to the minor axis, and the degrees of those ellipses often seem a bit wide, especially through the middle of the forms. Doesn't really give a good sense of how those cross-sections shift relative to the viewer's eye. This is an issue that carries quite strongly into the organic forms with contour curves. In addition to this, I don't think this was your best page of the contour curves - you've got some better ones in your warmups, largely since you didn't really apply the overshooting method here, resulting in your curves hitting the edge at too sharp of an angle.

All that said, jumping ahead to your organic intersections shows that your capacity in all of these areas has improved considerably. The forms feel much more believable (better degree choices, contour alignment AND curvature along the edges), so it does look like you've grown a fair bit since doing these pages.

Moving forwards, your dissections are fantastic. A lot of very refined observation and consideration for the complexities of each texture. I don't see you descending into chaos or randomness at all, and at the same time you're balancing the visual noise quite nicely, establishing areas of rest alongside the areas of interest.

One thing that I want to mention that may help moving forwards is about how to think about the elements you're drawing. You're visibly on the cusp of this, so I'm just going to give you a little bit of a nudge. It's normal to be in the mindset that you've got these forms present on a surface, so you want to establish each one individually with some kind of enclosing line. For example, your squid nipples. You've drawn each one in its entirety, a neat little cylinder upon the surface. You did a pretty good job at that, taking their orientation into consideration, breaking the silhouette and all.

Instead of drawing each one so completely however, when detail gets this numerous and especially when it gets small, we stop drawing the form itself, and instead start drawing how it impacts the area around it. When a form is present, one of the biggest impacts it has is the shadow that it casts by occluding a light source. These cast shadows are extremely versatile, and can be used to imply the presence of forms without having to draw each and every one to completion. In addition to this, those shadows by their very nature can merge together, creating larger more complex shadow shapes whose interior is flat, but whose edges can convey a great deal regarding the forms present there. This very concept is why the polar bear fur texture came out so well - you were drawing the shadows cast by each clump of fur rather than the hairs themselves, and where the texture went more or less empty towards the center, it gave the impression that the light source was being pointed directly at it, effectively blasting away all the shadows.

Your form intersections, despite your struggles, were really well done. Lots of very solid, confident forms, and for the most part your intersections are correct or close to it- which is better than I ask for at this stage. There were a couple mistakes, mostly not too egregious, though I did see places where you rounded off some transitions that should have been much sharper. I marked out some mistakes here.

And of course as I mentioned before, you really nailed the organic intersections. Your contour lines there are considerably better, and you also convey a strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space, how they sag where their weight is not supported, and so on. Your shadows are also quite nice, except for the one towards the upper right, where it doesn't quite look like the shadow being cast there is actually projected onto the surface of the form underneath. The shadow looks like it's kind of floating.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the good work, and please stop bothering me or Scylla will turn into a feral raccoon and claw up your eucalyptus-eating, chlamydia-riddled, koala ass.

thehamco

2018-09-12 09:49

Dang your organic dissection textures are amazing, IMO.

Uncomfortable

2018-09-12 17:13

Great work! There are a few little hiccups - most of which you identified - though overall I do think you may be a little tough on yourself. The issues you mentioned are merely the kinds of things you keep in the back of your mind as you continue to move forwards, so don't dwell on them much.

For your arrows, I do agree that exaggerating the scale (specifically making the closer end much larger) would have really helped sell the depth, but overall you did a pretty good job of it as is, and conveyed a good sense of how the arrows flowed through space. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are solid, and the contour curves are coming along well - you'll want to work on your ability to place the curves directly in between the two edges of the form to make them fit more "snugly" (remember that the curve is meant to give the illusion that it is a mark running along the surface of the form, so that snugness is important), but you're making excellent headway and are almost there.

You definitely knocked it out of the park with your dissections, and I disagree that even your first attempt was poor. You definitely did improve over the set, but you've gone well beyond what I expect to see for this exercise, as it's largely an opportunity to demonstrate to me how you deal with detail and observational drawing, rather than actually than a challenge with a set standard needing to be met. You've shown an excellent eye for detail, both in identifying the complexities present in your reference image as well as identifying how they can be organized across the surface to give the same impression. I'm also pleased to see that you're not making much use of hatching lines, and instead study your reference more closely to find more suitable patterns of linework that reflect the texture more closely.

You'er right to be confident in your form intersections - they're fantastic. What I'm primarily testing here is your ability to draw solid forms that feel as though they exist consistently within the same space. The intersections themselves are something students will generally be weaker at, especially now, and is the sort of thing that is expected to improve over time. You're doing a good job with keeping the forms consistent within the space (I do agree a little with your assessment - they're not far off, but they do sometimes feel a little more foreshortened than the surrounding forms), and your intersections show a very well developing understanding of how the forms relate to one another.

Lastly, your organic intersections are entirely clear and well organized already - there's no need to push the line weight further, and to do so might risk going overboard. At a glance, I can fully grasp each individual form and understand (as well as believe) in their solidity. You also convey their sense of weight very well, in how they sag and slump against one another. The subtle line weights you've applied there, as well as the shadows work marvellously towards organizing the details without outright replacing things with a "clean up pass" (which is something I discourage).

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 2.

Uncomfortable

2018-09-12 17:47

Now, I will critique this, but I want to make one thing very clear: Don't treat my instructions or assignments as suggestions. You've shown a number of signs of this, and it's not working to your benefit. You're paying for the structure of receiving reviews and being told when to move forwards, and for me to identify what you need next - so stick to that. It's pretty obvious that you completed this stuff prior to pledging and submitting for critique, so I'll let it slide, but I hope you haven't done more than that.

To start with, your arrows are alright - they're a bit stiff in how they flow (the lines wobble a little), so that needs a bit of work, but all in all they do demonstrate convincing movement through 3D space. To better convey how they explore the depth of the scene however, I recommend that you exaggerate the scale of either end - pick an end that is farther from the viewer and an end that is closer, and push the scale of the closer side.

Your organic forms exercises were considerably... distracted. You added a lot of your own flair, and in doing so, demonstrated exactly why at the beginning of lesson 1 I make a pretty strong point of not doing that. If you look at lesson 1 again, you'll see at the bottom of the introductory text, a red box with this message. As described there, in taking your own path with this exercise, you neglected a number of instructions:

• You should be keeping the forms you draw simple - basic sausage forms are really the best way to focus on practicing the use of contour lines. You did keep things relatively simple in the contour ellipses section, but went off the rails with your contour curves.

• Similarly, the minor axis line is extremely important when it comes to learning how to align your ellipses and curves. Again, you used them for the ellipses but not the curves.

• The contour ellipses tend to be very loosely drawn, so those definitely need work. Apply the ghosting method so as to improve your control without sacrificing the confidence of execution.

• Your contour curves are hit and miss - you've got some that are okay, and others that feel very stiff and don't really convey the illusion that they're resting along the surface of the form.

• You'll notice that I don't cover shading at all, unlike a lot of other drawing courses. There's a reason for this - I see it as a crutch. When it comes to conveying the illusion of 3D form, a lot of beginners will try to fix a form that feels flat by piling on more and more shading, without consideration for the other elements that can make a form feel solid and believable. As such, they neglect the importance of contour lines, of silhouette, and of drawing through one's forms, relying only on this singular technique. I push the idea that shading should not be used as a tool to convey form - that before you ever apply it, that form should already feel completely solid. For that reason, I don't want students to shade their forms, so as to keep them from being distracted from these core techniques.

Your dissections are coming along decently. What I'm mainly looking for here are signs that you're picking up on how to draw from observation, and whether or not there are any visible tendencies to work from memory (due to either not observing enough, or spending long periods drawing between glances at your reference). Some of your textures here show that you're coming along well on this front - the avocado for instance, and the green toad, as well as the lemon. The watermelon does look decidedly more haphazard however.

One thing that might help, especially in situations with dense collections fo smaller forms (like the snake scales) is instead of enclosing each scale individually with an outline, try and focus more on the impact that scale has on its surroundings. There are two main impacts a form can have - it can occlude a light source and cast a shadow (which is actually what we really see when we observe the presence of lines on an object), and it can break and cause irregularities in its silhouette. Keep in mind that when I'm talking about cast shadows, this is different from the kinds of form shadows I said to avoid above. The beauty of cast shadows is that unlike what we know lines to be, they can vary considerably in thickness, going from simple line-like marks to full on shadow shapes. They can also merge with others to create larger swathes of solid black, or they can be blasted away (as if a light source were shining directly on the surface) - both situations that create nice areas of rest with minimal contrast or visual noise, which are important to balance against the areas of "interest".

Moving onto your form intersections, they are definitely weak. This comes from the fact that your mental model of 3D space simply isn't there yet - on account of you skipping past my recommendation of completing the 250 box challenge first. The box challenge is very much about pushing yourself to think more in terms of how each object sits in space, which is the predecessor to this particular exercise, which in turn focuses on how different forms can relate to one another in space.

The intersections themselves are intentionally challenging, and I don't expect students to nail them just yet. I do want them to attempt them, but it's the sort of thing that takes a lot more development to really nail. What I am interested in however is whether or not a student is able to convey the sense that these forms exist consistently within the same space, without conveying contradictory information about the space they occupy. For example, having a box that foreshortens quickly and dramatically next to a box that is much shallower in its convergence towards its vanishing points would immediately set off alarm bells without additional information being provided as to why this would be the case.

That said, you're not there yet. Your forms still aren't really solid, your linework is rather shaky and uncertain, and there's a visible lack of confidence overall. Funnily enough, the intersections themselves actually are coming along well - the few that you've got there are generally correct. But it's the underlying ability to draw those forms and capture their solidity that is sorely lacking.

You did mention that you've already completed almost half of the challenge, which is a start - given that you undoubtedly started on them before receiving my critique for lesson 1, I do hope that you read the notes and watched the video before starting. You are obviously drawing through your forms, which is good - but applying the techniques of extending your lines upon the completion of a page to identify where you've got issues in your convergences is very important.

Your organic intersections are alright, in that you are conveying a good sense of how the forms rest and slump against one another. The contour lines do seem a little half-hearted though, and some of your shadows don't really feel as though they're being properly projected onto the surfaces beneath them. Rather, it feels more like the shadows are glued to the forms casting them, like you've just gone overboard with thickening their outlines instead.

First, obviously, I'd like you to complete the 250 box challenge. Once that is done, and I've given you the OK to move onto lesson 2, I'd like you to redo the following:

• 1 full page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 1 full page of organic forms with contour curves

• 4 pages of form intersections

• 1 page of organic intersections

Uncomfortable

2018-09-16 21:56

Definitely a good start, though there's a few things to address before you move forwards.

Your arrows are looking good, and both flow quite smoothly and also explore all three dimensions of space - depth included. That's great to see.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are pretty good, though I want you to pay more attention to how the degree of each ellipse/curve might shift over the length of the form. I explain this concept a little further here.

Your dissections are pretty good, but there's a couple things to keep an eye on. Firstly, I can see some definite attempts at wrapping the textures around the rounded forms. Some of these come out well, but often times you're not quite accelerating that curvature as you reach the edges. The turtle shell for example is still quite flat as it reaches the edge - each hexagon should not be maintaining its own straight lines, the lines themselves should be curving as they come over that threshold.

Additionally, think more about how your textures are made up of three dimensional forms of their own, and how that's going to break and alter the silhouette of the sausage. For the turtle shell again, if you were wrapping a turtle shell around a sausage, there would be visible bumps along the sides where the shell rises and falls.

Your form intersections (the ones with the boxes and pyramids) are generally pretty good, albeit you don't really fill up the pages. Once you get into cylinders and cones however, things start to go awry. Keep in mind that in the instructions, I did mention to avoid drawing overly stretched forms (some of your cylinders fall into the territory of being much longer than they are wide, which brings a lot of unnecessary complexity into play from additional perspective foreshortening). Also, you should be drawing your cylinders (as well as your cones) around a minor axis. To learn more about that, you can check out the 250 cylinder challenge notes. Also for pyramids in particular, take a look at this.

While your organic intersections do show some good qualities, they look a little.... sad. Fundamentally, the issue is that a lot of the shapes you've drawn have very weak, wobbly edges, which vastly undermines the solidity of those forms. You generally want to stick to simple sausage forms with smooth, consistent edges, and focus on how they slump and sag around the forms that support their weight. Think filled waterballoons being stacked, rather than used condoms.

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

• 2 more pages of form intersections including cones and cylinders, with pages filled.

• 2 more pages of organic intersections

Uncomfortable

2018-09-17 16:03

Hey, a couple that you should be aware of:

• Private critiques from me are only available to those who support drawabox on patreon - it doesn't seem that you're currently eligible, so you can post your homework directly to the subreddit for a free critique for the community instead.

• My students (those who are patrons and help support drawabox) are required to start from lesson 1 and to submit the entirety of each lesson together (all sections of the given lesson, rather than one at a time), and must wait for the lesson to be marked as complete before moving onto the next step. This is necessary so I can point out any underlying issues before the student moves onwards to lessons that may not reveal those problems as clearly.

Uncomfortable

2018-09-17 22:42

Hey! I'm glad you saw the response to the other student, though I think you may still have misunderstood based on you saying "I'll finish Lesson 2 and repost for feedback then". New students must start at lesson 1, get that critique and then move onto the next only once it's been marked as complete - so your first submission should be lesson 1, and then I'll let you know what to do afterwards.

Uncomfortable

2018-09-19 17:11

You've presented a bit of a mixed bag here. Your organic-based exercises definitely could be better, but your form intersections are definitely looking quite strong. Your textural exercises are pretty decent - lots of room for improvement, but that's entirely normal and expected, as this is really more of an assessment of where you are rather than setting down a particular standard you're meant to reach.

Lets start with the organic forms with contour ellipses:

• One extremely important aspect of this exercise is that you keep your forms as simple as possible. A basic sausage form works best, with a consistent width throughout the length. There's no need to make things more complex with pinching through the middle or any kind of waviness, and this kind of thing can definitely undermine the solidity we're after.

• The next priority here is ensuring that your ellipses fit snugly between the two edges of the form, as we're giving the impression that the line wraps around the surface. If the ellipse were to fall outside of the edges, or float between them, then you'd break that illusion. Generally you did a good job of this here.

• Alignment is also key - you want to make sure that the ellipses sit perpendicular to the overall flow of the form. The flow is represented by the central minor axis line - obviously it's a little hard to draw that line perfectly through the center, but it does serve as a good visual aid when determining whether or not an ellipse's minor axis matches that of the overall form. You struggled a little bit here and there with this, but not overmuch.

• Lastly, you want the degree of your ellipses to represent the angle of each cross section's orientation relative to the viewer's eye. Usually this means that you're going to have a subtle shift over the course of the form - which you do have in most cases, but you've got some that stand out as being way wider or narrower than they ought to be at a given point. I further explain this concept in these notes.

As a whole you've not done too badly here with this exercise, but there are definitely areas where you can improve. Also, your ellipses aren't as strong as they could be. A number of them wobble and become quite uneven.

All of the same principles apply to the organic forms with contour curves. You want to stick to simple sausages, keep the curves snug between the edges, keep them aligned properly and mind the degree/width of your curve so it matches the position of that cross-section relative to the viewer's point of view. You also want to keep those curves smooth and confident - this is an area where you suffered a great deal, especially on that first page. It was a little better on the second.

All in all, I think there is lots of room for improvement, but rather than being overt misunderstandings or failures on specific points, you're doing okay on each, but the hiccups with each concept come together to drop you a little below the standard I'd like you to meet. So we'll work a little more on these before moving forwards.

Your dissections are demonstrating a lot of the things I'd hope. You're paying careful attention to your textures, you're not descending into chaos or randomness, you're paying careful attention to your textures, and you're even venturing so far as to break the silhouettes to further convey detail there. All in all, you're doing a good job. One thing that may help a little further is to think of the textures you're drawing as having all these little minute forms (which I'm sure you already realized) - but rather than trying to capture and enclose each individual form on its own, think about capturing them by drawing the impact they have on the space around them.

So for example, lets say you're drawing a sun dial - it's got a big spike sticking out, but what you would actually draw is the shadow that sundial casts. Actual objects in the real world are not enclosed by lines - the things we often perceive as lines are actually just shadows cast when those objects occlude a light source.

The beauty of a shadow is that it isn't statically bound to the object itself. It's cast onto another surface, so it can be a little distance away. It can also merge with other shadows to create larger shadow "shapes", which are filled with solid black and can only convey information about the forms that cast them through how the shadow shape's edges have been carved. Moreover, you can end up in a situation where the light source can hit part of the form so directly that it blasts out all of the shadows in that area - so where you've struggled to transition between where you'd draw parts of a texture to where you'd leave it to be a nice empty rest area, it's a lot easier to pull off if all you're drawing are shadows. I discuss this further in the notes of the texture challenge.

One last thing about your dissections - where you drew the watermelon/pumpkin textures, you got the degrees of the ellipses that establish this chunk wrong. That is, the end that faces the viewer should always be of a smaller degree than the farther end (which we covered in the cylinder challenge).

Your form intersections are well done. You're demonstrating a decent grasp of how the forms sit in the same scene consistently without contradicting each other. This was the main focus of this exercise, as the intersections themselves are meant to be a sort of challenge that you continue to develop on over the course of the later lessons. That said, you did a very good job with the intersections as well. There are some hiccups here and there, but you're showing that you're thinking about these spatial relationships a lot, and that you're making really good headway.

The one piece of simple advice you can chew on for now is that the line of an intersection sits on the surface of both forms simultaneously. So you can go back over your intersections (maybe after a bit of a break), and look at each intersection and ask yourself - does this line actually sit on both surfaces at the same time, or is it at any point plunging inside of the other form?

Lastly, your organic intersections are okay. Definitely some of the same weaknesses as the organic forms exercises, though all in all you are demonstrating a grasp of how the forms sag and slump against one another. One thing you'll also want to pay a little more attention to is how the casting of shadows works. You seem to demonstrate a partial grasp of it, where you are definitely projecting those shadows onto other surfaces, but wherever you have a sort of valley that a shadow should be plunging into, you're a bit too timid and tend to ignore it. Here's a comparison of how you did it across the top, and something a little more in line how i'd do it.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-09-21 22:17

So this is a bit of a mixed bag. In a lot of cases, you're demonstrating an okay grasp of the concepts, but overall I think your presentation, and the general approach (which seems to be a little less focused, and a little more intent on filling the page rather than thinking through each mark you put down) is shooting you in the foot a little bit.

To start with, your arrows flow nicely, but by and large you're not really thinking about how they sit within a three dimensional space. The arrows you've drawn across your few pages feel very restricted to the limited space defined by the flat page. You want to think of one end as being further away from you and the other as being closer, and then exaggerate them to match in perspective. Thinking about how the arrow flows through 3D space is really important - about how it flows from far away to closer to the viewer.

In a few of your organic forms with contour ellipses, you neglected to draw the central minor axis line - this suggests to me that you don't fully grasp how important it is to the alignment of your ellipses. The minor axis is like the spine of the form, defining the direction of its flow. Each ellipse is a cross-section that sits perfectly perpendicular to that flow. The minor axis of an ellipse (the line that cuts it into two equal, symmetrical halves down its narrower dimension) is what defines a line shooting right out of the ellipse, perpendicular to it. Long story short, you want the ellipses to use the organic form's "spine" as the ellipse's minor axis.

Secondly, you're a little haphazard with those ellipses and need to ghost/prepare more beforehand. Keep pushing yourself to get the ellipses to sit snugly between the two edges of the form - not outside of it, or floating inside. The contour lines are all about creating the illusion that it's a line that runs along the form's surface. The only one that won't be snugly between them is the one at the end facing the viewer, because this is where the surface of the form rounds off and we get a sort of "pole".

Lastly, keep to simple sausage forms - you generally are doing this, but I noticed a few that get pinchy towards the center. Better to avoid this, a simple form which maintains a consistent width throughout will allow you to focus on the core of the exercise much better.

Your organic forms with contour curves were pretty well done. You can use a little more work getting their positioning between the edges right, but all in all you're doing a good job and I'm glad that you're applying the overshooting method to ensure their curvature is correct.

In your dissections, they do seem pretty sloppy at times. Not a huge deal in terms of the completion of this exercise (since I haven't really taught much about texture yet, it's more of an assessment), but it does suggest to me that you need to get used to observing your reference much more carefully, and avoiding situations where you draw for a long time without looking back at your reference. Working from memory like this is bad, because your brain is going to oversimplify the things you think you remember, and you're going to end up drawing something more cartoony than you intended. I also see areas where you rely more on being random or sketchy or chaotic. Every texture has a very specific rhythm to it in how its various elements are arranged and spread out over the surface of the form - it's your job to identify what that rhythm is and to convey it in a precise, intentional manner. Never work randomly.

