Uncomfortable

2019-03-27 16:03

Definitely much better. Just one thing to keep in mind - from what I'm seeing, the degree of your contour curves doesn't change as we move through the form itself. Give these notes a read to get an idea of what you're doing wrong with that.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-03-30 18:46

They are definitely getting there. I'm starting to see your brain working through the spatial problems of understanding how these forms all have to interact with one another, but there are still areas where they're cutting into one another rather than moving aside to accommodate their neighbours.

That is ultimately at the core of this exercise - you're resolving a spatial problem where you've got all these solid sausage forms sitting in the same space, which would be physically impossible. Like a pile of water balloons, you can't have them cut into one another - they instead have to push each other around, sagging and slumping until they find a point of equilibrium.

So start out by putting down a ground plane to help yourself visualize a flat surface. Then place a single sausage just resting there, minding it's own business. Next, pile another one on top - think about how it's going to bend to accomodate this mass beneath it, how it's being pushed up and out rather than cutting right through it. When you're drawing a given sausage, focus only on it- don't worry about the one you're going to draw next. Then repeat the process until you've got a nice pile going. Try drawing from more of an angle (your pages were more from straight-on, try shooting from a 3/4 angle).

The other point worth mentioning is that your linework is definitely looking kind of uncertain at the moment. There's not a lot of confidence there, and you may have slipped back into drawing from your wrist. So here's what I want you to do:

• Reread the lesson 1 and 2 material - you don't need to redo all the exercises, just reread the lesson content and take the time to absorb it. It's all been rewritten since you were last doing drawabox, so there have been some changes and clarifications.

• Do 1 page of organic forms with contour ellipses, then one page with contour curves. Focus on being smooth and confident. Your sausage forms are just simple things, basically two equally spaced spheres connected by a single tube of consistent width (as shown here, later in the lessons). Shake off that hesitation, draw confidently from your shoulder, using the ghosting method.

• Do one page of organic intersections, taking into consideration what I've written above.

Uncomfortable

2019-04-01 16:04

It looks like your last submission was on March 28th, so you'll have to wait until April 11th before submitting this work (as per the 2 weeks between submissions rule). Feel free to submit it again on or after that date and I'll jump right on it.

Uncomfortable

2019-04-03 19:32

Generally pretty well done, with a few little issues to address.

To start with, your arrows are looking good. They flow nicely through all three dimensions of space and explore the full depth of the scene, rather than just being limited to running across the two dimensions of the page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses were pretty well done, though I am noticing a tendency to use the same degree for each ellipse. In addition to this, I am seeing some issues - and this gets a little more noticeable with the contour curves - in maintaining your alignment with the central minor axis line, as explained here.

You've definitely put a great deal of effort into your texture analyses, which is great to see. You're headed in the right direction, though one thing that definitely jumps out at me is the fact that you're attempting to enclose each and every element of your texture in a solid, closed line. You're basically very clearly defining the outline of each of these elements, which in turn makes it quite difficult to play with the density of detail, since there's no way to bleed through these elements and leave some information to be implied rather than explicitly presented to the viewer. I explain this a little further in these notes.

You don't want to get caught in the trap of treating your lines as though they exist in the real world. Instead, the marks we tend to perceive are simply shadows cast by the forms present. Shadows themselves are very fluid, and depend heavily on the nature of the light source. A light source can be lacking, in which case our "lines" expand in width and merge together, or that light source can be very bright, blowing everything out like an overexposed photograph, leaving only a few minimal shadows to imply the presence of further detail.

The key thing to remember here is that this means we don't have to explicitly draw every little bit of detail - we can imply the presence of further detail in the areas we don't draw. That applies to both the areas of solid black, where everything is engulfed in shadow, as well as the areas of solid white. I definitely noticed in your gradients that you did struggle with pushing the darker area to the left of your attempts, resulting in the transition from the solid black inch or so to your actual texture being very visible. When done correctly, there should be no visible border between these two regions that you can identify.

Your dissections are definitely a good start, but there are a couple things I'm noticing here:

• There's definitely a tendency to get a little cartoony with some of these textures. This suggests to me that you're still drawing from memory, rather than spending most of your time observing your reference, only looking away to transfer a specific mark or two before looking back at your reference (as explained here). Do not trust your memory.