Lastly, always remember that you're wrapping texture around a rounded form. The brick, for example, has been drawn as though it's a flat object. Instead, you'd be seeing a good deal of compression of that texture as it comes upon either edge of the form, because that surface has turned to face away from the viewer.

Jumping forward to the form intersections, there are signs of a good start, but there's a definite lack of confidence here, and just overall sloppiness of presentation that is taking something that is fundamentally not badly done, and tearing it down a great deal. Your hatching - if you should choose to use it, which you don't necessarily have to - is haphazard and scratchy, your application of line weight is usually more in the form of automatic reinforcement of lines (rather than individual applications of the ghosting method), and your intersection lines tend to look pretty sketchy and indistinct.

This is a pattern I'm seeing across the board - you're grasping things, but you're not really taking the time to present it carefully and clearly. You don't have enough faith in what you're doing, so you're sabotaging it a little bit by rushing. Same thing goes for your organic intersections - you're showing a good grasp of how the forms relate to one another, but it's just very sloppy, and those shadows are very scratchy, with their edges getting very hairy (you may want to fill these in with a brush pen or something else to make them a little smoother, if you can't do it cleanly and consistently with your fineliner).

So, before I mark this lesson as complete, I want the following:

• 2 pages of form intersections (rewatch the video and see how I generally approach it, from how I draw each form individually, then start thinking about how the forms intersect and how I leverage my line weight in a planned, thought-out manner).

• 2 pages of organic intersections (again, rewatch the video and take a little more time with placing your linework in general, you're generally lacking a sense of cohesion overall and your forms feel more like a loose congregation of strokes rather than solid masses).

Uncomfortable

2018-09-24 19:14

Overall you're doing a pretty good job. For each exercise, while you're demonstrating some difficulties (which are normal and expected), you show improvement and overall demonstrate that you understand the concepts being taught.

There are a few issues I noticed however that I'd like to share. Some of them you touched on, or at least grazed, in your self-assessment, but in a way that suggests you may be misunderstanding the actual source of some of these problems.

To start with, your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour lines are done well, save for one thing - the degree of your ellipses and curves remain fairly consistent through the entire length of each form. Instead, the degree of the ellipses should be shifting to correspond with how the angle of sight (from the cross-section to the viewer's eye) would change depending on its position in the form. If you're looking straight down at something, it'll have a degree of virtually 0, allowing you to see only its edge. As that cross-section moves to either side, you'll see a little more of its face, and that degree will increase. Of course it's not usually a very large shift, but it is enough of one that it would impact how we draw. I explain this further in these notes.

Next, your dissections are showing a good start. As far as this exercise goes, I don't have any expectations for students, or any real standards for them to meet. It's more of an opportunity for me to see how you think about texture and detail, so I can provide you with a response that helps keep you moving in the right direction.

There are two points I want to raise here. The first is how you think about each element that is present on the surface of your form. It's clear to me that you're thinking of them as independent forms - which is absolutely correct. Texture is made up of smaller forms that exist along the surface of a bigger one. Currently however you are enclosing each form in its entirety with a line.

The lines we actually see when looking an object, or when analyzing the intricacies of its surface, don't actually exist. Instead what we're looking at are shadows - either those caused by ambient occlusion (where light finds it more difficult to penetrate cracks and corners, you can find this effect by looking at any corner in a room, it will be a little darker than the open face of a wall) or by some form of cast-shadow, where the form itself is occluding a light source. The reason this is important is because it means that our "lines" are much more dynamic. If a light source shines directly at them, it will blast them away, effectively eliminating them in places (often resulting in a sort of lost-and-found effect where they taper off to nothingness, and then resume later on). The opposite is also true - if these shadows are present on the opposite side of a form from the light source, then they can start merging together with other shadows to create massive swathes of flat black. In this case, the edges of the "shadow shape" are the only element that can suggest what might exist within the shadow, in how they carve and wrap around the forms that are still in the light.

I talk about this more in the texture challenge notes so check those out.

The other issue I found in your dissections is also present in your form intersections, and it relates to what you were saying about line weight. As a whole, I do not want you to see the process of drawing with line weight as being something involving an underdrawing that is then replaced with heavier lines. It's not a matter of sketching and then later committing to the lines you liked. Everything you put on the page is there to stay (such is the way of ink), and all of it is part of the drawing you're creating.

When you add line weight, don't think of it in terms of adding it to the entirety of a line - add it only to certain local areas, places where you want to clarify a specific overlap of lines. This will allow you to add weight with a more confident, ghosted stroke, since you won't have to worry about following along with the original mark for very long. Similarly, you should never be adding weight to the entirety of an ellipse, certainly not all at once.

Aside from that (and the fact that you neglected to draw through your ellipses as you should be doing for every ellipse you draw for my lessons), your form intersections came out very well. You demonstrated a really good grasp of space and the interaction of forms within it.

Your organic intersections were pretty good too, although some of your contour curves were off at times, in terms of their alignment and degree. Don't forget that overshooting your curves a little can be very helpful as well. I don't want you to get too caught up in needing things to be pretty and clean - presentation is important, but only insofar as we don't want you to be wasting lines thoughtlessly. Every mark should be preceded by considering what it contributes to the drawing or construction, and whether or not its contribution is already being covered by another mark. This also means that you should be drawing each and every organic form in that pile IN ITS ENTIRETY. Don't stop those lines where they get overlapped by another form, otherwise you won't develop a proper and full grasp of how each one sits in space.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-09-25 20:16

To start with, your arrows are looking great. Very smooth and fluid, and they explore all three dimensions of space with a great sense of how they plunge into the depths of a given scene.

In your organic forms with contour ellipses, one thing really stands out: you're not drawing through your ellipses. As a result, they're coming out quite stiff and uneven. Aside from that however, you're demonstrating good degree shifts, and are generally doing a good job. The uneven ellipses do have a pretty significant impact however. Also, continue to work on nailing the alignment of each ellipse (to the minor axis).

Your organic forms with contour curves are fairly well done, although the curves do feel a little shallow. The way they hook around is fine, it's just that the ellipses themselves feel a little squished rather than giving the form the sense of being fully voluminous. Also, I'd recommend getting used to drawing your lines so the tips taper slightly, especially when overshooting those curves - it's an important aspect of giving your lines a sense of liveliness, rather than having them be entirely uniform throughout. Usually that uniformity comes from drawing too slowly or applying too much pressure. A proper confident stroke will naturally taper as you lift the pen up.

Your dissections' textures definitely improve between the first page and the second, largely in that you use less hatching/randomness/scribbling. There definitely still is some there, and I highly recommend that you stay away from that sort of thing. Always try to capture your textures with a sense of intention as to what you're trying to achieve with each mark. Randomness can be an attractive notion, but it always comes out looking sloppy and haphazard. Every texture - even the ones that seem random - follow some manner of flow and rhythm, so it's your job to take your time and identify it.

You definitely achieved the central goal of the form intersection exercise - that is, drawing forms that feel solid within the same space in a manner that seems consistent. You did however make some questionable decisions - mainly in the fact that you applied straight hatching lines to your spheres. Hatching lines will essentially serve the same role as contour lines, in that they rest along the surface of a form and help describe how it deforms through space. If the lines are straight, that tells us that the surface itself is flat - and so your spheres end up reading more as circles.

By and large I wouldn't be so quick to apply hatching in general. There are cases where it's very useful (serving as a visual cue to show which side of a box we've drawn through is facing towards us), but when it comes to organizing the relationships between different forms, I'd sooner leverage line weight to clarify those overlaps.

Lastly, your organic intersections are moving in the right direction, and you're certainly showing a good sense for how these forms interact with one another. The only issue I noticed was that your contour curve lines do feel a little hesitant at times, so keep working on getting that confidence up.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep the points I've mentioned here in mind, but feel free to move onto lesson 3. Also, in case you finish in the next 5 days, hold onto your submission until October 1st at the earliest.

Uncomfortable

2018-09-28 23:24

Your first few sections are quite well done. Your arrows flow smoothly through space and explore all three dimensions including the depth of the scene, which is great to see. Your organic forms with contour lines are looking pretty good, though just a couple points to raise on that matter:

• Your contour ellipses are okay, though often a little bit stiff. Remember that you want to apply the ghosting method, which involves executing the mark with a confident, persistent pace rather than a slower one. While executing a mark, you are not to focus on its accuracy - that's all done in the preceding steps.

• Always keep your contour lines pinched between the edges of a given form - if they're floating outside of it, you'll break the illusion that the line is resting on the surface of the form, which is an integral part of the technique.

• Stick to simple sausage forms. You did actually for the most part, but later on in the set you started to work with more forms that are a little more complex, with midsections that are pinched, or odd swellings towards the ends. A simple sausage form - meaning the equivalent of two balls connected by a tube of consistent width - is really the best for practicing this exercise as it allows you to focus on the core of the exercise rather than getting distracted by less important features.

Your dissections are coming along well, though I agree that your alligator texture is really quite well done. It's the one of the lot that shows the best grasp of the fact that the lines we draw for our textures do not exist in reality - that they're actually shadows cast by the forms present on that object's surface, and therefore not limited to being uniform lines or even limited to having to enclose entire forms or shapes. I do think that you could have pushed your darks even further (plunging large areas into solid black towards either side) but i think this is a great start and shows a great deal of careful observation that many of the other textures don't quite demonstrate.

Your form intersections are alright, though similarly to your organic forms with contour ellipses, the ellipses still feel rather stiff. Additionally, your boxes could definitely continue to use some development - likely related to the fact that it's been a good four months since your last submission. If you apply the line extension method from the box challenge to some of these forms, you'll see that there's a lot of room for improvement in regards to keeping the convergences of your sets of parallel lines consistent.

I'm definitely pleased to see the ample use of minor axes for your cylinders and cones, and while your actual intersections aren't quite there yet, they're not really expected to be. I want students to start thinking about those intersections now in order to push them in that direction, but it's an extremely complex spatial problem that will develop gradually rather than as part of a single exercise. This one's more about your ability to construct forms within the same space such that they feel consistent and do not contradict one another, and you do seem to be doing decently there. Lots of room for improvement, but you're getting there.

Lastly, your organic intersections are... to be completely honest, not really what I asked for. You definitely got carried away with the exercise and drifted from my instructions a great deal, so I'm going to ask you to do this again. Watch the video again and read through the notes, and focus on the exercise as being the act of piling sausage forms on top of each other and getting your head around how they sag and slump around one another. Also, don't neglect to draw each form in its entirety - I don't want you to stop drawing a form where it is hidden by another. Draw through everything and then sort things out with line weight and cast shadows once all the sausages have been drawn.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-01 23:17

I really appreciate you deciding to delay it to the turnover of the month. It doesn't actually make that much of a difference, but it's still a very considerate gesture.

Overall you're doing a great job. Your arrows flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space, and push through the depth of the scene to great effect. There's no sense that they're limited to the two dimensions of the page.

Your organic forms with contour lines are generally coming out quite well - your ellipses and curves are smooth and consistent, and the curves especially hook around in a way that really conveys the sense that these surfaces are nicely rounded. The only thing I'd mention is that you'll want to continue working on getting the curves to fit snugly between the edges of the form, so they always give the impression that they're running along its surface. Sometimes they slip out of that limited area, which can break or undermine that effect. You're still doing a great job, it's just the direction you should look to next.

Your dissections are... really impressive. For reasons that you mentioned yourself, they're not exactly what the exercise prescribed, but they do largely provide me with a clear sense that you've got strong observational skills and that there's no issue with you symbol-drawing, or drawing strictly from our basic, faulty, human memory.

You mention that you used a lot more grey - this is definitely true, and it is something I want you to avoid in the future. The lessons are meant to be drawn with fineliners/felt tip pens (though lessons 1 and 2 do allow for the use of ballpoint in a pinch, they're really meant to be done with fineliners specifically because of how they're full black or nothing with no in between).

When it comes to detail and texture, working with such a stark black/white contrast really forces the student to think more about all the forms that are present, and the little shadows that they cast, rather than getting caught up in more hatching-based rendering. In fact, hatching is generally something I discourage specifically in the context of these kinds of high-contrast tools.

Moving forward, you demonstrate a very solid grasp of 3D space with the form intersections. The intersections themselves are spot on, which is admittedly beyond the scope of this lesson (something I want students to try, but I fully expect them to stumble). I expect this will serve you very well in later lessons.

Lastly, your organic intersections are well done, although a couple minor issues were present. On the first page, I did get the impression that the forms themselves were a little stiff (there was less sagging and slumping than there could have been - that isn't inherently bad or wrong, depending on the intended tension in your forms, but it is a difference between my own example).

In the second page you actually do a much better job of showing that kind of interaction between the forms, where they hang limply over the edges of the forms beneath them. The issue I noticed here was really minor, but it was in the cast shadows and how they behave. Remember that these shadows are projected onto the surface of the form beneath them - if that surface changes in a dramatic fashion, then the shadow should replicate this as well. So, where you've got a shadow transitioning from being cast onto one of the lower organic forms to being cast onto the ground, you'd likely see a very sharp change in the shadow. As you've drawn it, it continues on as though it were still attached to the organic form.

Anyway, you're doing some really fantastic work here. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-02 18:23

Very nice work! I have a couple points to raise, but overall you're doing a great job and are capturing the main focus of each exercise quite well.

To start with, your arrows flow very nicely through space, and come out quite fluidly. One thing I want you to focus on a little more however is how the scale of either end of the arrow can be exaggerated to convey a greater sense of depth in the overall scene. Right now your arrows do feel more like they're flowing within a space that clings to the plane defined by the page you're drawing on - try and think about arrows going from very far away to way up close instead.

Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along great, and you're capturing a strong sense of form and volume. With the ellipses, I noticed that at times you fell outside of the bounds of your form's edges, so that's one area you'll want to continue to work on. That said, it wasn't that big of a problem, and you did a much better job with your contour curves, so all in all you're doing fine.

Your dissections' texture work shows a couple great things - that you've got a good sense for observational drawing and don't get caught up in trying to draw strictly from our flawed human memory, as well as that you are mindful of how you're organizing those details in a manner that avoids making things overly noisy or distracting. You're focusing on communicating the surface quality of each form, and don't go beyond that goal. Great stuff.

Overall your form intersections show a well developing understanding of both how forms sit in 3D space and how they relate to one another within it. I noticed that as you progressed through the exercise, you started using the minor axis of your cones, pyramids and eventually cylinders more frequently, which is great to see. I did however notice that when you were drawing the minor axis of your cylinders, you had a tendency to stop early - make sure that minor axis goes all the way through the entirety of the form, so as to help you with aligning the ellipses at either end.

Lastly, really nice work with your organic intersections. You're showing a fair bit of consideration for how these forms interact with one another, how they slump and sag against each other where their weight is no longer supported. Overall it is very much in line with the grasp of 3D space and form that you've established throughout this lesson.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-10-06 22:08

You've really done a fantastic job here, and honestly I don't agree with your self-assessment (which is often the case - students tend to judge themselves more harshly than necessary, and it's the sort of thing that they learn to do less and less over the course of time).

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely through space, and they do a great job of exploring all three dimensions including the depth of the scene, rather than being limited to those defined by the page. You've used the exaggeration of scale to great effect.

Your organic forms with contour lines are doing a great job of conveying the illusion of volume and the distortion of the surface they're drawn upon. One area where you'll want to keep working is to get your ellipses and curves to fit snugly between the edges of a given form, so you can really drive home the sense that the lines do in fact run along the surface of the forms. When the lines fall outside of the edges, that illusion is lost. Also, keep an eye on the degree shift of your ellipses. I see certain cases where you were mindful of it, and others where your contour ellipses/curves tended to follow the same degree throughout the length of a form, despite how the viewing angle for each cross-section would inevitably change. I expand on this concept in these notes.

Your dissections show that you're doing a great job developing your understanding of how to observe carefully, what kinds of details to pay attention to and how to ultimately organize them along a given surface (with mindfulness towards how they wrap around that surface). You are at times a little sketchy (like the eagle feathers and the pineapple/ananas) but you definitely show a strong move forward with that sort of thing and are in general ahead of where I'd expect you to be at this stage.

Your form intersections, though they were certainly challenging for you as they are for everyone, show that you not only have a strong grasp of what I'm assessing with this exercise (the ability to construct solid forms that feel consistent within the same scene, rather than contradicting each other in terms of how they affect our perception of space and scale), but you also show an exceptional understanding of what I merely want students to try, and expect them to have considerable trouble with. That is, the actual relationships between those forms, how they intersect and so on. You've done a great job here.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along well. You've constructed solid forms, and you're doing a decent job of conveying how they interact with one another. There are some places where perhaps the forms come off as stiff - not stiff in terms of a stiff drawing, but rather that the characteristics of the objects themselves are conveyed as being stiff, where they're not really sagging as much as they perhaps should where their weight is not supported. The forms are still entirely believable however.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-10-14 17:15

I definitely agree that you're showing improvement, especially on the front of patience and generally taking your time. It varies from exercise to exercise, but overall you're demonstrating an upwards trend.

Your arrows are well done. They're flowing smoothly through space, and exploring all three dimensions rather than remaining limited to the two dimensions defined by the page itself. I can see that you're mindful of which end is closer to the viewer and which end is farther, and you're conveying that through the exaggeration of scale of either end.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along, though it is important to take a little more time when applying the ghosting method to push the notion that each ellipse or contour curve must fit snugly between the two edges of the organic form. The whole idea of a contour line is that it runs along the surface of the form - so if the line isn't snug between the edges, if it falls outside of the form or floats arbitrarily inside of it, then this breaks the illusion that it's actually tracking along its surface. Also, keep in mind that the degree of your ellipse should shift slightly over the course of a form, to convey the idea that the orientation of each cross-section changes slightly relative to the viewer's viewing angle. I explain this a little further in these notes. I see some minor variation here and there, but it looks like it may not be intentional in every case. All things considered however, you are doing a pretty good job. In most cases your alignment is correct (though continue to keep an eye on this, there are a number where they're a little slanted), and your ellipses are generally drawn quite confidently and remain fairly evenly shaped.

Your dissections are a great start, and they show that you're willing to take care and really study your reference images rather than just rushing ahead with actually drawing. You're clearly regularly returning your gaze to the reference, and you're working pretty hard not to rely on memory. You're absolutely on the right track here, and you'll continue to develop with practice. I have one suggestion for things with scales or brick-like tiling - try not to focus too much on enclosing each entity (each brick or each scale) entirely. Instead, focus on drawing the shadows those forms cast, rather than the lines themselves. Cast shadows are a lot more dynamic, in that they can expand into larger shapes, which themselves can combine into a large swathe of solid black, or they can be blasted away by direct light into nothingness. Shadows can be lost and found, and this kind of approach leads to a much more fluid, natural texture rather than fully enclosed shapes stitched to an object's surface. The texture challenge's notes explains this further, especially in regards to being able to vary the density of your texture as needed over the course of an object.

Your form intersections are coming along. There's plenty of room for improvement, but you are doing a pretty good job with my main focus here - which is testing your ability to draw many forms together within the same space in a way that they feel consistent and cohesive. I did however notice a few things I want you to avoid in the future:

• You're clearly drawing a lot of your lines to be purposely faint and light. Don't do this - it takes mental effort to draw things lighter and to hide them from the final drawing, and that energy could be better used on focusing on the construction of each form. You're also quite sketchy at times - like with your ellipses as well as some of your lines - rather than drawing each stroke with the full confidence of one being drawn using the ghosting method.

Lastly, your organic intersections are fairly well done. Your line quality is a bit sketchy again, but in terms of the spatial understanding you're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms would interact and sag against one another.

Overall you're doing a pretty good job. You've got a number of things I've mentioned here to keep in mind, but I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-15 15:12

Overall you've done a good job. There's a few things I want to mention but most major points seem to be in order, and there are a number of things you've done very well.

Your arrows flow quite nicely through space, and I'm pleased to see that they very clearly explore all three dimensions rather than being limited to those defined by the page itself. You capture the notion of depth well by exaggerating the scale of either end of the arrow.

Your organic forms with contour lines are fairly well done, with a few hiccups here and there. With your ellipses, your first page definitely marked some struggling in terms of keeping the lines snugly between the edges of the form. As soon as the contour line goes outside of those bounds, or floats arbitrarily within them, you lose the illusion that it's a line running directly on the surface of the object. I also noticed that your linework earlier on was a bit stiff and clunky, though this also improved onto the following page.

For the most part your contour curves were well done, but there were a few cases where your alignment (to the central minor axis line that runs through the center of the form) was off, and where your contour curves didn't quite hook around convincingly on one side. One example of the former is 19, while an example of the latter is 24. That said, these issues often go hand in hand, as misaligning them will generally result in one side being much harder to hook around properly.

Your dissections were phenomenal. You've clearly got a solid grasp of how to approach conveying the smaller forms that exist on the surface of larger ones to make up different kinds of texture. You're not showing any kind of overwhelming noise or any elements that become distracting, and you're doing a great job of balancing them across the form with a strong focus on communicating each individual texture rather than getting caught up in detail for detail's sake. Excellent work.

Your form intersections absolutely demonstrate a strong grasp of 3D space and how those forms relate to one another. The one thing I want to point out is that I absolutely do not want you to fall into the habit - especially in relation to drawabox - of doing under drawings followed up by a "clean up pass" where you replace the lines with more carefully drawn, darker strokes. This is a great way to end up treating the initial construction too loosely, and stiff follow-up lines. In the video for this exercise, I stress the importance of adding line weight locally, to specific sections of existing lines rather than to lines as a whole, in order to clarify overlaps. Don't. Replace. Lines. All your construction should be drawn with the same planning and confidence, as though they are meant to be part of the final drawing - which they are. All we're doing at the end with line weight is organizing them in a visual hierarchy.

Lastly, your organic intersections were well done, though this same thing applies. You did do your construction loosely, and you did follow them up with a clean up pass - so no more of that in the future. Aside from that, in terms of your spatial understanding of how these forms relate and interact with one another, you're doing great.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-18 16:09

Nice work over all, but I've got a few suggestions as you continue to move forwards:

• Your arrows are looking great - they flow really nicely through space and explore all three dimensions rather than being limited to those defined by the page itself. Not much to add there.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses fit well between the edges and show a nice, subtle shift in degree over the length of the forms to properly depict how they move through space. Don't forget to draw through your ellipses though - I stress this in lesson 1 and it's something you should do for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons. It'll help you achieve the appropriate confidence behind each mark to ensure that you're keeping them smooth and consistent. It should be mixed in with the ghosting method.

• Your contour curves are coming along well, though watch their alignment to the central minor axis line. They have a tendency to slant a little, which also throws off the illusion. Contour curves like this are most effective in this context when they represent a slice of the form that runs perpendicular to the form's overall flow/directionality.

• Your dissections' textures are a good start. This exercise is more about seeing how you tackle texture, and you are showing a well developing grasp of observation, and an approach that is growing nicely. I do however want to point out that you are still relying a bit much on general erraticness or chaos to convey certain textures that may be more complex - in general, try to avoid randomness, scribbling, and even basic hatching lines. These are things we use to avoid looking deeper to identify the complex rhythms that are present under the surface. It's not always easy to see this kind of thing, but being able to fall back to simpler, more generic and less appropriate shorthands for texture will keep us from properly learning how to handle them.

• Your form intersections, spatially, are looking good. Your line quality is notably scratchy however - not as bad as it was previously, so you are improving, but there are signs that you're still rushing through and employing bad habits like correcting mistakes by reflex, or automatically reinforcing strokes. The ghosting method is everything - that means patiently working through the phases of laying down your points, ghosting through the motion to build up your muscle memory, and then executing once with confidence. If you make a mistake, no big deal - keep moving forwards, fixing it will only draw more attention to your mistake.

• Your organic intersections are coming along well and convey a good grasp of how they all interact with one another, how they slump and sag where their weight is being supported.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but if there's any one thing you take away from this critique, I'd hope it'd be the bit in your form intersections about that sloppy linework. While it is improving, that's the kind of issue that really needs to remedied sooner rather than later. It all comes down to patience and discipline, and fighting that urge to be thinking 10 steps ahead. Focus on what you're doing at that very moment, and on nothing else.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-18 20:03

Your arrows are looking pretty good - they flow nicely through space, and do so in an organic, fluid fashion. One thing that you will want to keep in mind for the future however is that currently they do feel somewhat limited to the dimensions of space defined by the page - they do move into the third somewhat, but I recommend considering each end of the arrow and consciously determining for yourself one as being farther away from the viewer and the other being closer, and exaggerating the scales of these ends to match. This will help you break more into that third dimension, exploring the depth of the scene and developing that internal understanding that the page you're drawing on is merely a window to a larger, infinite world.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking very solid. The contour ellipses are fairly well done too, though one thing I noticed here was that your contour curves don't shift in their degrees over the course of the form. This is something you do quite nicely with the contour ellipses, so I'm certain you understand the concept (if not you can check out these notes) - just be sure to apply it with your contour curves as well.

Moving onto your dissections, this is a pretty good start. You're clearly demonstrating careful, patient observation of your reference image, and seem to be making a strong effort not to work from memory or fall back to scribbling or more chaotic approaches. One recommendation I have as you move forwards is that when you've got a texture that consists of many smaller, concise, separated elements - like the far right side of the first page of this exercise - instead of enclosing each and every one of these elements in its own solid border, try and think more as though you are capturing the impact those elements have on their surrounding area. The primary impact a form has, is its cast shadow.

So rather than drawing a series of lines that separate out each individual element, think more about implying its presence by drawing its shadow - the great thing about cast shadows are that they can be combined with neighbouring ones to create larger shadow shapes. They can also be blasted away completely under direct light, causing that sort of 'lost-and-found edge' effect that allows us to transition from really dense texture to sparser areas without the kind of sudden shift we see in your attempt. I've got more information about this on the texture challenge page notes.

Both your form and organic intersections do have room for improvement, but they're heading in the right direction. You actually did quite well with the intersections of only boxes, and I'm very pleased that you started off with that. As you add different kinds of forms, it does become more clear that your overall grasp of 3D space still needs development, but it's the sort that will continue to grow with practice and exposure to these kinds of exercises.

For your organic intersections, I want you to try and think more about how those forms would slump and sag against one another, under their own weight. Try and picture them as a bunch of water balloons all piled on top of each other - they're not stiff, but rather need something else to hold them up.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3. Just be sure to continue practicing the exercises from this lesson, as well as the previous one, as part of a regular warmup routine (as explained at the beginning of lesson 1).

Uncomfortable

2018-10-22 17:27

All in all you're doing a good job but there are a few things I want to draw your attention to.

• Your arrows flow pretty nicely through space, though one thing to notice is that right now they're fairly restricted to the two dimensions defined by the page itself, and don't push much into the depth of the overall scene. It's important to remind yourself that the page you're drawing on is only a window into a larger three dimensional world. Try and identify one end of your arrow as being farther from the viewer and the other closer, and exaggerate their scale accordingly.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are fairly well done, though one thing I noticed is that your ellipses have a tendency of being quite stiff. You need to be drawing these more confidently, applying the ghosting method to maintain control through the initial planning and preparation phases, but ultimately committing to your stroke without hesitation, and trusting in your muscle memory. Mistakes happen, but it's better that your ellipse be smooth and evenly shaped, than accurate but stiff and rigid.

• Your organic forms with contour curves have a notable issue - the whole idea of contour lines is that they present the illusion that a line sits on the surface of a form, and in doing so, it describes how that surface deforms through space. None of yours actually attempt to capture this illusion - all of your curves sit outside of the form (rather than snugly between either edge of the form), so at no point do you establish the illusion that they actually sit on its surface. They do help describe the overall form a little bit, but that illusion is weakened considerably. There are a few instances where you've drawn the contour curve snugly between the edges, but usually the curvature is somewhat off because you're not properly employing the "overshooting technique" I recommend, where you just let the curve continue along the other side of the form a little before lifting your pen.

• You've got a good start with your dissections. Some of your textures are a little more cartoony and oversimplified than others, but overall you're demonstrating a good approach. When you end up with this sort of cartoony look, it's often because you're not following the reference as closely as you ought to, and relying too much on your memory. Remember that human memory is not designed for this kind of thing - you have to continually look back at your reference between every couple strokes to ensure that every mark you're putting down is meant to reflect and represent a specific element that is present there.

• Another point that may help is to think of the lines you're drawing as being representative, not of actual lines that exist (because such lines don't exist in the world), but of the shadows the little forms present there cast when they block the light. The thing about cast shadows is that they can expand, become thicker, merge with other shadows creating large shapes, and so on. They can also be blasted away by a direct light source, resulting in lost-and-found lines that make it much easier to transition from areas of sparse and areas of dense detail. Right now, you're largely enclosing each little element - each scale, each pebble, etc - in its own shape. Because they're enclosed, it's quite difficult to transition from sparse to dense and leave more detail to be implied rather than directly captured. Thinking more about shadows helps a great deal with this. I talk more about this in the texture challenge notes.

• Your form intersections are coming along quite nicely. One thing I wanted to mention though is that it looks like your added line weight is done with a different, thicker pen - this results in a visible jump from one thickness to another. I'm definitely glad that you're applying weight only to certain local areas, but you should be doing it with the same pen. Line weight is usually to be kept subtle, and your weights should transition smoothly - meaning, when you add that extra weight, your pen should start at a light pressure and increase through the stroke, to create a tapered, blended effect. In general, this is how all your linework should be done - not full pressure all the time, but a tapered stroke that'll imbue your drawings with more energy and life.

• Your organic intersections are looking good - just that same issue I mentioned with your organic forms with contour lines is present.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-10-24 18:38

Really, really nice work! You've done an excellent job here, and I don't really have anything to complain about. Which is unfortunate, because I love to complain - but on the flipside, this is the eighth critique I'm doing today, and the last, so it's always nice to end on a high note.

Your arrows flow quite nicely, and explore all three dimensions of space to great effect. I like that you clearly know which side of the arrow is going to be further away and which will be closer, and you're scaling them appropriately to demonstrate a good grasp of how the page you're drawing on isn't the limiting factor in terms of the space those arrows exist in - it's merely a window looking out into a boundless world.

Your organic forms with contour lines - both ellipses and curves are very well done. They're snug between the edges of their form, they're aligned nicely and they accentuate the overall curvature of those masses to great effect.

Your dissections show a lot of growth, as well as a pretty impressive balancing act. Many of your textures here are quite complex, but you never rely on shortcuts like hatching or scribbling, and you're always mindful (with varying degrees of success) of the fact that the objects are curved. Even towards the beginning with your lego bricks, where that curvature is not necessarily pronounced, it is present.

On that same one however, I would like to point out that the little nubs on the lego bricks are themselves little cylindrical forms. Of course being so small, we wouldn't construct each and every one - but instead there is a much more useful approach to conveying them, and it applies to texture in general (as all texture is made up of little forms). In this case, rather than enclosing each cylindrical nub, instead it's best not to try to enclose them in line at all. Instead, rather than drawing the nub itself, draw the impact it has on the forms and surfaces around it. That is to say, draw the shadow it casts when it blocks a light source. This cast shadow is a lot more dynamic, as shadows can be as slim as a line or as expansive as a large shape. They can also merge with neighbouring shadows, creating large swathes of black whose contents are merely implied by the way their silhouette is carved. Lastly, those shadows can also be blasted away by a direct source of light, resulting in lost-and-found edges that can make it a lot easier to transition from a dense concentration to a much sparser one.

Moving onto your form intersection, you've demonstrated a solid grasp of form and how each one both sits in 3D space on its own, as well as how it relates to its neighbours. Despite your struggles, your organic intersections follow the same path, going as far as to firmly demonstrate an understanding of how these forms can actually interact with one another - where they'd sag under their own weight where it fails to be supported by other objects.

You've done a fantastic job and should be proud of yourself. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2018-10-31 20:31

Very nice work overall! I have just a couple of points to raise with some of these, but they're minor issues that you will simply have to keep in mind as you move forwards.

Your arrows flow quite nicely through 3D space, and I'm pleased to see that they explore all three dimensions rather than being limited to just the two defined by the page.

Your organic forms convey a strong sense of volume, and you're doing a good job of hooking those curves around near the edges and you've got a good shift of degree through the length of the forms. I do agree that you need to keep working on getting those contour curves to fit snugly between the two edges however, as having them fall outside of the form or float inside it breaks the illusion. Also watch the alignment of your ellipses to the minor axis, as you have some that are a little slanted.

You've tackled a great variety of textures and you're approaching each one with a good degree of consideration for how one should go about tackling each individual case rather than applying general solutions across the board. I'm also pleased to see that you're mindful of the curvature of the underlying form, wrapping the textures around rather than letting them flatten out.

Your form intersections are very well done, spatially speaking - what I do want to point out however is that your approach to adding line weight definitely needs some adjustment. Right now, as you mentioned for your arrows exercise, you are not drawing these with the kind of confidence you ought to be. As mentioned in the video for the form intersections video, you should be drawing each stroke - including those used to add weight - with the same process. Use the ghosting method and execute confidently. The key here is that you're not meant to reinforce the weight for entire lines - you should only be doing it for key areas, local sections of lines to clarify specific overlaps. This is considerably easier to do while also maintaining a confident execution.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a good job of capturing how these forms interact with one another, and how their masses are arranged, sagging against one another. One thing to keep in mind - remember that cast shadows are not pinned to the object that casts them - they are projected onto the surfaces below. So here you've got the shadows generally staying close to the initial forms, even when the ground underneath them gives way. In such cases, the shadow should be cast further down.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3, though perhaps slow down a bit - you submitted 3 times this month, which is definitely a lot when compared against your pledge.

Uncomfortable

2018-11-01 20:06

Nice work overall! I do have a few things to mention however:

• Your arrows are looking pretty good, but one thing I noticed is that your arrows are very restricted to the dimensions of space defined by the flat page. They aren't flat in and of themselves, but they do not explore the full depth of the scene, in a way that suggests that you're still very much tied to the page. It's important to start thinking of it more as a window into a larger space, rather than that which defines the bounds of your space. Try thinking of one end of an arrow as being farther and the other as being closer to the viewer, and exaggerating the scale of the ends to match.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are very well done, and you're achieving a good sense of volume and conveying the illusion of the surface's distortion through space quite well. Just be sure to keep using the minor axis line for the organic forms with contour lines as well - they're important for getting used to the alignment of those curves, which is something that is slipping a little, especially when the forms twist and turn.

• Your dissections are looking great, and mark a very good start with tackling texture. One thing I want to suggest - which you're doing a little bit here and there, but I want to make it clearer - is rather than making efforts to enclose each element (be it a scale, a kernel of corn, etc) in line, think of the marks you're putting down as being the shadows cast by those elements and forms. Cast shadows are a lot more flexible, in that they can merge together with their neighbours to create large shadow shapes (whose contents are merely implied by the way their edges are carved and shaped), and more importantly, when faced with direct light they can be blasted away, resulting in those lost-and-found effects that allow us to convey the transition from dense to sparse detail.

• Nice work on both the form intersections and organic intersections. You're demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space here, as well as a solid understanding of how those forms interact with one another in space.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-11-05 20:12

You've done okay, but there are a number of places where you've deviated from the instructions. I know you mentioned a few of them yourself, but I'm going to point them out anyway. Keep in mind that while you may not feel you can resist doing something because of what you perceive to be your nature, that's... largely bullshit. It falls into the same realm as people claiming to be 'perfectionists'. Everyone starts out with some issue of that sort, and part of pushing forward is a matter of developing the discipline to follow the instructions as they are written, no matter what you may personally wish to do at that moment. Don't make the mistake of thinking a character flaw is inherent to your nature, and locked in. It's not a part of who you are as a person, it's just something you struggle with right now.

So, starting with your arrows, you're certainly doing a pretty good job of having them flow through 3D space, pushing them through all three dimensions and not just those defined by the page you're drawing on. That said, I can see areas where you've very purposely stopped drawing certain lines where they get overlapped by others (and where you went back in with a lighter stroke to suggest where they'd be). In all of the drawings you do for my lessons, I want you to stay away from this - draw everything with the same kind of confident, persistent stroke, and draw through everything. Doesn't matter if something else overlaps, draw those lines anyway. This helps us to better understand how everything sits in 3D space, and helps us keep our linework smooth and consistent (rather than having it start and stop repeatedly, losing its flow throughout). Don't preoccupy yourself with the end result - all of these things are just exercises, and the focus is not on how it looks at the end, but what you learned in the doing of it.

This continues on into your organic forms with contour lines, where you've clearly been trying to push forward without consistently using the minor axis for each construction. You're also not keeping your forms simple, as instructed to here. Furthermore, your contour ellipses tend to be very rough and scratchy, or just generally uneven. You should be applying the ghosting method to each and every ellipse and drawing through them two full times before lifting your pen. It does look like you need more practice with drawing your ellipses in particular. Lastly, I'm not seeing any real shifting in the degrees of your ellipses through the length of each form. I explain this further in these notes, as well as this video.

I'd also recommend drawing these forms larger - right now you're forcing everything into a very cramped space, which tends to make these difficult tasks even more challenging. Give your brain more room to think, and give your arm more room to work. Working so small is likely also making it much easier for you to slip into drawing from your wrists, resulting in a lot of the scratchiness we're seeing. Draw from your shoulder.

There are many decent examples amongst your contour curves, though again - you've neglected your minor axis line, and are in turn having some trouble with keeping those contour curves aligned correctly. You are hooking them around at the edges and getting a decent sense of them continuing along the other side however, so that's good. Again, stick to simple sausage forms - making things more complicated isn't going to help you learn the material any faster or more effectively, but it is going to distract you from the main skills you should be developing through this exercise. That's why it's so important to follow the instructions exactly as they are written, rather than being lax with them. It's very easy to get distracted.

Your dissections are definitely a great start, and for the most part you're making good progress on developing your observational skills. Simplification will come later - all I really want to see from this exercise is that the student is paying careful and constant attention to their reference, rather than trying to work from memory. As we draw from reference, it's important that we continually look back to that reference to remind ourselves what is present there, how it's arranged, and so on. All in all you're doing well here, though there's plenty of room for growth.

The only thing I want to mention in regards to this exercise is that you're meant to start off with a normal organic form with contour lines. Here you've very clearly gone in fully aware of the fact that you were going to turn it into a dissection, so you specifically tried to make it as clean as possible - as a result, the underlying forms are pretty weak.

For your form intersections, you're making good headway and are developing your understanding of 3D space and how those forms are meant to interact with one another. You did however miss one of my instructions again:

Now, fill up the whole page with forms. I mean it, fill up the whole damn page. People tend to submit homework that has tiny groupings of two or three intersecting forms. I want to see an ENTIRE page of forms all layered on top of each other. It will get visually confusing, but push through it, and use line weight to emphasize certain lines over others.

You failed to do this, especially in that page where you made individual groupings of forms, something I specifically said not to do. You also have a number of cylinders that are stretched, rather than sticking to largely equilateral forms as instructed. This is one of those things that adds to the complexity of the overall exercise, and draws your attention more to the kind of dramatic foreshortening that results, rather than focusing entirely on how the forms sit in space and interact with one another.

You actually did a pretty good job with the organic intersections, and convey a good grasp of how those forms slump and sag against one another, building up a good illusion of forms piled up against one another in space.

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

• 2 pages of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves

• 1 page, FILLED, of form intersections.

Make sure you reread the instructions for the exercises before you do them, rewatch their videos, and make sure you are not deviating or making things up for yourself. Follow the instructions to the letter and focus on drawing confident lines with a persistent pace, from your shoulder, using the ghosting method for each and every mark you put down.

Uncomfortable

2018-11-05 20:26

You've done a pretty good job.

Your arrows flow fairly well through space, though I did notice that right now they're pretty limited to the space defined by your page. It's important to remember, and really to convince yourself that the page you're drawing on does not define the entirety of the world that exists in your drawing, but rather that the page is a window into a larger, three dimensional world. To this end, try deciding one end of a given arrow is farther away, and the other is closer to the viewer, and play with exaggerating the scale of each end to correspond with its distance.

Your organic forms with contour lines are fairly well done, though I did notice some stiffness to your contour ellipses, so be sure to push yourself to draw through them more confidently, and always apply the ghosting method (which helps us to be more confident upon the execution phase). Also, remember that the degree of your ellipses shifts slightly through the length of a given form (as explained here). You did a pretty good job of it with one of your attempts, specifically the top middle, but the rest are lacking this effect.