• You've got some success in certain areas with wrapping the textures around the rounded surfaces, but this is definitely something you aren't entirely consistent with. Keep how that surface moves through 3D space in mind.

Moving onto your form intersections, you're doing okay here, but I am definitely noticing some shakiness for your overall line quality. Don't forget to apply the ghosting method to each and every mark to ensure that each stroke is smooth and confidently drawn, without hesitation. The second your pen touches the page, you're committed, and any opportunity to avoid a mistake has passed. All you can do is push forwards and make the mark. If you mess up, no big deal, there are plenty more lines to draw. Don't allow yourself to hesitate under any circumstances.

I'm also noticing that you didn't quite fill up most of these pages. Consider why you're doing these exercises - this is for your own betterment, so you should be taking full advantage of ever opportunity to practice these skills, and should not be leaving ample blank space on your pages where you could have otherwise furthered your practice.

Finally, your first attempt at the organic intersections was fairly well done (though on that larger sausage form, I think your contour curves are reading backwards, causing a strange optical illusion). You definitely need to work on keeping the contour curves wrapping around the form (as explained here), but you're doing a good job of demonstrating an understanding of how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, and how the space they occupy must be resolved to find a state of balance.

Your second attempt definitely fell flat. I'm not sure why you added line weight in the way that you did, but it entirely flattened out the drawing, and made your linework appear very shaky, and as a result, undermined the illusion of solid form. Your contour curves here also seemed to be drawn somewhat sloppily, as though you weren't thinking about what each mark was meant to achieve.

By and large you're moving in the right direction, but you do have a tendency to get a little sloppy (especially when it comes to applying the ghosting method, or taking the time to apply your contour curves correctly).

As such, before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to do one full page of form intersections, and one more page of organic intersections. Take your time and work through each one with patience. Before attempting each one, I want you to reread the instructions for it, and rewatch its video so you're completely up-to-date on exactly what you should be doing.

Uncomfortable

2019-04-07 17:04

Your arrows are looking pretty good. They flow nicely across the page, though one thing I want you to keep in mind is that while you've got the width of the arrow decreasing as it moves farther away from the viewer, the actual amount of room between the zigzagging lengths should also be getting smaller, since it is all of space that compresses as we look farther and farther away. I explain this further in this section.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses do leave a bit to be desired. Your ellipses are certainly drawn confidently, though there are a couple of issues that need to be addressed:

• You've neglected to draw the central minor axis line for many of these, which suggests that you're not really concerned with the purpose it serves, and therefore not thinking about how your ellipses are aligned within the form. Read about this here.

• It's important that you work on getting your ellipses to fit snugly between the edges of the form, since we're trying to create the illusion that they are lines that run along the surface of the form. As soon as the ellipse bursts outside of the silhouette of the form, or floats somewhat arbitrarily inside of it, this illusion gets lost. Applying the ghosting method more conscientiously will help you improve your control and accuracy while continuing to maintain the evenness and smoothness of the elliptical shapes.

• You've got some cases here where the degree of your ellipses makes sense, shifting naturally along the length of the form, but there are others where it seems somewhat more random. Give these notes on the topic a read.

Your organic forms with contour curves are generally better, though you are struggling in a few places with getting the lines to accelerate in their curvature as they reach the edge so as to give the impression of hooking back around. You're close, and you're getting it in a number of cases, but there are still examples - like the bottom right of the page - where many of the contour curves just fall short of giving the impression that they continue along the other side. Overshooting your curves a little as explained here can definitely help with this.

Very nice work with both your texture analyses and your dissections - you've demonstrated a great deal of attention to detail, and a good understanding of the little forms along the surface of your forms to inform how you apply the little cast shadows to create the illusion of texture. At no point did you work on auto-pilot, trying to scribble in the illusion of texture - you were purposeful with every mark, and clearly thought through how you wanted to approach each texture individually. Great work.

Your form intersections demonstrate a pretty good grasp of how these forms all relate to one another in 3D space. My one critique here is your use of hatching lines. Any line that sits on the surface of a form functions like a contour line, and describes how that surface deforms through space. So when you put straight lines on the side of a box, that's fine - the surface is flat, so the straight lines help reinforce that. When you apply similarly straight lines on the rounded surface of a cone or a cylinder however, you serve to completely flatten it out. You need to be a little more mindful when applying techniques like this, and consider what kind of impact they're going to have.