Your dissections are coming along quite well, and you're demonstrating a great deal of thought and consideration on a case-by-case basis, rather than trying to apply one-size-fits-all approaches to each and every texture. One suggestion I do have however is to think of the lines you're putting down as being representative of the shadow each miniature form (like each scale, each seed, each grain of dirt, etc.) casts on the forms around it. Usually we think of forms as being enclosed fully by lines, but if we treat the lines as actually being cast shadows, it gives us a lot more flexibility. For example, shadows aren't just lines - they can exist as shapes, and those shapes can merge together with their neighbours to create larger areas of shadow, whose contents are implied by the way their edges are carved and cut. Lastly, when blasted with a direct source of light, those shadows can also disappear, creating those lost-and-found effects that I see you attempting to harness here and there.

Your form intersections are fairly well done, though again I'm noticing definite stiffness to your line quality. It comes down to the ghosting method again - make sure you're applying it everywhere. It allows us to split the process of mark making into a number of steps, some where the brain is taking charge, and others - like the execution of the mark - where it takes a back seat so our muscle memory can do its thing. Also, watch for those stretched forms - like long cones and long cylinders. I mention in the instructions that you should stick to forms that are roughly equilateral, so as to keep overly complex foreshortening out of this already complicated exercise.

Lastly, you've done a pretty good job with your organic intersections. There's still room for growth of course, but you've explored how those forms interact with one another, slumping and sagging where their weight isn't supported, and so on.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-11-11 22:11

Nice work overall! Just a couple things to keep in mind:

• Your arrows are nicely done - they flow well through space, and they push beyond the two dimensions defined by the page to explore the depth of the scene as well.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are fairly well done, but keep working on getting those ellipses to fit snugly between the edges so as to maintain the illusion that the mark runs along the surface of the form. When you break away from that, the effectiveness of the technique deteriorates. Ghosting through the motion more can help improve your accuracy without sacrificing the confidence of the stroke. Also, I noticed that there isnt much variation in the degrees of your contour ellipses - as explained here, as the orientation of each cross-section shifts relative to the viewing angle, the degree of the ellipse will grow larger or smaller to match.

• Same points go for the organic forms with contour ellipses - keep working increasing your accuracy to keep them snugly fitting between the two edges (using the ghosting method). Also, Id recommend trying to overshoot your curves just a little bit (as explained here) to help you get the curvature near the edges right and convey the idea that they continue along the other side of the form.

• Your dissections are coming along great. Your wood texture there is likely the weakest one, and it employs more auto-pilot, less direct consideration of the kinds of marks youre trying to put down, and generally relies on randomness. All the others however are considerably better planned, demonstrate forethought, observation and consideration for what youre trying to achieve with each mark. Great work.

• Your form intersections are well done and demonstrate a good understanding of both the space the forms occupy as well as how the forms relate to one another.

• Your organic intersections show that youre wrapping your head around how these forms interact with each other, where their weight is supported and where they sag or slump against one another.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-11-18 00:09

You're generally doing a pretty decent, though there are a few things I want to point out. Before I get to the drawings though, I do want to mention that the photo quality is pretty poor and does make it harder to critique. Also, I strongly recommend that you use a different sketchbook moving forwards. The size and the way this one doesn't lay flat are both going to give you trouble. Working on smaller pages really restricts your ability to think through spatial problems, and obviously having a sketchbook that doesn't lay flat can be distracting.

So for the drawings, you're doing a pretty good job with the arrows - they flow nicely through space and explore all three dimensions, rather than just those defined by the flat page.

It seems like you didn't include a picture of your organic forms with contour ellipses - I can see a bit of them on the side of the arrows though. A couple things on that front. Firstly, you're not drawing through your ellipses - this is something you should be doing for each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons. Instead of being confident and even, yours are a little stiff, where you've slowed your pace down to keep things accurate, and this has definitely impacted the flow of that linework. Secondly, you're generally sticking to simpler sausage forms as far as I can see, which is great - there's a couple there that are very fat to one end and tapered on the other. Stick to the ones that maintain a consistent width throughout their length.

Also, this could just be the lighting, but it does seem like you've gone over your organic forms with a white coloured pencil, or something to create a bit of a sheen effect. Don't add additional components to the exercises, just stick to the instructions as they're written. Especially with these kinds of exercises, I don't want students getting caught up in trying to apply lighting/shading to their forms, because they'll end up relying on them as crutches for making things appear 3D. I don't cover shading at all because I want students to learn to convey the illusion of form with these constructional techniques alone.

Your organic forms with contour curves are looking pretty good, but definitely work larger. Getting that cramped is definitely going to make things more difficult for you, in a way that'll slow down your progress. Also watch your alignment to the minor axis line - you're close, but there are a few places here and there where your contour curves slant a little. We want to aim to have them running perpendicular to the flow of the form.

A few pages here do look like they've been drawn in pencil - like some of your dissected organic forms, and some of your form intersections. All the homework you submit needs to be done in ink only.

Your work with your dissections is pretty great. At times it's hard to make things out, but you're very clearly paying careful attention to your reference images, and are doing a great job of carrying that detail over in a purposeful, intentional manner. You're also organizing those details nicely, and are picking up on the fact that most of the lines we put down here represent the shadows cast by the little forms along the surfaces. This allows you to control just how dense or sparse the texture's going to be in any particular location, which is great to see. The only area that I want to draw your attention to is actually getting the textures to wrap around the forms convincingly. Here you seem to be a little hit and miss. The.. wood louse? on this page definitely ended up flattening out, as did the cobblestone. Always try and compress the texture along the edges, where the surface turns away from the viewer.

Your form intersections are coming along, though again - more space definitely would have helped. Also, in the instructions I mentioned that you should stay away from overly stretched/elongated forms like long tubes, long cones, etc. and stick to those that are more equilateral. This helps keep the focus on how these forms are all interacting with one another, without bringing overly complex foreshortening and perspective into the mix. That said, your understanding of how these forms intersect and relate to each other is definitely coming along - there's plenty of room for growth, but you're on the right track.

Finally, your organic intersections are looking quite good, and convey a good sense of how these forms sag and slump against one another where their weight is no longer supported by the masses beneath them. They all feel quite solid and convey a strong sense of mass. The one issue I noticed however was that your shadows felt like they were attached more to the forms casting them. Always remember that a shadow is projected onto another surface, and is going to wrap around that surface regardless of how far away it is from the object casting it. I think you're on the verge of grasping that properly, but need to work at it a little before it'll fully click.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 2. I strongly recommend that you work on something like A4 printer paper, as that'll give you a lot more room to work and will be much easier to take pictures of - but I imagine that you may be making some concessions considering that you live in a house that is regularly invaded by tiny humans.

Uncomfortable

2018-11-20 20:51

Ahh! I was a bit worried with the speed at which you'd returned - it's good to see that it doesn't mean you rushed. Your work is overall quite well done! You're implementing the concepts covered in the lesson well, and are demonstrating a good grasp of them.

Your arrows flow very nicely through space, exploring all three dimensions of space rather than being limited to the two dimensions defined by the page you're drawing on. Your organic forms, both with contour ellipses and contour lines convey strong volumes and a good sense of form, and both align well to the forms' minor axes and wrap convincingly around their surfaces.

Your dissections definitely demonstrate the time and patience spent outside of this exercise, with the studies you mentioned. You're clearly aware of all the elements and features of each texture, and do a great job of applying them to the basic organic form in a way that communicates their surface qualities to the viewer without demanding too much of their attention and becoming distracting. The details balance quite well, and your use of line weight and cast shadows is effective in ensuring that things don't get too overwhelming.

Your form intersections demonstrate both a solid grasp of the main spatial awareness I'm looking for - that is, being able to draw these forms in a manner that is consistent across the set within the same space - as well as with the more advanced intersections between them. I don't by any means expect students to be able to nail those intersections, and ask just that they give it a shot to get those wheels turning for the future. That said, you've shown here that you're already well on your way, and already understand how these forms interact in space to a pretty solid degree.

I did notice that your spheres are a little on the weaker side - it's normal, as perfect circles are difficult to achieve, but that's an area you're going to want to continue working on, to keep them evenly shaped. Also, when you add line weight to clarify overlaps, I noticed that you were doing so only to local areas, which is great and exactly what I want to see. Just be sure to push yourself to draw those sections more confidently, and try and work in a bit of tapering towards the beginning and end of the line to blend it back into the original stroke. It's a bit of an ask and certainly isn't an easy task, but keep working on it and you'll find it gets easier with time.

Lastly, your organic intersections demonstrate a good understanding of how those forms interact with one another, how they slump and sag where their weight is not supported, and so on. Don't be afraid with those cast shadows though - right now they're clinging pretty closely to the form casting them. Remember that those shadows are projected onto the surface below them, even if that surface is farther away. Think about how those shadows might end up getting extended a great deal, and don't be afraid to stretch them across a surface as needed.

Anyway, 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

2018-11-22 21:47

You've done quite well! By and large you're showing a pretty good grasp of space and the interaction between forms, and the general concepts covered in this lesson.

In your arrows, in the first page I noticed that while they all flowed quite nicely, they were definitely visibly limited to the space defined by the flat page you were drawing on. In the second page, you pushed more into playing with all three dimensions, so keep pushing yourself in that direction, thinking about how one end is farther away from the viewer, and the other is closer.

Your organic forms with contour lines - both curves and ellipses are very well done. You're capturing a strong illusion of volume, are shifting your degrees nicely over the length of the forms, and are also doing a good job of capturing the right curvature near the edges to emphasize the illusion that they're wrapping around the forms and continuing along the other side.

Your dissections are a great start, and it's clear that you're observing your references closely to identify the visual elements that are present and how they are spread out over the surfaces. There are two things that I did notice however. One, specifically on the leaf, you got a bit too caught up in the leaf itself and didn't quite capture the curvature of the form itself - the surface itself flattened out. Remember that the textures ultimately must still convey the warping of the surface underneath, and that the textures must always be submissive to the dominant form.

The other thing I noticed was that you do still have trouble transitioning from dense detail to sparser areas. This is entirely normal and I by no means expect you to have a handle of this just yet. What I do want to suggest however is that you try and think of the marks you put down for these textures as being representative of the shadows cast by the smaller forms that are present along the surface. By thinking of them as cast shadows rather than actual lines that enclose the forms, we are given a lot more flexibility. Cast shadows can be grouped with their neighbours to create larger shadow shapes. They can also be blasted away by direct light to create a sort of lost-and-found effect, which can be very useful in transitioning from dense to sparse detail. And lastly, they are almost never fully enclosing the forms that cast them. You can check out the exercises on the 25 texture challenge for more information on this.

I can definitely see your confidence increasing with your form intersections with each page. From the start you are doing a good job of nailing the main element I'm looking for - your ability to draw these forms within the same scene as being consistent and cohesive, rather than contradicting each other or becoming spatially inconsistent. The intersections themselves are really just something I want you to try, and you'll continue to improve with them as you move through the lessons and further develop your understanding of space. That said, you definitely do make considerable strides from the first page to the last, and end up doing a pretty good job.

As for line weight, I generally use it to make places where my lines overlap one another much clearer, and to give a sense of organization and hierarchy. Where two forms overlap, by giving just a little more weight to the overlapping section of the form in front, I can show the viewer that the line with the heavier weight is ahead. Also, doing so when it is unclear which lines belong to which forms (as sometimes this can get confusing) can help clarify such things, by separating the lines into one set that has a lighter weight, and another that has a heavier weight, within that area of confusion.

Lastly, your organic intersections are very well done, and you're doing a great job of conveying how these forms sag and slump against one another in a very convincing way.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-11-29 22:08

Very nice work on the arrows, especially the first and last pages of that exercise. The middle page there is alright, but it does appear to be considerably sketchier than the others, and a lot less confident.

For the most part, your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are looking okay. They're not great, mostly on account of the fact that you didn't really stick to simple sausage forms like those used in my demo. The simpler ones you did were rather stiff (more like stretched ellipses), and others were complex in a way that did take away from the exercise (stay away from forms that swell or taper arbitrarily through their lengths). You did still apply the technique decently, and I can see clear shifts in your ellipses'/curves' degrees through the length of a form, and you're mostly keeping them snug between the edges rather than spilling out or floating inside in a way that would ruin the illusion.

Do work on drawing your ellipses more confidently though - right now they're a little bit hesitant, which keeps them from being as evenly shaped as they could be.

Your dissections are very well done. A great range of textures, a lot of clear, careful observation, and well thought out approaches to each. My only critique here is that where you have textures that get very hairy or otherwise end up with a lot of black/white packed densely together, fill the whole thing in with black so as to avoid an unintentional focal point. High contrast zones like that are going to draw the eye like a moth to a flame - very useful if done intentionally, but otherwise a liability.

While your form intersections are again, okay, there are a number of things you missed in the instructions that had a negative impact on your result:

• You didn't stick to equilateral forms (forms that are roughly the same size in each dimension), and ended up with a lot of unnecessary foreshortening that overcomplicated the exercise

• Especially with your spheres, you roughed them in and then went over them with a clean-up pass, something I strongly recommended against in the video. Line weight should only be applied to specific local areas, not the entirety of strokes, as to avoid situations where you draw with a slow, more belabored and hesitant stroke, replacing all the underlying confident linework with more wobbly lines.

• I may not actually have instructions against this in this exercise specifically, but try to avoid drawing forms as being very, very small if you can help it. Especially this early on, we need a lot more room to think through spatial problems and drawing things as being cramped is going to make things considerably more difficult for you. For this exercise, it'd be much better to keep everything roughly the same size, as I did in my demo.

Your organic intersections are pretty well done. A bit much in terms of the number of contour ellipses (keep in mind that you should only use as many as you need, overdoing it is not going to make anything better), but your forms are solid and the interactions between them where they sag and slump to support their weight is clearly well understood. So good job there.

I'm going to mark this lesson as complete, but you do have room to improve on some of these. There's no need to go back and redo exercises as far as homework goes, but the exercises from lessons 1 and 2 should be incorporated into a regular warm up routine, picking two or three at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes so as to keep sharpening those skills and to ultimately keep them sharp.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-06 20:36

You've got something of a mix here - you've got a number of exercises that are demonstrating a solid development of your understanding of 3D space and how forms interact within it, but there are also a number of areas where things do feel a bit rushed.

Your arrows are looking pretty good. On the first page, you were a bit restricted to the space defined by the page you were drawing on. By the second page however, you showed considerable improvement on this front and started to push more into the 3rd dimension, exploring more of the depth of the scene.

There are a few issues in your organic forms:

• I mention in the lesson that you should stick to simple sausage forms. You definitely have a lot more complexity in the forms you chose, with some tapering in the midsection, branching, etc. All of these properties will distract you from the core of the exercise, because now you've added another challenge to contend with before nailing it at its simplest state.

• There's not a lot of consideration going into the degrees of your contour ellipses and curves, which suggests to me that you're not keeping in mind what these contour lines represent (cross-sections of the organic form) and what the degree describes about them (how much each cross-section is turned towards the viewer). The angle at which we see the cross-sections changes as we move through the length of a form. There's more information on this in these notes.

• Some of your contour lines are a bit loose - make sure you're applying the ghosting method before executing your mark confidently, so as to improve your general control and accuracy without losing the evenness of your ellipses. Since we're creating the illusion that these lines run along the surface of the forms, it's critical that the contour curves fit snugly between the edges and not fall outside of the organic shape or float arbitrarily within it.

Your dissections are looking pretty well done, and you've clearly put a lot of work into observing and studying your references, so good work there. I do feel that you somewhat rushed through actually creating the underlying forms however, and that you neglected to draw through them to keep them solid. You were definitely rushing forward to get to the texture work and didn't quite take the time to ensure that the forms you were adding texture to were as believably 3D as you could make them. When doing this step, forget about what you're going to be doing next - focus only on making them solid.

I can definitely see you thinking about how each small form you're adding to your texture casts its own shadow, and how this effectively constitutes the marks we're making (rather than drawing each micro-form, we're drawing the impact they have on their surroundings). That's excellent, so keep that up. There is room for improvement but you're headed in the right direction and it's largely a matter of getting used to these kinds of challenges.

Your first page of form intersections definitely had some rather wobbly line quality, and you did jump into doing a few different groupings of forms rather than one big one taking up the whole page (contrary to the instructions). This gets better into the second page, where your line quality improves and you start trying to deal with all the forms together. You could definitely use more of the page (there's a lot of space left blank), but it's an improvement. You're also showing that you're thinking through the 3D forms and how they relate to one another, and are generally conveying them in a way that feels cohesive and consistent.

Lastly, your organic intersections are kind of sloppy. Not a lot of time has gone into each individual form, so they feel rather loose and lack the kind of solidity that sits at the core of this exercise. I do think that you're capable of much better than this, given the time.

Before I mark this lesson as complete. I'd like you to redo the organic forms with contour lines section (1 page of contour ellipses, 1 page of contour curves) and then two pages of organic intersections.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-06 22:10

My first thought was to laugh at the idea of winter in San Diego - given that I'm from Canada - but I remembered how cold it got in late fall when I was in LA, going through these same exercises myself some years ago.

ANYWAY, your work is extremely well done. Your arrows flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space. Your organic forms each look solid, convey a strong grasp of form and volume as well as how the cross-sections and the viewing angle of them shifts through the length of the form.

You may claim your dissections are not satisfactory yet, but I think it speaks more to your standards being a bit messed up. And that's not one of those backwards compliments - there's a lot of importance that I put on being able to see the value of what you've produced. Always digging into the "not good enough" isn't healthy, and it's not sustainable long term. Your dissections demonstrate an excellent grasp of how to deal with reference imagery, and a visual library that is already developing quite well. It shows that you understand how to organize information rather than just applying it as densely and as thoughtlessly as possible - everything is clearly set out with an awareness of the value of rest areas as well as areas of interest, and each texture is approached in a specific, case-by-case manner, rather than applying any one-size-fits-all techniques.

Now that's not to say there isn't room for improvement. The first page is definitely better than the second, and one thing that caught my eye was that the stone wall texture didn't quite wrap around the whole form properly. Here's what I mean, using an image from the new lesson material that'll release with the new website rebuild on christmas: https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/e58b7887.jpg

I'm actually pretty pleased with the fact that you picked up pretty early on that the feathers were a bad choice. Usually I don't like it when students add little self-critical notes, but here it was definitely pertinent and I'm glad you did.

Moving forward, your form intersections convey a strong grasp of 3D space, along with a good sense for how these forms relate to one another within it. I'm not a big fan of how you went over everything with a darker line though. You did a pretty good job of keeping that second pass clean but I still much prefer students keeping their extra line weight to limited local areas of existing lines, and using them only to clarify overlaps rather than applying them as generally as you have here.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a great job of conveying your understanding of how these forms sag and slump against one another, as well as your own belief and understanding that what you're drawing is in fact solid and three dimensional, rather than just lines on a flat page.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-12-10 21:07

Really, really nice work. You've just about nailed each exercise, and have demonstrated a strong grasp of the concepts covered in each one and across the whole lesson.

• In the arrows exercise, you've shown a good grasp of how the scene you're working has great depth to it, exploring all three dimensions rather than limiting yourself to the two dimensions of the page itself.

• In the organic forms exercise, you're showing an understanding of how the cross-sectional contour ellipses turn more or less towards the viewer through the length of the form (shown by a shift in degree), and you're achieving a strong curve all the way around with the contour curves rather than having them come out too shallow and ruin the illusion you're creating. One thing to mention here though - keep working on getting those contour lines to fit snugly between the edges of the form. Having them float a bit arbitrarily in the middle or fall outside those bounds will undermine the illusion we're creating. Based on your work, you likely know and understand this and are getting it right more often than not, but it was worth mentioning.

• Your dissections demonstrate a keen eye and good habits as far as observation go - you're clearly not working from memory, so you're picking up the wealth of details and visual information in your reference and are organizing and applying them very effectively to keep the results fully under your intentional control. Don't worry about the smudges - it's really not a big deal.

• Your form intersections demonstrate a strong understanding of 3D space, and a good grasp of how these forms fit together within it. Not only are you drawing these forms consistently within the given space (which is the main focus of the exercise), but you've had considerable success with the intersections themselves, which are more intended to be something to think about rather than an area I expect to see a lot of success.

• Your organic intersections capture how your forms would slump and sag against one another, and how their volumes, masses and surfaces interact with one another in space.

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

Uncomfortable

2018-12-10 21:30

Nice work! By and large you've done a pretty great job. Your arrows show a good grasp of how you're working in a three dimensional world rather than a bunch of lines on a flat page. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are getting there, though keep an eye on the ellipses that fall either outside of the bounds of the form or end up falling short of that edge. It's pretty important that you work towards getting the contour lines to fit snugly between the two edges, though this does take some definite getting used to. Also watch their alignment with the minor axis - keeping this aligned will help give the impression that the cross-sections are running perpendicular to the overall flow of the form.

Your contour curves are generally coming along well, and you're getting the curvature of the lines near the edges to hook around reasonably well. There is room to grow here however, mostly in terms of the alignment of the curves to the minor axis.

Your dissections show a good deal of patience and care, that you're willing to take your time and really study your reference images closely rather than working form memory. One suggestion that I do have - and this comes up most of all in the cantaloupe skin, is that while it's great that you've recognized the presence of all of these little forms along the surface, we don't actually want to draw and enclose each one in its entirety. Instead, it's much more effective to draw the impact they have on the surface around them - specifically, this means capturing the shadows they cast rather than the forms themselves. Here's an example of what I mean. This allows us to flow more smoothly from areas of high detail density to areas where it is more sparse, and allows us to control that transition to a much finer degree. Cast shadows are by nature much more flexible, because we can determine that maybe in one location it is being hit so directly by the light that most of the shadows are blasted away, whereas in others, the cast shadows can be so strong that they can engulf entire sections of the surface.

Your form intersections are coming along well, and are demonstrating a solid grasp of 3D space and how these forms interact with one another within it. Your scenes are looking consistent and I'm not seeing any major spatial contradictions between them, which is great. You're also making good headway with the actual intersections, which are really something I mean for students to start thinking about, rather than expecting them to be able to pull them off just yet.

All in all your organic intersections are coming along well. You are definitely demonstrating that you understand how these forms exist together within space, and how their presence impacts each other. Where one form's weight is not supported, it sags and slumps against whatever is around it. This is the kind of interaction that suggests a well developing grasp of how all of this works as solid forms, rather than just as a collection of lines on the page.

Keep up the good work. Be sure to continue focusing on your organic forms with contour lines when you warmup, but overall you're doing well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-10 21:37

Your work is coming along well, though there are a few things I want to draw your attention to.

• Your arrows are coming along well. Initially you were focusing more on how those arrows would flow across the space defined by the 2D page, but into the second I can see where you've started pushing into the depth of the scene. On that first page, I did notice a point where you have two arrows overlapping and you stopped one where it was hidden and continued it along the other side. In general, I want you to draw your lines continuously for these lessons, even where they get overlapped. More like this. This allows you to keep your lines confident and smooth.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well but there are a couple issues. For your contour ellipses, watch the alignment to your minor axis - you want those contour lines and the cross-sectional cuts they define to feel as though they're running perpendicular to the flow of the overall form. Secondly, in your contour curves, you very clearly drew most of your curves outside of the bounds of the form. This exercise is very much about building the illusion that these lines run along the surface of the form, and therefore are able to describe it. Breaking this core tenet by either having the lines fall outside of it or float arbitrarily inside of it will undermine its effects.

• Nice work on your dissections - I can clearly see a great deal of effort and patience put into studying your reference images, and I can see where you're trying to focus more on the shadows cast by each smaller form, and how that allows you to control the texture density throughout the surface and transition from sparse, white areas, into areas of greater detail.

• Your form intersections are alright, but they're definitely held back by one key point that you seem to have missed or ignored from the intersections - at the beginning of this exercise, I say to avoid forms that are not equilateral, and are instead stretched in one dimension. For example, long tubes, long cones, etc. I don't want you to tackle these here because they tend to bring the complexity of far too much foreshortening into the mix, which makes it more difficult than it needs to be and draws your attention away from the core spatial problems we're dealing with here. By and large you did alright, but I do feel like you'd have done a better job had you followed the instructions as intended.

• Your organic intersections are looking solid and show a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, slumping and sagging against each other where their weight is not supported. A few more forms would have been nice to really fill out the page, but you are demonstrating a good grasp of the material here.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, though there is definitely room to grow. Be sure to continue practicing all of these exercises (and those from the previous lessons and material) as part of a regular warmup routine, picking two or three at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes before starting your main work.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-11 20:23

You're making good headway but there are some things I'd like to point out that should help you improve.

• Your arrows are flowing pretty well, and I can see that you're attempting to scale the far end with perspective, but one thing that isn't being scaled is the space between the lengths of your arrow. Basically, everything gets compressed as it moves farther back - so as your arrow-ribbon folds back on itself, the visual space between the different sections is going to end up smaller and smaller on the page.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses have some real great confidence to them, and I'm glad that you're sticking to nice, simple sausage forms. Keep working on getting your contour ellipses to fit snugly between the edges of the form though, that's pretty critical to the illusion we're trying to create - that the lines run along the surface of the form.

• Your contour curves are pretty good on their left side, but towards the right you have a tendency to curve them too shallowly. One thing that comes to mind is that you may not be rotating the page to find the most comfortable angle at which to draw them, so definitely make sure you're doing that.

• In your dissections you've covered a great variety of textures, and I can see clear attempts at attacking each one with a clear, tailor-made solution rather than trying to tackle things with one-size-fits-all approaches. There are a few things i want to point out though. First off, make sure you're thinking about how the texture wraps around the three dimensional surface, especially as that surface turns away. Right now your textures are flattening out the surface. A good example of this is the brick/stone texture on the first page of this exercise. Secondly, get in the habit of looking at your reference more, and relying less on your memory. Even looking away from the reference for moment will start throwing away critical information about what was present, how it was arranged, and so on. Look back at your reference after every few marks or so, and make sure the marks you're putting down correspond in some way to a feature you identified in that reference. Lastly, rather than drawing the visual elements and forms you see present on the surface of an object, try to draw the shadows they cast. This is a lot more flexible than trying to capture each one and enclose it individually, because shadows can merge with one another, they can deepen and expand, and they can also be blasted away to produce a lost-and-found sort of effect, where an element is only represented by a couple tiny marks here and there implying its presence.

• Your form intersections are a decent start, but there's definitely room for improvement. Work on making your forms feel more solid and three dimensional before moving on (for example, when you're drawing a sphere, make that circle as even and confident as you can, and then try adding a contour line or ellipse on it. Marking out the "pole" (as one might find on a globe) can be very helpful to build that illusion.

• Your organic intersections are looking pretty good. They give a good sense of how these forms relate to one another and how they sag and slump against each other to settle in space.

I am going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to keep working on this stuff as part of a regular warm up routine, as well as the exercises from previous lessons. Doing 2 or 3 exercises at the beginning of each sitting for 10-15 minutes will help you continue your progress with them as you continue to move forwards.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-15 18:25

By and large you've done an excellent job here. Your arrows flow confidently through all three dimensions of space, your organic forms convey a strong sense of volume, your dissections explore a number of textures and their application to generic surfaces in a way that is specific to each case rather than more general and one-size-fits-all, your form intersections though a bit weaker at first end up looking much more solid and convey a strong sense of how each form sits in space by the end, and your organic intersections demonstrate a well developing grasp of how these forms relate to one another.

There's just a few things that I want to bring to your attention, most fairly minor:

• On your organic forms with contour ellipses, I can see that you're pushing yourself to keep those ellipses pinched snugly between the edges of each organic form. Keep this up - there are some places where you're slipping a little, and it does weaken the illusion we're creating, but I'm pleased that you are conveying a strong intent (rather than not being aware of the issue) and are clearly working at it.

• For your contour curves, I noticed that your tend to maintain a single width throughout. It's not really a question of line weight here, but rather that I'm not seeing the characteristic tapering that usually occurs when someone touches down on the page or lifts off, and as a result the lines do feel a little stiff. This may be a sign that you're drawing a little too slowly to allow for that tapering to be visible (your curves also are a bit stiff which adds credence to this hypothesis), or that you're pressing too hard too soon. The tapering is pretty helpful in making strokes feel more natural and lively.

*Your dissections are honestly pretty fantastic, and while I can see what you mean by leaning a bit hard on stippling, it's far from the worst thing you could be doing. I tend to keep an eye out for students using hatching all over, which tends to look far worse. That said, try and think about what you're trying to represent with those little stipplings and vary how you draw them each time to correspond with your goal. For example, if you're trying to capture little pits and pores in a surface, you may want to draw small crescents instead (because when light hits such a thing, it's likely to light one side and cast a shadow along the other).

• I noticed in your first attempt at the form intersections exercise, you did use a lot more stretched forms, though the instructions specifically mentioned that you shouldn't as they add needless complexity to an already difficult exercise. I am pleased however that you seem to have corrected this during your following attempt, and the results came out much better for it.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto lesson3.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-15 18:56

Prior to looking at your work, the most useful piece of advice I can give you is to cut that self-effacing shit out, at least when you're submitting something you've put time and effort into. We do that to put up the illusion of modesty, but in truth it serves as a shield to ready ourselves for criticism. In turn, it also makes that criticism less effective.

When you submit work to someone, do so with confidence - even if you have to fake it. If you've invested time and real effort into it, then it's worth something regardless of its quality.

So there are a number of things to work on here, and I'll break it down by exercise:

• Your arrows aren't bad - you're clearly making an attempt to scale the far end to be smaller than the closer end, creating a bit of a perspective shift. To push this further, also try compressing the space in between the flowing lengths of the arrow - everything gets smaller as things move farther away, including the space in between objects.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking okay, but there are a couple things to keep an eye on. Firstly, your ellipses are pretty close to being aligned correctly, generally speaking, but there is some deviation here and there. Definitely continue to work on that. Additionally, I'm noticing that your ellipses have a pretty limited shift in degree, if any at all, which results in them looking a little stiff. As we move through the length of an organic form, the angle at which we see each cross-section changes slightly, and as we look at cross-sections further from us, we'll be able to see more and more of the face of that circular cut. As such, the degree of those ellipses is going to shift through the length of the form. Try and replicate this in order to make it feel more natural. I explain this a little further here.

• In your organic forms with contour curves, I noticed that you employed a different tactic when drawing your forms. From the looks of it, you drew a line underneath, and then went over it with a heavier mark (possibly with a different pen?). I'm not really sure why you've decided to approach it this way, but in general I want you to stay away from replacing the entirety of a line with a heavier stroke, even if you're trying to add line weight. There's no need for line weight in this exercise, but when you do add it, it should only be to limited sections of an existing line, rather than the whole thing. It should also be added with the same pen (to avoid overly heavy, garish looking marks), and it should be drawn with the same kind of confidence you used when drawing the initial mark.

• I'm also noticing that your contour curves tend to feel a bit stiff, in ways that suggest that you may not be drawing them as confidently as you could, and perhaps not applying the ghosting method as stringently as you ought to. The curvature is actually pretty decent, but what catches my eye is the fact that your lines stop very abruptly, without the natural sort of tapering that occurs as we lift our pen off. This tapering gives us the impression of a more natural, flowing line, whereas having the line stop suddenly without it is going to look much more stiff. This tends to happen when a student is drawing a mark more slowly.

• Also worth mentioning, in both organic forms exercises (though much moreso in the contour curve one) the forms you're drawing have a little more complexity than they perhaps should, and it's making the exercise more difficult than it needs to be. Stick to simple sausage forms that maintain a consistent width through their length, with no pinching or wobbling in between. This will help you focus your attention on the challenge of applying believable contour lines.

• Your dissections are a good start, and that's really all I'm looking for here. I want to get students to start thinking about observing reference and working on how they approach that. Your work does suggest to me that in certain places you have a tendency more to work from memory (that is, looking at your reference for a while, trying to record it all to your memory and then drawing without looking at it for a prolonged period of time). Try to change those habits into looking at your reference, identifying the visual elements and how they're arranged, and then picking one or two marks to put down that specifically reflect something present in that reference, and then going back to studying your reference. Spend most of your time observing, and only a small fraction of it actually drawing.

• Also something helpful - when drawing texture, think of it as though instead of drawing lines that fully enclose all the tiny forms present there, approach it by implying their presence by capturing the shadows they cast. So when you have your chips of paint, for instance, there you've very clearly enclosed each individual piece. Instead, you could capture the shadow it casts - leaving certain sides open and allowing them to bleed into one another. This allows you to control the density of the texture you're creating, rather than having such hard borders between them. Shadows consist of shapes rather than limited lines, and they can be merged with one another to create larger compound shapes, or they can be blasted away with direct light to create a sort of lost-and-found-edge effect where most of the texture in a space is left blank.

• Your form intersections certainly do improve over the set, though there is room for improvement that'll come from continuing to practice with it. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, there are signs that you didn't follow the instructions as closely as you could have. Specifically, in the instructions I mentioned you should stay away from forms that are overly stretched (like long cylinders and such) because they bring too much foreshortening in to complicate an already difficult exercise. You don't seem to have noticed that, as you used quite a few of them.

• Your organic intersections are alright - you are demonstrating a growing understanding of how these forms slump and sag over one another, though your use of contour curves here and the forms themselves generally don't give a strong illusion of solidity. The most important point here is to stick to simple sausage forms that maintain a consistent width through their lengths, rather than undermining that solidity by making them more complex with little pinchy areas or areas that swell slightly. I do suspect that much of this was unintentional, perhaps due to less than confident linework.

• Also worth mentioning, when you're drawing shadows, remember that a shadow is not connected or pinned to the object that casts it. It is not an extension of line weight and does not adhere to the form in the same way. Instead it is projected onto a surface below it - no matter how far that surface is - and it wraps itself along it.

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

• One more page of arrows

• One more page of organic forms with contour ellipses

• One more page of organic forms with contour curves

• One more page of form intersections

Be sure to apply what I have listed above. I'd recommend reading over my critique for a specific exercise as well as the full instructions for that exercise immediately before attempting it again.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-17 20:40

You've got a lot of great flow and exploration of all three dimensions of space with your arrow exercises, so that's good. I am noticing however that your linework does seem a little bit more rushed - confidence is important, and you've got that in spades, but it needs to be preceded by the application of the ghosting method. This means taking your time to plan and prepare before executing your mark.

I believe that this overall tendency to rush is something that is apparent through the other exercises as well.

Your contour ellipses are looking decent, but there are clear areas to improve on:

• Keep an eye on the positioning of your ellipses. You actually do this pretty well in a number of these, but there are as many where you don't seem to have put in the same amount of effort to get the ellipses to fit snugly between the edges. This impedes the illusion we're trying to create, that the ellipse is a line that runs directly on the surface of the form. When the ellipse ends up floating inside the form, or if it falls outside of its bounds, then it breaks the illusion that the line actually runs along the surface of the organic form.

• For the most part, your ellipses either all have the same degree, or the change in their degree seems somewhat arbitrary and unintentional. Remember that as you move through the length of an organic form, the angle at which you view a given cross-sectional slice is going to change, revealing either more or less of its face (and therefore causing the degree of the ellipse to increase or decrease accordingly). I explain this further in these notes.

• Your alignments to the central minor axis line tend to be off pretty consistently, which suggests that you may not be paying much attention to that requirement.

Your organic forms with contour curves are pretty hit and miss - as with all the rest of this work, I get the feeling that you're capable of much, much better, but that you've kind of plowed through this lesson focusing more on getting through it.

The dissections exercise is meant to be pretty challenging at this point - really an opportunity for students to be exposed to observational drawing, to struggle through the challenges of taking something they see and transferring it to the page. Rather than expecting to see any success here, it's more about getting students to think about how they're approaching it, and to experiment somewhat.

You do start out doing that, to an extent, but it doesn't last particularly long. I wouldn't actually consider any of these attempts at the exercise complete. Rather, they're quite scattered and half-finished.

Now, your form intersections are coming along reasonably well. There are a couple of instructions you didn't seem to catch from the lesson though:

• Don't use forms that are particularly stretched in one dimension, like longer tubes. Stick to forms that are equilateral, or roughly the same size in all three dimensions, so as to keep complex foreshortening from making an already difficult exercise even more challenging.

• Don't work in small groupings of forms - fill the whole page with a single network of forms that are interconnecting in a variety of ways.

Now that said, you did visibly shift from the rushing you were doing previously. Your linework is confident, but planned, and you're thinking through what you put down. By and large you did a good job, aside from not reading the instructions as closely as you should have.

Lastly, the organic intersections are pretty catastrophic. From the looks of it you're struggling with how the forms relate to one another, in terms of what you're actually trying to accomplish. You've shown in the previous exercise to have a reasonable understanding of 3D space, so I think you've just jumped in without thinking about what you were actually doing in the exercise.

Try and think of this as though you've placed a waterballoon on a flat surface, and then placed another on top of it. Consider how it would sag and slump under its own weight. Then add another, and another, creating a stack - but only moving on from each one once you feel confident in your understanding of how those forms relate to one another.

By and large I am not pleased with the overall theme of rushing - either through the work, or through the instructions. I would like you to do this lesson again, as I am fully aware of the fact that you can do much better than this. My critiques aren't going to be worth much unless I'm reviewing examples of your best, and while I've scraped together what advice I could offer, there's not much more I can do for you unless you're investing the appropriate amount of time and focus into each task to which you set yourself.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-17 21:44

Pretty well done overall! I do have a few gripes with some of the deviations you made from the instructions (in terms of incorporating markers and such), but that's fairly minor. Still, stick to the instructions so you don't risk getting distracted from the core focus of each and every exercise.

So, looking at your work, your arrows push through all three dimensions of space quite nicely. Your organic forms with contour ellipses are demonstrating a solid attempt to keep your ellipses snugly between both edges, they're aligned pretty well and I can see an awareness of the shift in degree that occurs through the length of a given form.

One point I do want to raise is that you should try to stick to really, really simple sausage forms that maintain a consistent width through their lengths. No swelling through the middle, no tapering or pinching, etc. Yours are pretty simple, but they're still a touch more complicated than they could be.

Your contour curves are a bit mixed, with some only hooking around correctly along one side, but I can see enough successful attempts that suggest an awareness of this issue, and that you're working at it.

Great work on the dissections - you're clearly experimenting with a great many different textures, and you're not applying any one-size-fits-all techniques. You're observing your reference images carefully and identifying the specific visual elements that are present, and applying techniques that fit each case.

You're doing a good job with your form intersections, keeping the forms fairly consistent within the shared space. I did notice that you're not drawing through all your ellipses though - you need to be doing that for each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons in order to keep them smooth and evenly shaped. Yours here are alright, but there is a hint of stiffness to them, largely because you've tried to nail them in a single go. Draw through them at least two full times before lifting your pen, and draw them using the ghosting method, with a confident execution each time.

On that same note, I noticed that you're generally managing line weight well, except on your spheres where you've tried to reinforce the entirety of the ellipse with extra weight. Doing this, rather than limiting line weight to key local areas (parts of existing lines, never the entire stroke) will cause you to draw more slowly and carefully rather than with the kind of confidence that is required. Doing so will stiffen your line work, and take what was initially fairly smooth and underline the solidity of the form itself.

Lastly your organic intersections are coming along quite well, and convey a well developing grasp of how these forms interact with one another in space.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, but keep the points I've raised in mind. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2018-12-30 20:48

Wow, it really has been a while! It's good to see that you haven't gotten rusty during that time though - your line quality is still generally quite smooth and confident.

Jumping into the exercises, your arrows are looking great. They flow smoothly through 3D space, and explore all three dimensions - including that of depth - rather than being restricted by the two dimensions defined by the page itself.

Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along fairly well, though I do want to comment on the kinds of organic forms you're producing here. In general, when it comes to forms like this, try and focus on 'sausage' shapes. Obviously you have attempted to do so, so I'll be a little more specific. A sausage is essentially two spheres connected by a single tube of consistent width. They maintain that width through the entirety of their lengths, before getting nicely rounded out at the ends. This kind of form is really great for practicing these kinds of contour lines, and establishing the illusion of volume and form in something that can be flexible and flowing at the same time. You've done perfectly fine here, but this is something that will continue to help as you move forwards. They also come into play a great deal in later lessons.

I'm glad to see that you incorporated the texture analysis exercise, despite it being new - I would have let it slide had you left it out, due to the recentness of its addition, but all the same this is largely better for you and I think you did a pretty great job. You explored each texture to a great degree and clearly gave good thought to how they're made up of cast shadows rather than lines that enclose the entirety of these little surface forms, and put that to great use in organizing that detail in the gradients. My one recommendation here is to invest in a brush pen, or something that will allow you to fill in some of the blacks a little more completely. In your gradients you did a somewhat better job of this, but there are still areas with a lot of little bits of white peeking out where it seems unintentional, like you tried to fill them in but weren't able to completely with the tool you were using. That's really the crux of things - whether you mean to do something or not, having it look intentional and purposeful is what controls what the viewer thinks when seeing your work.

Despite your intimidation, I think you did a pretty great job with the dissection exercises as well. The same bit about really letting your darkest darks be more fully filled in still stands here, but you demonstrated excellent observation and care, and organized your details quite well. This is especially true with your pangolin scales and beehive, the latter of which is both a very interesting choice, and a well executed one.

Your form intersections are coming along well, though there's one major pit fall - you didn't quite heed the directions to avoid stretched forms (something that was mentioned in the old instructions, but has been somewhat more emphasized in the newer revisions, here). We prefer sticking to more equilateral forms because it allows us to avoid the additional complexities of more significant foreshortening.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along pretty well - the linework is a bit... not scratchy, but there's something a little rough about it, or perhaps somewhat less than properly planned, and some of your contour lines break the silhouette of your organic forms, but you are conveying a strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space, and how they sag against each other. That is the core of the exercise, so I'd say you're doing a pretty good job there. Just put a little more time into planning out each individual form and each contour line, and also make sure you're drawing from the shoulder so as to get as smooth a mark as you can when drawing your sausage forms.

All in all you're doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so be sure to keep these points in mind as you move forward onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-05 20:26

Your arrows are very well done. They're extremely fluid in how they flow through space, and do so through all three dimensions with great confidence (rather than being restricted to just the 2D space of the page).

Your organic forms with contour ellipses and curves are coming along well, but I do want you to strive to stick to simple sausage forms - that is, specifically, forms that maintain a consistent width through their lengths without any pinching, tapering or swelling through their midsections. It's like two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You've mostly adhered to this, but there are a few where you start to stray, especially when you get into the contour curves.

Moving onto your texture analysis, you're generally approaching these quite well and are paying a good deal of attention to the nature of the shadows being cast by all of the small forms that make up each texture. I do however want to warn you away from the tendency to use hatching so heavily however. It's commonly used as a sort of shorthand to represent whatever other textures/patterns of light and shadow may actually be present there. By relying so heavily on it, you're avoiding having to look deeper and more carefully at what is actually there. Instead of simply shading your feathers, for example, play with the density - cram more feathers into the far left of the gradient so as to increase the number of shadows being cast. Similarly, for y our silk, you can concentrate more folds and wrinkles on that side.

As for your dissections, you generally did a good job (though again, try to find something other than hatching in those darker sections of your tree bark, bark is full of all kinds of nice, rough protrusions that cast little shadows). Your fabric, as you mentioned, was definitely the most challenging for you, and I think you got a little overwhelmed by it. From what I can see, you allowed the seemingly chaotic nature of the texture to overcome you, and in doing so, you failed to keep track of the general rhythms and patterns these folds and wrinkles generally follow. Remember that such features are all caused by physical force - tension, gravity, etc. As such, they're governed by a sense of order and harmony. When you draw them, don't draw them erratically. Don't approach them with a sense of randomness or chaos. Rather than drawing each fold independently, think instead about the forces themselves, and try and infer what kinds of wrinkles they might produce.

For your form intersections are looking good, though I do think that highlighting the intersections in red is pretty distracting. Instead, if you want to emphasize how one form, or part of a form sits in front of another, use simple line weight with the same pen you used to draw the other marks. By adding a little extra weight to part of an existing mark, you can clearly communicate how the lines of a form flow continuously, distinguishing and clarifying them where you end up with unclear junctions. I explain this further at the bottom of these notes.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along well (especially on the second page - the first, with that more complex form sitting on top is kind of unclear). On the second page, you're doing a good job of conveying how these forms slump against one another, where their weight is supported and where it is not.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-01-05 21:24

To start with, your arrows are coming along pretty nicely, and you're clearly making an effort to push them through all three dimensions of space, so that's great. One recommendation I have is that while you're ensuring that the far side of the arrow gets smaller (following the basic rules of perspective), one additional thing to keep in mind is that space itself gets more compressed, the further back you go. This means that the space between each piece of the ribbon that gets folded back on itself will get smaller and smaller. I explain this in the diagram for this step.

You actually did have a few that captured this pretty nicely, such as this one from the second page.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour ellipses, you're generally doing a pretty good job. I can see a clear effort to stick to simple sausage forms (though some of their outlines are a bit wobbly, so work on drawing them with more confidence), and you're obviously showing an awareness of the degree shift that occurs through the length of the form.

Just one issue to raise on that front - continue working on getting your ellipses to fit snugly between the edges of the organic form. We're creating the illusion that these ellipses run along the surface of the form, so keeping them snug against those edges is pretty important to this end. It is also a bit tricky to do, so make sure you're employing the ghosting method as much as is needed to help you on this front.

The same applies to your contour curves. You're definitely making a good effort at hooking them back around to get that curvature right, so that's great. I do have one concern though - from the looks of it, these lines are drawn either very slowly, or you're pressing quite hard on your pen as you draw. In all likelihood, it's a combination of both. The reason I'm calling this out is that generally when we draw a line with confidence, our pen has already started to move before fully pressing against the page, resulting in a line that starts and ends with a slightly noticeable taper, which helps give our linework a sense of liveliness. When you draw too slowly, or press too hard, this taper is eliminated. That's something you'll want to keep in mind as you continue to move forwards.

You've made a solid attempt at both texture exercises - there is plenty of room for improvement, but that's completely normal and expected. I have no expectations of perfection here, I just want to get students to start thinking about how to break texture down into the simple little forms found on the surface of an object, and how to imply them with the shadows they cast. In these regards, you're moving in the right direction.

Keep working on observing your reference images carefully, and you'll continue to see improvement. I think you did a lot of great analyses in the first texture exercise, and while you still did lean quite a bit on a great deal of randomness here and there, you're clearly moving towards identifying more and more of the underlying rhythms and patterns of each texture.

For your dissections specifically, you do have quite a bit of variety, and you try to tackle each one on a case-by-case basis (rather than trying to apply the same tactics to each one), which is great. One thing I am noticing though is that compared to your texture analysis exercise, these are quite a bit more cartoony and simplified. This suggests to me that you may be working more from memory on these, relying on the bit of information your brain has retained rather than pulling information directly from your reference images. Remember, as explained in the lesson, our brains will start throwing important information aside the moment we look away from our reference, so we need to get in the habit of looking at our reference, picking one or two specific marks to carry over, drawing them, then looking back at our reference.

Jumping ahead to your form intersections, you're generally doing a pretty good job with your understanding of these forms and how they relate to one another in 3D space. The only major weakness here is more in regards to your linework - a lot of it tends to be a touch more loose than it should be. Work on applying the ghosting method more stringently, taking all the time you need to plan and prepare before each stroke so your muscle memory can maintain control while executing the strokes with confidence. Right now your forms are alright, but they do have a tendency to feel less solid either due to lines that leave gaps where they fail to connect, or lines that wobble a little too much.

Also, mind the fact that in the video for this exercise, I explained that you should not be trying to apply line weight to the entirety of an existing mark - we're not replacing our lines by adding a darker, cleaner stroke, we're merely accentuating and clarifying specific overlaps. This happens in local sections of a given line, rather than the whole thing, and also ensures that we can add this line weight with the same kind of confident, persistent pace (rather than drawing more slowly and carefully while trying to match the original line the whole way through, resulting in a wobbly line that further undermines the solidity of the form).

Last of all, your organic intersections are a good start - you are definitely demonstrating an understanding of how these forms sag and slump against one another, where their weight would be supported and where it wouldn't. My only concern right now is that the linework does feel a little stiff - so again, keep pushing yourself to draw with confident strokes, preceded by ample use of the ghosting method.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There is plenty of room for improvement here, but you're moving in the right direction. Just be sure to continue working these exercises as well as those from the previous lesson into a regular warmup routine, picking two or three at the beginning of each sitting to do for 10-15 minutes.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-10 22:24

• Your arrows are alright - they're generally showing the qualities I'm looking for (they're flowing through all 3 dimensions of space), though at times you definitely seem rather distracted with those fraying edges at the end, and getting too caught up in the hatching. The core of this exercise is about how your arrows flow through space, so make sure you're putting all your attention towards executing your lines smoothly and confidently so as to eliminate any wobbling.

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are pretty good, though keep working on pushing the confidence of your execution here as well. I can see where your ellipses get a little stiff at times, due to you drawing a little too hesitantly. Also, your forms stray a little bit from the basic, simple sausage I'm looking for (you've got some tapering/pinching through the midsections of a couple of these).

• Your sausage forms get even more out there in your organic forms with contour curves - this exercise really is best done while focusing on dead simple forms that stay consistent in their widths all through their lengths, as though they're just two spheres connected with a simple tube. No tapering, no pinching, no swelling, just the same width all the way through.

• Your texture analyses are a good start, but you do rely a bit much on hatching on that first texture, and definitely didn't fill out that gradient enough to have a consistent shift from dark to light over the course of the whole rectangle. Generally stay away from hatching lines, as they tend to be used instead of paying closer attention to the textures that are actually present in your reference image. I think you may have used them here because of the little scratchy lines in your reference image, but overdid it and ended up drawing them on auto-pilot without thinking about how the scratches were arranged and how frequent they actually were.

• You've got a pretty nice variety of textures through your dissections, so that's good to see, and you've tackled most of them in a meaningfully different, case-by-case manner rather than applying a one-size-fits-all solution to them all. That's good to see. You do need to work on how you transition from dense texture to sparse (which is covered more in the previous exercise), but that's pretty normal. One thing to note - the porcupine quills definitely fall in the territory of being independent forms rather than just texture, as they're so large and protruding that they are no longer quite as submissive to the underlying form.

• Your form intersections are looking pretty good. Good demonstration of spatial sense, though you did include longer cylinders - something that I instructed you to stay away from (the instructions say to avoid any stretched forms and to stick to those that are more equilateral).

• Your organic intersections do suffer a great deal from being uneven and lumpy, rather than sticking to the simple kind of sausage forms I mentioned earlier. You are demonstrating a grasp of how these forms interact with one another and how they slump together where their weight is not supported, but please stick to simpler forms for this in the future.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There's plenty of room for improvement, but you're headed in the right direction and should be ready to move on. Just be sure to read the instructions more carefully, and if you get impatient with things, take a break. Don't use it as an excuse not to complete an exercise in its entirety.

Lastly, as to your question, no I generally ignore those comments and prefer them not to be included. It's best to let me give my critique without balancing them against your own self-assessment, as that way I can speak more freely about what I see and how I perceive it.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-13 19:04

Your arrows are looking pretty good, and convey a good grasp of all three dimensions of space. I did notice however that they tend to flow in a very jagged, almost erratic manner - like a fish gliding in one direction, suddenly turning sharply and gliding in another, then repeating the act over and over. This isn't wrong for this exercise, but I did want to point out the difference between this and my examples where the turns are more gradual and fluid.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking pretty good, though some are better than others. What stands out most to me are the shapes you've drawn prior to adding the contour lines to establish their volumes. Always aim for creating sausage forms that are essentially two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width - you've got some that pinch in their midsection, and others that don't quite round out enough towards their ends. Not a huge concern, but something to keep in mind as you continue to move forwards.

Towards the top of the page of organic forms with contour curves, you definitely do a visibly better job than the lower half. The lower section appears more rushed, like you're not ghosting through the marks you want to draw, and therefore are exhibiting much less control over getting them to fit snugly between the two edges. Getting them to fit snugly is important because we're trying to create the illusion that these lines run along the surface of the form. If they fall outside of the silhouette of the form, or float arbitrarily inside of it, that illusion will be broken.

Your texture analyses are a good start. One thing I noticed, especially in your leaf texture, is that right now you're treating it a great deal more like a pattern, rather than thinking about the actual shadows that are being cast by the forms that are present. For example, you've filled in all of your cells with solid black - this isn't really how light works, however. If a cell is a consistent dip in the surface, then you're going to have a shadow cast by the edges on one side, and it's only going to extend into the cell at a distance relative to the height of this depression. You've thought more about the depressions themselves, rather than the fact that they are caused by yet more veins that flow over the surface, casting shadows into the areas that are not raised up.

When tackling the brick wall texture, try and think about what texture you're really trying to convey. On one hand, you have all of the little pits and cracks and pores of the bricks themselves - something that can be varied in density or otherwise. On the other hand, the bricks themselves can be a texture as well, and depending on where the light hits hardest, you can vary their density as well. That isn't to say that there are more bricks in one area than another (since that's not how regular red bricks are laid out), but rather that despite being present, fewer of them will necessarily be visible when light is pounding on them so harshly that only a few shadows avoid being blasted away altogether. When it comes to creating your gradient, pick one level of texture to focus on. Of course, the pores and cracks are still useful and important even when focusing on the bricks themselves as your main level of detail, but in this case their density hasn't been adjusted much.

Very nice work on your dissections - I can see a much clearer awareness of how these cast shadows work here, and you've tried a great variety of textures. If I had to recommend one thing, it'd be to draw the sausages to be larger, putting fewer on a page and giving yourself more room to work on each individual texture.

Along with the awareness of shadow, I can see a clear awareness of how the surfaces turn over the form.

Very nice work on the form intersections. Your understanding of 3D space is coming along great. As to the point about line weight, the main reason I don't want people to get caught up in applying line weight to the entirety of a line is because I don't want them to draw that additional stroke slowly and carefully (resulting in the mark becoming very stiff and wobbly and losing its underlying flow). You didn't do that here, so what you did was fine. The key point is that we don't necessarily always need to cover the whole edge with extra weight, and emphasizing this helps people come to terms with applying weight with the same kind of confident stroke they'd have used when drawing the original line. Short story is, what you did was fine.

Your second page of organic intersections is quite well done - it coveys a good sense of how your forms pile onto one another, how they slump and sag against each other and so on. Your use of contour curves is also considerably more measured and better planned than the contour curve exercise, so you clearly have improved on this front.

Anyway! You've done quite well. Keep up the good work. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-15 22:25

Since we're on reddit, let's stick to reddit usernames.

Overall, you're doing a pretty great job. Your arrows flow very nicely through 3D space and explore all three dimensions, including the depth of the scene. Don't be afraid to let your arrows overlap though (meaning, when they overlap, draw right through them as you see me do in this example page).

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along well, though you do need to work on getting your ellipses to fit more snugly between the edges of the sausage form. Since we're trying to create the illusion that the lines run along the surface of the form, having it fall outside of its silhouette or float loosely within it tends to break this illusion.

Your organic forms with contour curves however are a little loose - you're definitely rushing through your curves here, and as a result have a tendency of having them hook around nicely on one side, but come out way too shallow on the other. In general, it does seem here that you're not applying the ghosting method (and are therefore not planning/preparing before each mark as you should be). This is a process that should be applied to each and every mark you put down, without exception.

You're breaking into textures with a good start in your texture analyses. Admittedly, I can see you struggling to break away from enclosing each form completely and to focus more on the shadows they cast, to varying degrees of success, especially when you work on the density gradient. This is something that will definitely improve with practice. That said, do take more care to pay closer attention to your reference image as you work on that gradient. Looking at your direct study for that first row, I can clearly see more specific nuance to the scales' shapes that isn't present in the gradient, where it's instead become somewhat oversimplified and loses some of its key characteristics.

Your dissections are really well done. You show a keen eye for observation, and do a great job of organizing your visual information. You're also clearly applying methodologies tailored to each texture, rather than relying on any one-size-fits-all solutions, and the results certainly speak to this, especially on the first page. Things get a little bit more lax on the second page, so make sure you're not letting yourself slide on this front.

Your form intersections demonstrate a solid grasp of 3D space, though your linework is at times a touch on the sketchy side. I can see cases where you've automatically reinforced a line you've drawn with another stroke, rather than ensuring that each mark you put down (outside of line weight) consists of only a single planned mark. This again suggests to me that you need to work on your use of the ghosting method, and fight against that urge to draw things quickly. It yields great results as far as confidence goes, but your overall control and general presentation does suffer for it.

Finally, your organic intersections are much the same. Demonstrating a solid grasp of space and form, but those contour curves are drawn somewhat sloppily, and without enough care.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do two more pages of organic forms with contour curves. Take your time with each curve, and while I still want you to execute each mark with a confident, persistent pace, I want you to precede it with the appropriate amount of planning and preparation.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-15 22:50

Looking at your work here, I'm not entirely sure just how much of my last critique you've tried to apply. You may have read what I wrote initially, and then over the course of a month or so, worked through the lesson without looking back to see what you should be adjusting in your approach.

Your arrows are alright - they flow nicely through space, though you've really rushed the arrow heads a great deal. Just slow down and think about what you're doing - you don't have to put down the first mark that crosses your mind. Draw less, think more.

I brought this to your attention last time: you have a tendency to rush your linework. I'm still seeing this, your lines seem largely unplanned. You draw wihth a lot of confidence, but not much control. As a result, your contour ellipses are extremely smooth and even, but they rarely fit snugly between the edges on either side of the form.

Your contour curves are better than before, in that you're hooking them around quite nicely, but you often have alignment issues (probably because you skipped the instruction about including central minor axis lines here to help align the curves properly. Also, it may help considerably to stick to simple sausage forms with no tapering or swelling through their lengths. Basically just two spheres connected with a tube of consistent width.

In your form intersections, you're still using stretched forms (mostly your cylinders) and incorporating a lot of needless foreshortening into this exercise, making it more difficult than it needs to be. Aside from this, your intersections are fine and you're doing okay as far as making the forms themselves feel consistent within the same scene. At least, aside from those highly foreshortened cylinders. You should also be drawing those around a minor axis to help with the alignment of your ellipses.

I did notice that you've drawn your form intersections as a single set on the page rather than many smaller groups - that's something I'd raised before, so I'm glad you corrected that issue.

For your dissections, you seem to have shifted focus more to patterns rather than textures. Textures are made up of smaller forms that sit along the surface of a given form, whereas pattern is more like someone's drawn on the surface with a marker. Like wallpaper, there's no additional dimension to it, it's just lines directly on the surface. The few cases where you did try to apply texture, you drew these largely as though they were sitting on a flat surface, rather than wrapping around a rounded sausage form.

Lastly, your organic intersections suggest to me that you're still perceiving this as though you're drawing flat shapes on a flat page, rather than thinking of these sausage forms as though they're actually interacting with one another in 3D space. We don't see any convincing sagging where the forms do or don't support each others' weight - it's all very flat and two dimensional.

So, I'm not going to mark this lesson as complete just yet, but I am going to cross certain exercises off for now.

• Arrows: We'll consider this finished.

• Organic Forms with Contour Ellipses: This is done, for now.

• Organic Forms with Contour Curves: I'd like to see a little extra work done on this.

• Dissections: We'll dig into this a little more, especially since there is new material on this subject in the lesson, since the website was rebuilt and the lessons were rewritten late last month.

• Form Intersections: Done.

• Organic Intersections: Needs work.

Here's what I want you to do. First, look at Lesson 2 and read through it in its entirety. Like I said, the lessons have been rewritten, so this should be new to you. Focus especially on the "Thinking in 3D" section, as I believe this is a point of weakness for you, especially when it comes to the dissections and organic intersections.

Then, I'd like you to do the assigned homework for the following exercises:

• Organic forms with contour curves (two pages, contour curves only). Take your time, don't rush these. Make sure they align to the central minor axis line.

• Texture analysis (1 filled page). This exercise is new.

• Dissections (2 filled pages). Focus on textures, not patterns, and think about how they wrap around the forms they're applied to.

• Organic Intersections (2 pages). Think about how these forms exist in 3D space - imagine that you're piling filled water balloons on top of each other, and think beyond the page you're drawing on. You are not drawing flat shapes on a page, you are creating solid forms in a three dimensional world to which the page is just a window.

Make sure that before any sitting spent working on these exercises, that you review the instructions for that exercise, rather than trusting what you remember. And most of all: TAKE YOUR TIME. Your work continually suggests that you're rushing through things, that you're not giving each mark the appropriate time to plan and prepare appropriately, and as such you're not demonstrating the kind of control you'll need in order to succeed as you move forwards.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-16 22:08

While there's still room for improvement, these are definitely much better than before. A couple things to keep in mind:

• Keep working on getting your curves to hook back around as they come to the edge of the silhouette - if your lines are flying outside of the sausage shape, then you're not curving them enough.

• When one end of the sausage is facing us, then it is fairly natural to have a contour ellipse (basically a contour curve which is completely visible) on that end, as shown on this step. This tends to help a great deal to convey the illusion of 3D form.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the next lesson, but continue to work towards controlling your marks and applying the ghosting method to every mark you put down.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-20 20:47

Nice work overall! Your arrows flow quite nicely through space, exploring all three dimensions. One thing that I did notice though was that while the far ends of your arrows did get smaller, the actual space itself did not seem to compress with perspective. This is discussed in these notes.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are coming along quite nicely - I'm seeing a nice transition of degree, and you're managing the curvature quite nicely. You definitely do need to keep working on your control however - when the ellipses fall out from being snugly squeezed between the edges of the form, we lose the illusion that this line runs along the surface of the form. As such, having your ellipses/curves fall outside of the silhouette of the form, or when they float arbitrarily inside of it, we lose the effect we're trying to achieve. Keep working on applying the ghosting method here to improve your accuracy, without giving up the nice, smooth, confident strokes.

Also, I noticed that some of your contour curves struggle with their alignment to the minor axis at times, so keep an eye on that as well.

You've got a nice variety of experimentation in your texture analyses and dissections. On the subject of hair, I'm not entirely sure of what you were trying to draw on the left there - it looks like you may have been creating little patches floating in space, and then applying fur to them. Instead, think of it as though you're zooming in on the side of a squirrel - the entire square should be filled with hair, like this. Instead of focusing on individual hairs, try and look at the rhythm and flow that is present there - each hair does not exist in isolation, they move like currents of air or water. This kind of rhythm exists in all textures, though it's not always easy to see.

I felt your gravel came out quite nicely, both with the study and the gradient, and your cucumber was quite nice too. With the cobble stone, it became quite graphic, where you focused primarily on the flat shapes, rather than the actual shadows that each cobblestone form would have been casting. This in turn made it quite difficult to transition from dark to light, so we can see that strip of black along the left side quite clearly. I actually did a quick demonstration for a student who was struggling with something similar when trying to draw the texture of a leaf, which you can see here. They, like you, attempted to do it as shown in the middle - blocking out the negative space as shapes. What you want to achieve is more like the far right, where we focus not on enclosing and defining each form, but rather capturing only the shadows it casts - this is something we can play with, to make them more prominent or blast them away with light.

I think you conveyed this sense of cast shadow rather than enclosing lines much better in your dissections, though you still do have a strong tendency to enclose things (like in your armadillo scales). Your second attempt at corn was getting there, though, so you're progressing in the right direction.

Your form intersections are looking pretty good, though I am glad that you did the extra two pages with all the forms interconnecting rather than doing so in smaller groups (something that was specifically included in the old instructions as something to avoid). You're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another within the same space, though I would recommend maybe easing up on some of the foreshortening, especially on this page's boxes, as it causes the scale to become somewhat inconsistent and visually confusing.

Finally, your organic intersections are coming along well, though the forms themselves are definitely much more complex than they need to be. As you can see in my demonstration here, if you think of the forms as being water balloons, the balloons themselves have enough tension in them to keep the form together for the most part, rather than having them spill over each other a viscous liquid. When doing this exercise, focus on how they'll sag against one another, slumping where their weight is not supported, but without losing their overall sausage-like form. Here's another example.

Anyway, you're doing very well so far - a few things to keep in mind, but you're well on your way. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next one.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-20 21:54

Your arrows do a pretty good job of exploring all three dimensions of space, and flowing fluidly through it. I can clearly see the compression of space, both in the size of the arrow's farther end, as well as (in some cases) the space in between the lengths of the arrow as they go back and forth. I do want to mention though that at times the hatching lines are kind of erratic and messy - remember that these are not necessary, but if you do wish to add them (as with anything) you should apply the correct techniques to ensure that they don't come out looking sloppy.

I'm glad to see that you stuck to fairly simple sausage forms for your organic forms, though there are some issues to address with your contour lines:

• The contour ellipses on the second page (IMG_3270) are visibly better, in that they're a little tighter and they're consistent. On the first page, you seem to be intentionally trying to keep them lighter along one side, and darker along the other - trying to balance multiple things at once like this isn't a great idea. You should be focusing on the only task in front of you, which is at that time, to draw an ellipse that is smooth and controlled.

• On that second page though, I am noticing issues with keeping aligned to your central minor axis line. Remember that your ellipses should be running perpendicular to the flow of the sausage form, and so even if that minor axis line you draw isn't exactly correct, it should give you a better idea of where the "correct" one would be. Your ellipses should align to this "correct" minor axis line, such that each ellipse is cut into two equal, symmetrical halves down their narrower dimension.

• For the contour ellipses, they're actually quite well done, aside from one major issue: they're all falling outside of the form itself. The contour line technique relies on creating the illusion that these lines run along the surface of the form - the second your contour ellipse or contour curve fails to fit snugly between the edges of the organic form, you lose undermine this illusion.

Your texture analyses were actually quite interesting. The tree bark was the only one that I'd deem to be entirely successful, but it was very well done. Considering how challenging texture can be, and that this seems to be your first major exposure to this kind of exercise, being able to achieve this within your first three attempts is pretty damn good. The cat fur wasn't too far off either, but the skin had major issues.

Basically it comes down to the amount of intent is driving your marks. With the skin, they're very clearly quite random and erratic. If you were to pick a line that you've drawn and look at the reference you were working from, you'd be pretty hard pressed to identify which feature that line was meant to represent. Instead, you seem to have seen something fairly chaotic and in there, you saw nothing but randomness. Understanding that, you went to your paper and drew, as you saw, randomness.

The most important thing in texture is to understand that as random and nonsensical they may look up close, this is never the case. Texture always carries some manner of rhythm, flow or structure that can be identified and transferred to a drawing.

Looking at your cat fur, you did pick up on it somewhat there - you had your fur flowing in similar directions. The tree bark however, while it did have some erratic marks to it, these were controlled and were only erratic within a certain limited space. For the most part, your texture contained visible structure, and you did a comparatively good job of employing the same things you'd observed to achieve a varying range of density from left to right.

Admittedly you never did fully blend the textures into that thick bar along the left, but you came pretty close to it in this last one.

Despite the difficulty you had here, your dissections were actually really quite well done. I can see that the date listed on the page says that it was done prior to the newer exercise, but despite that I'm not surprised. It is a little different to try and tackle texture when it's flattened out, versus when it's actually applied to a three dimensional form. You tackled a number of different subjects here, and while the grass did get kind of random/chaotic, you demonstrated a good grasp of these different kinds of textures and worked well towards controlling your shadows and detail density. All in all I'm quite pleased with your results here.

Your form intersections are coming along decently. Aside from the fact that you included some of the stretched forms (like longer cylinders) that I advised you against in the instructions due to their tendency to overcomplicate this exercise by bringing in additional foreshortening, you are mostly doing a good job of keeping your forms relatively consistent within their shared space.

I can however see places where your linework sometimes gets erratic - for example, edges where you've drawn a number of different strokes. Every mark you put down should be drawn using the ghosting method, without exception - this means that every mark should be preceded with planning and preparation, rather than drawing by reflex, which is often what happens when we see marks that have been automatically reinforced with another stroke. If you make a mistake, leave it be - adding another mark is only going to draw more attention to it.

Additionally, it's worth mentioning that your boxes are coming along, but there are plenty of places where they're lopsided or skewed, so be sure to continue incorporating them into your regular warmup routine.

Lastly, your first page of organic intersections (IMG_3280) came out very nicely. Your forms feel solid, your contour curves fit snugly within each form, and you demonstrated a strong awareness of how they interact with one another in 3D space. The second page definitely went awry, due to a combination of some forms being more complex (you've got some that taper through their midsection) and you going way overboard with the shadows and losing control over that aspect of the drawing.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You do have plenty of things to work on, but you seem to have demonstrated a good enough grasp in each area. So, feel free to move onto lesson 3.

As for the cylinder challenge, you definitely struggled through the beginning. It seems that you were not drawing your lines using the ghosting method, and that you struggled a great deal with the idea of constructing a cylinder in a box. You've probably seen it by now, but in case you haven't, the material for this challenge was updated quite significantly, especially to focus on the mechanics of boxes and ellipses/cylinders, so I'd recommend checking that out.

That line quality issue seems to have stuck with you through the entire challenge - I really cannot stress this enough: the ghosting method must be applied to every single mark you draw, be it a straight line, a curving one or an ellipse.

Also, I am noticing that your use of the minor axis isn't entirely consistent. You use it for a great many of these cylinders, but you leave it out of plenty of them, and in others it's drawn somewhat sloppily (where it's not entirely straight). Also, I do want to point out that you have a tendency of placing your ellipses on the ends of the minor axis, so the line doesn't penetrate all the way through each ellipse. In the future, place the ellipses such that the minor axis passes through the completely instead, as shown here.

All in all, I strongly believe you can do much better than this. Much of this is quite rushed, and not always following the instructions as closely as you ought to. You have completed the challenge, and I'll be marking it as complete, but you have a lot of room for improvement on this front. It's not that you're not capable of drawing these things cleanly, or drawing straight lines - it's just that when faced with the task of drawing so many of them, you as many others do, put less effort into each individual component. A line is a line is a line is a line - whether it's one of a thousand or one that stands on its own, it should be drawn with the same care and consideration.

You do luckily have plenty of time to continue working on this for yourself, and the cylinders only really become particularly important by the time you hit lesson 6 (which is why it's not a prerequisite until then). When you have a chance, review the newer material for the challenge, and start incorporating them into your warmup routine.

Uncomfortable

2019-01-27 20:08

Very nice work! I caught a couple things that I'd like to point out, but by and large you've demonstrated a solid grasp of the concepts covered in this lesson.

• Your arrows flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space, and are not being limited to the two dimensions of the page you're drawing on. This suggests that you're pushing into that illusion that you're working within a fully three dimensional world, which is great to see.

• One point to keep in mind with this exercise however is that all space compresses as it moves further away from the viewer - the width of your arrow's ribbon did shrink which is correct, but as shown here the space between the various turning lengths should have also grown smaller.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are looking great. Admittedly it's a little hard to distinguish them as contour ellipses vs. contour curves but I'll let it slide here as you have a smattering of both throughout and you demonstrate a solid grasp of how the ellipses should be aligned to the minor axis line, and how their degrees should shift over the course of the length of the form. I'm also pleased to see that most of your forms were kept quite simple.

• Your texture analyses and dissections both conveyed observational skills that are developing well, and the ability to organize the information you gleaned from your reference to suit your own specific needs (be it the transposition of the texture onto a rounded form, or to achieve a shift from dense/dark to sparse/light). There were a couple textures where the roundedness of the dissections didn't come through entirely - for example, the stuff on the outside of the form chunk that has salami on it (the texture looks like pebbles or gravel), and the knitted texture. These are attempting to get that roundedness but don't quite compress along the sides enough. Same goes for the rose petals on the following page. Additionally, your attempt at the "leaf" one wasn't really correct in that you drew a leaf within that space, rather than taking its surface texture and applying it to a different form.

• Your form intersections are generally well done, but there are a couple things I want to stress. You're a little inconsistent when it comes to drawing through your boxes, as well as with the use of the minor axis when drawing cylinders. Make sure you're applying these principles all over when doing the drawabox lessons. If you've got a box, draw through it. If you've got something cylindrical, construct it around a minor axis.

• Also, the instructions did state that you should stay away from more stretched forms that weren't equilateral (equal in all dimensions), and I can see quite a few that ignore this, especially with your cylinders.

• Your organic intersections are okay - they're starting to show the believable relationships between these different forms as they're piled upon one another, but there is room for improvement here. Try to stick to shorter sausages (more like the one you started off with), and think of it as though you're piling filled water balloons on top of one another. Think about how each one sags and slumps against the ones around it as it tries to find support for its mass and volume.

Anyway, by and large you've done a good job. Just a few things here and there to keep an eye on. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto the next lesson.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-01 21:57

Very nice work on the arrows - I'm especially loving the fact that while you've got the arrows to flow nicely through all three dimensions of space, you're not only compressing the size of the arrows themselves, but also the space itself as you move further back. Sometimes students will leave the same amount of 2D space between the various lengths of a ribbon that folds back over itself - you've done well to actually afford less room the further you delve into the depths of your world.

Your organic forms with contour lines are fairly well done, though I do want to stress the importance of ensuring that your sausages are essentially just two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. At times you have a tendency to draw the more as a ball that has been stretched (with a more gradual tapering over its length).

In addition to this, you do need to work on getting your ellipses, and even more so, your contour curves, to fit more snugly between the edges of the form. We want to achieve the illusion that the line runs over the surface of the form, so if they fall out of the silhouette or float arbitrarily within it, we undermine this effect.

You are doing a good job of hooking your curves around so they continue along the other side however, and I can see a good grasp of the degree shift that occurs over the length of the form.

Your work for the texture analysis exercise is phenomenal. You've done an excellent job of observing your references, pulling out the visual information, and then organizing it to cover the gradient of density. Your dissections are fairly well done too, though I think more practice in applying what you learned from the analyses and applying that same gradient principle to a more rounded form will work wonders. That said, you do have several very successful textures, especially on that second page. There are only a couple (like the wrinkled cloth and the stone bricks) that feel like they could use some more work.

Your form intersections convey a well developing grasp of 3D space, and your box forms feel quite solid. Do watch out for the use of those longer cylinders however - remember that the exercise instructions specifically advise against the use of stretched forms. Stick to those that are more equilateral.

Finally, your organic intersections demonstrate an improvement over the issues I mentioned in regards to your organic forms with contour lines. They also show a strong grasp of how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, how they sag and slump against one another and reinforce each others' presence within the scene.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-02-02 19:57

I think you might be referring to the pinterest board that used to be linked from lesson 2. You'll find that here, and I've added it back to the texture analysis and dissections pages.

So, onto your work. To start with, your arrows are flowing quite nicely across the page. One thing that does jump out at me however is that as your arrows flow back and forth, the distance between the reversing lengths of your arrows doesn't actually compress as we move further back in space. This makes us feel that the arrow is moving across the flat page, rather than through a three dimensional world with depth. I talk about this further in this step. Remember that perspective compresses everything we look further and further away - objects themselves, as well as the space between them.

Pretty nice work on your organic forms with contour lines. You're definitely doing a good job of hooking your contour curves around to give the impression that the lines are wrapping around the form. I can also see some lovely degree shift as your contour lines pass through the length of the form, though this can probably be exaggerated just a little bit more.

In a few places, I can see the alignment of your contour curves falling a bit awry, so keep an eye on that - and also work on those last few little curves that slip outside of the bounds of the form. Keeping them snugly pinched between the form's edges is key to ensuring that we create the illusion that this line runs along the form's surface.

Now admittedly your texture analyses fell a little short. This topic in particular is one that is a little drawabox adjacent, rather than at the core of the material, so there's no harm in taking more time with it. That said, I think you definitely do need to get used to studying reference images - not just looking at them more carefully, but getting in the habit of looking at them more frequently, rather than relying on what you can hold in your memory.

As explained in this section, you need to look at your reference image most of the time, looking only at your drawing for a moment to carry over one or two very specific marks, representing specific elements you saw in the reference. Once they're drawn, you go back to looking at your reference and repeat the process again. The result, at least for the left side of the texture analysis exercise, should be very visually overwhelming, and for that reason this exercise takes a lot of time to complete. Right now, we can see that your analysis portions were definitely left somewhat blank. Then without the appropriate amount of information there, it becomes very difficult to manage the second part of that exercise on the right side.

Now your dissections are somewhat better, with more attention being paid to a lot of the smaller details and their specifics. There is still room for improvement when it comes to your observational skills (this page was much better than this one, though there's still plenty of room to get better), but that will come with practice. In addition to this, when you're drawing these elements on your textures, rather than trying to enclose each little form in a line, focus instead on capturing the shadows they cast on their surroundings. Focusing instead on cast shadows allows us to control where we want our textures to be dense, and where we want them to be more sparse, and allows us to create gradients between them. If we're taking every little pomegranate seed, for instance, and enclosing them fully in a line, then there's no real opening to increase or decrease the density of seeds without explicitly saying "there are fewer seeds here" or "there are more seeds in this area". Using shadows allows us to imply the potential presence of more seeds even without necessarily drawing them.

Your form intersections are quite well done. There is some inconsistency when it comes to the different rates of foreshortening applied to your boxes, and as a whole continuing to do box exercises (like from the 250 box challenge) will further improve the convergences of your sets of parallel lines, but overall you're demonstrating a good grasp of the relationships between all of these forms. One thing you did neglect to follow however was that the instructions state that you should not be using forms that are particularly stretched, like longer cylinders. Stick to those that are more equilateral.

Lastly, your organic intersections are a good start. You're well on your way to conveying a good grasp of how these forms relate to one another, and how their volumes can rest on top of one another without appearing as though they've been pasted, one shape on top of the other on a flat page. There is still room for improvement here, in fully grasping how one's volume would be displaced by the form it is resting upon, but you're headed in the right direction.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I do feel that you've got a number of areas to work on, but that you're showing a good grasp of the material as a whole. I do want to point out however that there have been places where you didn't quite follow the instructions as they were written out, so do take some more time to read through the lesson more thoroughly. Generally it's a good idea to give the lesson a once over before starting any of the work, and then before you start working on a given exercise, reread its instructions fully (even if this means reading over the instructions several times across several days). There's a lot of information there and it can be very easy to miss important details.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-04 23:47

You've done a pretty good job overall!

• Your arrows flow pretty nicely across the page. I am still getting the sense that they're largely flowing across the two dimensions of space defined by the page itself, so that is something you'll want to work on, but they are quite fluid and natural. In the future, try applying perspective to them - that is, both compressing the width of the arrow as it moves farther away, as well as the space itself as explained here.

• You're applying the concepts of contour ellipses pretty well to the organic forms, and are hitting two major points: you're keeping them snug between the edges of the forms so as to maintain the illusion that these lines run along the surface of the form, and you're shifting the degree of the ellipses through the form's length. Where things are going somewhat awry however is that you're very clearly drawing those ellipses slowly and carefully. There's no confidence there to keep them smooth and evenly shaped, so they come out very stiff and uneven. In your first page, you totally neglected to draw through your ellipses (which you should be doing for each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons). You at least started doing it through the second page, but you still drew very slowly - remember that the ghosting method applies to every mark you put down, and that means investing your time in planning and preparing beforehand, then executing your mark with a confident, persistent pace and no hesitation whatsoever. Also, I noticed that you didn't actually do any contour curves here - I'd raise an issue about that, but you demonstrated a good use of them in your organic intersections so I'll let it slide. Be sure to mind the instructions more closely in the future though.

• You did a pretty good job with the texture analyses - you took great care in studying your reference images carefully, and you made great attempts at applying what you learned there to produce a gradient from dense to sparse. It's a good start, though I think the last one (the denim/jeans) was the most successful as far as the gradient goes, since the transition from dark to light was quite smooth and gradual (though could have been stretched out more across the whole rectangle). The other two were much less so, with the iguana scales being quite abrupt. Still, you did a good job of paying attention to cast shadows rather than outlining everything, so you're moving in the right direction.

• Pretty nice work on the dissections - not sure what you mean by them changing though, they're the same as they've always been. By and large you've done a pretty good job. Plenty of room for improvement, and that'll come with continued practice, but you're showing a lot of key features that I look for - you're minding cast shadows, you're breaking past the silhouette of your organic forms (for the little bumps from the wool and basket waves, etc) and you're definitely taking the time to observe your reference carefully, and transfer information bit by bit, rather than staring at the reference and working largely from memory. One suggestion with your grass - when you're breaking past the silhouette, I strongly recommend that you take more care in designing the tufts of grass that push past there. That kind of silhouette detail tends to have a big impact, so you want it to be as intentional as possible.

• Fantastic work on your form intersections - glad to see you kept all the forms equilateral, and you demonstrated a great grasp of 3D space. Everything feels consistently part of the same scene. Very well done.

• Same goes for your organic intersections - the forms overlap each other very convincingly, especially in how they sag and slump in response to each others' volumes, rather than being pasted on top of each other like stickers.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-02-08 21:24

Nice work! By and large you've done a very good job, though there are a few points and instructions you may have missed, and a few areas to focus on as you continue to move forwards.

• Your arrows are looking pretty good, and are flowing nicely across the page. One thing I did notice though was that as we move back towards the farther end of your arrows, the space itself doesn't compress much. At times we do see perspective applied to the thickness of the arrow, but not to the space between the lengths of the arrow as they swoop further and further back. I explain this further here.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are looking good - I'm pleased to see that you're hooking those curves around convincingly along the edges, and that the contour lines fit snugly within the silhouette of the form. One area you are struggling with however is keeping the curves and ellipses aligned to the minor axis line - they do have a tendency to be a little lopsided.

• Your texture work is fantastic, both for the texture analysis and the dissections. You've demonstrated excellent observational skills, and a great use of these texture as tools, both when building your density gradients and wrapping them around these rounded forms. I'm also very pleased with the variety of textures you experimented with, and the particular attention you paid to each one, finding an approach that would work on a case by case basis.

• Your form intersections demonstrate a good understanding of 3D space. I did notice that you included a great many longer tubes - the instructions do mention that you should stay away from these kinds of forms and focus on those that are more equilateral, so as to keep overly complex foreshortening out of the equation. Always take care to read the instructions before attempting a lesson, even if you've already read through it before, as our memories are not the most reliable.

• Your organic intersections are a good start - there's definitely hints there that you're beginning to grasp how these forms would pile upon on one another, but some of them do have a tendency to get flattened, with the feeling that some of them have been pasted on top without fully understanding how they'd slump and sag against one another, taking into consideration each others' volumes as they try to settle in space. You are getting there, but this is an area you may want to focus your efforts as you move forwards.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-02-08 21:48

Pretty nice work! I'll break my critique down by exercise:

• You're doing a good job of getting your arrows to flow smoothly across the page. One thing I am noticing however is that while you've got perspective shrinking the width of the arrow as it moves farther away from us, the actual distance between the various repeating lengths of the arrow itself does not get any smaller. Remember that perspective applies to all of space itself - as distances get farther from us, they are drawn as being smaller, so the gaps between those lengths of the arrow's ribbon will shrink as well. I explain this further in these notes.

• Your organic forms with contour lines are looking good - the only issue I noticed was that your contour curves did have a tendency to stiffen up a little. Make sure you're drawing these with the same kind of confidence you'd use with any kind of mark. If you feel you need control, rely more on the planning and preparation phases, rather than slowing your execution.

• Your texture work came out quite well - great observation and care went into studying your reference images, and you did a great job of organizing that information into the density gradients. You also applied them very nicely to the various rounded forms. One issue I did notice was that you were a little timid when it came time to push past the silhouette of your organic form. I can see a few places where you tried to play with it a little, but it wasn't nearly as bold as it could have been. Don't be afraid to push past that silhouette's edge - break it up as needed, and let those bumps push right out into space. Also worth mentioning, avoid those really long organic forms - stick to simple, short sausages, as these allow you to focus on making them solid and three dimensional rather than distracting yourself with further complexity.

• Your form intersections are fantastic - you're conveying a strong grasp of 3D space, solidity and form. Everything feels very consistent, as though they exist firmly in the same scene and space. The only issue I noticed was that your ellipses did have a tendency to stiffen up, so keep an eye on that.

• This page of your form intersections did a great job of demonstrating how these forms interact with one another, how they sag and slump against each other and account for each others' volumes as they settle in space. The other attempt was pretty good as well, but the extra complexity of these wobbly forms did take away from the main focus of the exercise.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto the next one. Do keep working on the confident, smooth execution of your marks as well, but by and large you're doing very well.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-10 19:43

Nice work with the arrows! They both flow nicely through space, and demonstrate a good understanding of how perspective not only causes the width of the arrow to shrink as it moves farther back, but that the space itself (and therefore the distances between the various lengths of ribbon) also compresses.

Your contour ellipses are coming along decently, though watch the stiffness of your ellipses. You're drawing them a little hesitantly, and when you slow down your line wobbles. Remember to apply the ghosting method to every mark you put down, so as to maintain control as well as confident pace.

Also, when drawing a sausage, remember that it's like two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (like this). As such, keep the roundedness limited to either end and try not to stretch it out. Also, keep the ends the same width.

Your contour curves are generally hooking around the form well, though work on keeping them snugly pinched between the edges of the form. If they float inside, or break past the silhouette of the form, you'll lose the illusion that they're running along the surface of the form.

Fantastic work on your texture analyses and dissections - you're demonstrating a good deal of observation and careful study of your reference images, along with plenty of progress in how you're approaching using that textural information either to create density gradients or to apply them to rounded forms. Keep working on the idea that what you're drawing are the shadows being cast by these forms, and allow yourself to vary their widths from nothing to a larger shadow shape. That said, you're making great progress.

Your form intersections are looking quite good, and are demonstrating a solid grasp of how these forms exist in 3D space, and how they interact with each other within it. The forms feel consistent, as though they exist in the same scene, and your foreshortening doesn't throw off the sense of scale at all.

The organic intersections are a start, and you are generally demonstrating an understanding of how these forms exist together - pushing on one another in order to allow for all their volumes and masses to be respected. The top form towards the right side was definitely a last minute addition that could have received more planning and consideration (the wobbly line of its silhouette undermines its solidity) but the rest are fairly well done. Just remember to focus on keeping these forms as simple as possible. The exercise is about how they interact with one another, not the complexity of each individual.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-02-21 20:36

So this is a pretty mixed set - there's some areas that are going quite well, and others that will definitely benefit from a little extra guidance.

To start with, your arrows definitely flow fairly well through all three dimensions of space, but I have a couple recommendations:

• Your lines waver at times, so definitely work on drawing your strokes with confidence, applying the ghosting method as needed. It's actually quite minor here, but you will see me mention this again in relation to other exercises.

• Remember that as explained here, perspective compresses everything as it moves farther away, including the space between objects. So as your arrow loops back and forth, moving further away into space, the space between these lengths of the arrow will also compress, bringing them closer together.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are pretty good, though in a few places I definitely see your ellipses getting deformed. Always draw with that confident, persistent pace to keep them evenly shaped. Also watch their alignment - you're generally on point here, but there are a few that don't quite sit on the central minor axis line correctly. Lastly, when it comes to the sausages themselves, remember that sausages are essentially two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. I'm seeing you stretching the roundedness at the ends out quite a bit. Keep that focused on either extremity and leave the length of the sausage consistent in its width.

When you get to the contour curves, you are definitely drawing these a little more stiffly. Again, use the ghosting method. Plan and prepare all you need, but put that mark down with a confident, persistent stroke, so as to keep it smooth.

Jumping ahead to the texture analyses, these are meant to be pretty challenging for students. Your observations along the left side are fairly well done, though they do suggest that there's room for improvement when it comes to the kinds of information you pick up from the objects you study. This is pretty normal.

When you get to the right side, I do see a degree of oversimplification that suggests to me that you may not be looking at your reference as frequently as you ought to. Always remember that our memories are not really designed for this. Human memory is designed to throw away any unnecessary information and focus in on only the core elements that are relevant to our survival. As such, the second you look away, a lot of the information specific to what you're trying to capture gets tossed away. Because of this, you must get in the habit of continually looking back at your reference, refreshing your memory and ensuring that every mark you put down somehow reflects an element you see in that reference - even when you're reorganizing that information as we are in this part of the exercise.

That said, your bricks are showing a grasp of how we want to focus more on cast shadows, which is good to see.

For your rope, you did make one common mistake - instead of focusing in on the rope's texture, you actually started drawing its major forms. For that gradient, you drew a physical rope, which is not what you're meant to do here. You're supposed to unwrap the texture that rests on the rope's forms and lay them flat.

You actually managed texture muuuch better in the dissections exercise, and covered a nice variety of them with a much stronger demonstration of observation. While there's still some that come out a little cartoony (like the bamboo and carrot), you've got many others that are handled quite realistically, like the artichoke and avocado. You're definitely moving in the right direction here.

Starting out with boxes for your form intersections was a good call. I'm glad you drew through these, though there is definitely plenty of room for improvement with those convergences (like the stuff we covered in the box challenge), as well as with your linework. You're still wobbling and wavering at times, so again - a confident, smooth execution is key. Don't hesitate when you put your marks down, accept that the opportunity to avoid mistakes has passed, and that the only thing you can do is push forwards with the mark. If you make a mistake, it's not the end of the world, but if you hide behind a slower execution, you'll be giving in and accepting a wobbly line.

Your other form intersections are okay, but they do suffer from one major issue: you didn't follow the instructions that carefully. As explained here, you're supposed to avoid forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension.

Your organic intersections are getting there (the first attempt is better than the second), but there are a few issues:

• Again, linework is rather wobbly and uncertain.

• The organic forms themselves are complex - stick to simple sausage forms. Don't pinch or swell them through their midsection, as explained here.

• Especially in that second attempt, I'm seeing a tendency to think of these more as being flat and two dimensional, as though you're pasting stickers on top of one another. Remember that these are forms you're piling on top of one another in 3D space. Think of it like they're filled water balloons that you are stacking.

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

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves. Keep them simple, keep your curves smooth and even, and keep the roundedness towards either extremity of the sausage forms.

• 1 page of form intersections. When drawing your forms, especially boxes, be mindful of the nature of your sets of parallel lines. You have to think about how they're meant to converge towards a shared vanishing point. Also, use the ghosting method. This means taking the time to plan and prepare before every stroke and execute with a confident, persistent pace. This is for every mark you put down. Students who try and avoid the ghosting method, or rush through it, naturally try and push that time investment to the execution to be more careful, but this only results in a wobbly line.

• 1 page of organic intersections. Again, keep the sausages simple, and think about how you're stacking forms in 3D space, not just as 2D shapes on the page.

For each of these exercises, make sure you reread the instructions immediately before attempting it to ensure that you're following them to the letter.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-23 00:29

Pretty nice work on the arrows - they flow nicely across the page. One thing to keep in mind though is that to make them seem as though they're coming out of the depth of the page (rather than going across it), you want to play with compressing all of space as we look farther and farther away. Right now you're playing with the width of the arrow, but the space between the various lengths of the arrow, as explained here, also should be getting compressed.

Your organic forms with contour lines are quite well done. You're drawing through your ellipses and keeping them fairly evenly shaped, you're generally doing a good job of keeping them pinched between the edges of your form, and your contour curves wrap nicely along the form by hooking at as they turn. I am noticing that while your contour ellipses' alignment is generally looking pretty good, some of your contour curves are slanting a little bit, so keep an eye on that.

What stands out to me most when it comes to the texture analysis, it's that you're enclosing every element you draw completely. In the lesson, I talk about understanding that the lines we draw don't actually exist - they're just representations of the shadows that are cast by the forms that are present. When we handle the forms that make up texture, there's often a lot of little forms present, and drawing each one in its entirety tends to result in too much noise and chaos. Instead we draw the impact they have on their surroundings - the shadows they cast. These shadows can merge together, or can be blasted away by a direct light source, as explained here. This gives us the freedom to control the density and transition from concentrated detail to more sparse areas fluidly, rather than having sudden and more delineated changes.

The textures in your dissections are definitely a bit better, and you are showing an improvement in your overall observation. I especially like the avocado, though the rocks are still fully delineated from one another, so it shows you still have room to improve on that front.

A couple things stand out to me in regards to your form intersections:

• Your boxes do need work, and aren't quite as good here as they were by the end of your 250 boxes. It's not that you've slid back or anything like that - it's just that you're faced here with a complicated problem, and as a result, you're not putting as much time into each individual line, and each individual box, as you did back then. No matter what the challenge before you, don't let the complexity of it overwhelm you from focusing on the smallest elements. Take the time to draw the boxes properly, thinking about how your sets of parallel lines converge towards their shared vanishing points. Also, sticking to shallower foreshortening here will help maintain a more consistent sense of scale across the many forms.

• When you start working in cylinders and cones, you end up ignoring one of the instructions from the lesson: avoid using stretched forms. Be sure to read the instructions to the lesson carefully immediately before tackling it.

Along with what I've mentioned so far, your intersections are generally off base. When tackling the pages with multiple kinds of forms, you're definitely showing that you don't fully understand how the intersections work. As seen here, the intersection between that box and sphere wasn't drawn on the sphere at all.

Now, this is admittedly a very complicated exercise, and it does take time to understand how it all works. I do feel however that you may be responding to the overwhelming nature of the exercise by guessing randomly, rather than thinking through the problem. As mentioned in the instructions, the intersection line sits on both forms simultaneously, as explained here. Give those notes another read, as it may take a few run throughs for it to start making sense. It's kind of line a venn diagram, where you've got two circles overlapping one another.

Lastly, your organic intersections are a bit varying in quality, but while your cast shadows are inconsistent (as explained here), they do demonstrate that your understanding of 3D space and the relationships between these forms is developing. You're not drawing them as though they're 2D stickers being pasted on top of one another - you clearly grasp that they exist within the same three dimensional world, and are being stacked in a way that requires their individual volumes to be sorted out.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to reread all the material on form intersections and attempt two more pages of the exercise. Take your time drawing each individual form. Don't rush, and don't panic - if things stop making sense, step back and take a break. Read the material and watch the video again, and them come back to it.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-23 00:44

Yup, you are indeed still eligible.

To start with, your work on the arrows is quite well done. They flow quite nicely across the page. One thing that I'm noticing is that in some cases (though not all), you've got the spacing between the zigzagging lengths of arrow remaining the same, while the thickness of the ribbon remains the same. Remember that perspective compresses all space, so the distances in between will also shrink, as explained here. It's worth mentioning that the bottom right of your second page of this exercise is a good example of this done correctly.

Your organic forms with contour lines are quite well done. Your lines are fairly confidently draw, they're mostly fitting snugly between the edges of the forms, I'm seeing the degree shifts (though in your contour curves this seems to be inconsistent, read these notes in case you don't know what I mean).

Your texture analyses are phenomenal. You're demonstrating both really sharp observational skills, and a pretty excellent understanding of the concepts. One recommendation I have though is on the middle one, where you've got some really dense areas of black and white in the cracks. This results in some really distracting visual noise. This kind of high density contrast can draw the viewer's eye in an unintentional manner, so I'd recommend controlling how you use it a little more directly. In cases like this, being more willing to combine more of the little specks into larger areas of black would probably help reduce the effect.

Your dissections were similarly well done - you're taking the same concepts you executed wonderfully in the analyses and wrapped them nicely around these forms. The only one that didn't come out all that well was the 'other snake skin', where it didn't quite wrap around the rounded form convincingly. Just a matter of compressing the scales more along the edges.

Finally, your form and organic intersections convey a really strong understanding of 3D space and the relationships between both geometric and organic forms in 3D space. While I usually frown upon students adding little extras, your little king and queen of the pile are adorable - and I'm happy to say that as you knocked it out of the park, your little additions obviously did not distract you from the focus of the exercise.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3 and keep up the great work.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-23 01:04

Your arrows are definitely quite well done, and you're focusing quite a bit on the confidence and fluidity of your strokes. When it comes to the compression of your arrows with perspective however, remember that this applies to both the thickness of the arrow as well as the space between the zigzagging lengths. Give these notes from the lesson a read to better understand what I mean.

Your organic forms with contour curves are alright, but they have a few key issues:

• Your forms should be simple sausages. Two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. No pinching through the midsection, tapering, etc. This will help you to focus on the core challenge of the exercise, without getting distracted.

• You are definitely rushing. This is actually the case across the entire lesson, where you're moving forward before fully thinking through what you're attempting to achieve with your marks. In this case, your ellipses are not very well controlled. They're often too big or too small to fit snugly between the edges of the forms, their alignment is frequently slanted, and so on. Drawing confidently is fantastic, but you need to make sure that you ghost through your lines beforehand as you plan and prepare before each stroke. Make sure you go in knowing full well what you plan to put down, rather than just jumping in.

• Your contour curves are a bit hit and miss - they're also rushed, and due to the alignment issues, they're not always giving the impression that they're wrapping around the forms correctly.

The whole texture section of the lesson really is intended to be quite difficult, and it's often something quite new and challenging to students. I don't by any means expect perfection here, and having students struggle a great deal is entirely normal. What I'm seeing in your case appears to be an urge to capture things quickly, in a sort of impressionistic fashion. This can be quite interesting, but doesn't actually suit the purpose of what we're focusing on here. More than anything, as I've mentioned before, you need to slow down and think. Take the time to observe the reference carefully, and only look at your drawing for the few moments it takes to transfer one or two *specific details or marks before returning to your reference image. As explained in the lesson, our human memory isn't well suited to this kind of task, so we have to continually refresh it, and simply cannot rely on it for even short periods of time.

Your dissections were better, though there are still plenty of places where you appear to be rushing through, trying to capture things in as few marks as possible, or oversimplifying. I very much liked your corn texture, and the use of cast shadow there. Other textures however, like your carpet, definitely relied much on repeated patterns rather than careful observation.

Jumping forwards to your form intersections, you definitely do struggle here but improve considerably over the set. Your linework is still rushed, but you're demonstrating a considerable improvement in your understanding of how these forms exist within the same space, and your ability to convey a consistent sense of scale. Your organic intersections are similar - you've definitely pushed those forms to be more complicated than they should be as per the instructions, but you are demonstrating that you understand how these exist together, and are drawing them as objects with independent volumes that need to be taken into consideration, rather than pasting flat shapes on top of each other on a flat page.

So this submission suggests a few things:

• You're rushing. Not always reading the instructions as carefully as you should, not taking as much time as each mark demands, etc.

• You have a strong understanding of 3D space and grasp many of the overarching concepts.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want you to do 4 pages of organic forms with contour curves. Reread the instructions for the exercise before attempting it. I want to see that you can be patient and plan things out. I know full well you are capable of doing an excellent job at these exercises (the texture-based ones are understandable, but everything else is well within your reach currently), but you need to slow down and think.

Also, much of this lesson appears to have been done with a pen that is much thicker than the recommended size (around 0.5mm), and the impact is visible. Try to use a more appropriate size from here on out.

Uncomfortable

2019-02-26 23:57

Fairly nice work overall, but I have a few things to point out.

Firstly, your arrows are looking pretty good - they flow nicely not only across the page, but through all three dimensions of space. At the same time, you're maintaining smooth, confident linework.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are okay, but you're definitely stiffening up with those ellipses. It's clear that you're hesitating as you draw them, rather than pushing forwards with the kind of confident, persistent pace that'll help you to maintain the integrity of its shape. You're definitely very focused on the accuracy of each ellipse (and you're doing a good job of keeping those ellipses snug between the edges of the form) but your main priority should still be maintaining evenly shaped ellipses. Only once you're able to do that, should you start worrying about accuracy and control.

Your contour curves are definitely a little better, though still on the stiff side, just to a lesser degree. You're doing a pretty decent job of keeping the ellipses properly aligned to your minor axis line, which is good. Just keep pushing yourself to draw with more confidence, being sure to apply the ghosting method (which forces you to invest time in the planning/preparation phases rather than into the execution phase), and to draw from the shoulder. Drawing from the wrist can also contribute to stiff ellipses and curves.

Your texture analyses are quite well done. The first and third studies (left side of the exercise) were a little simplistic, but the middle one there demonstrates a great deal of focus and observation. It's clear that the marks you're putting down reflect actual details present in your reference image, where as the first and third are drawn more from memory, trying to follow a set pattern.

On the right side however, you've done a pretty fantastic job and are demonstrating a good use of that textural information as a tool to convey varying levels of density.

For the most part your dissections continue to carry this over, though the quality varies as you experiment and play with different kinds of texture. There are a few where you're not quite wrapping the texture around the form believably (like the iguana scales on the first page), but you're generally demonstrating an awareness of this and striving to tackle it, with many solid successes.

Your form intersections definitely demonstrate a good grasp of 3D space and how these forms all relate to one another in 3D space. The only issue I'm seeing is that when you're intersecting with a rounded object (with a sphere or a cone), you have a tendency to draw the curve of the intersection to be quite shallow or at times reversed. It definitely takes a good deal of development of one's grasp of 3D space so this isn't surprising, but it is a particular area you'll want to focus on as you move forwards.

This does improve as you continue to move forwards however, and I don't see any intersections that are outright wrong on your last page - just a little shallow in their curvature.

Finally, your organic intersections demonstrate a good understanding of how this exercise involves stacking objects with independent volumes, and trying to resolve how they can all sit together in a way that makes sense. Your linework (especially where you add additional line weight) does get a little stiff at times, but overall you've done a good job of demonstrating the understanding of how these forms sag against one another, and you've moved well beyond the idea of simply drawing flat shapes on a flat page.

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