I noticed in a few places where you attempted to curve those contour lines (so you clearly understood that what you were doing wasn't working), but those curves were quite sloppy and shallow, and continued to flatten things out.

Lastly, you've done a good job with your organic intersections. You're clearly demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, how they sag and slump in order to reach a state of equilibrium. Your contour curves are looking a bit better here, though they are a little sloppy still - you need to work on the alignment of the curves (relative to the minor axis), and on keeping the curves snug between the edges of the sausage forms.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-04-10 22:45

You've got a good start on your arrows - there's a few here that really strongly convey the sense of depth of the scene and explore all three dimensions, so that's great to see. It probably would have been better had you made better use of the page though - I'm generally very much in favour of drawing big and not being afraid to overlap, but it does feel a little all over the place here, with large swathes of blank space in some areas, and heavy clusters in others.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking solid. Your ellipses are quite smooth and tight (though on occasion they do stiffen up a little, so keep an eye on that and don't ever put accuracy ahead of the flow of your lines). One other thing I'd like to mention is that the sausage forms are essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You've nailed that in a few places, but you've got a few others that are more stretched and elongated, with the ends no longer appearing to maintain their spherical integrity, or where one end is considerably smaller than the other. Just something to keep in mind as you continue moving forwards - keeping your sausages simple in this manner will help maintain their solidity.

You're doing well with the contour curves as well - they're wrapping around the forms nicely, and aligning fairly well to your minor axes.

Very, VERY nice work on your texture analyses. You've clearly demonstrated a strong grasp of how this involves leveraging cast shadow, and have shown a good grasp of what it means to draw from observation rather than memory. This carries over to the dissections as well - a lot of great choices of textures, and you tackled each one with specific consideration for each individual subject matter, rather than applying any kind of one-size-fits-all solution. Very well done.

Your form intersections demonstrate a pretty good spatial understanding. The forms feel solid, and consistent within the same space. The only thing that stands out to me here is the use of hatching on rounded surfaces. I can see that you've attempted to wrap those hatching lines around (rather than keeping them straight), but often times this is something of a losing battle. The hatching lines, especially when they're quite short, tend to flatten things out regardless. Instead, on cases like cylinders, it's better to apply longer hatching lines lengthwise along the cylinder - ones that are meant to be flat and sleek. In general, hatching does work best when the lines are straight, so finding places where that works is generally the best bet. On spheres, rather than applying hatching, adding a contour ellipse - like the pole of a globe - can be much more effective.

Finally, your organic intersections demonstrate a good grasp of how these forms interact with one another, pushing each other aside, and slumping/sagging against one another in order to find a state of equilibrium. You've pushed well past any sense that these are just flat shapes pasted on top of one another, and are conveying a strong sense of form and three dimensional space.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-04-11 20:38

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely across the page. I noticed that you're playing with the width of your arrows as they move farther away from us, but one thing to keep in mind is that the space between these zigzagging lengths is also going to get smaller as it gets farther from us. This is because all of spaces compresses as we look farther and farther away, as explained here.

Your organic forms with contour lines are looking pretty good. The only thing I noticed as an issue is fairly minor, but it does look like the degrees of your ellipses remain fairly consistent through the lengths of your forms. Just in case you weren't thinking about how those degrees change depending on the orientation of each cross-section, be sure to give these notes a read.

Your texture analysis exercise definitely went off in the wrong direction. What you ended up doing was relying very heavily on crosshatching - this is exactly what texture (the patterns and formations of cast shadows produced by the micro-forms that exist along the surface of a larger object) replaces. Crosshatching is instead a sort of stand-in that is frequently used when someone doesn't want to bother to convey the texture that is present, and wants to focus on shading/rendering. Shading and rendering are things we simply don't bother with, for the reasons explained here.

Now, your approach to texture did get back on track in the dissections exercise, at least somewhat. You've still got a lot of hatching here and there. If you look at any of the examples provided alongside the exercises, you'll see that I don't demonstrate any use of hatching at all - instead, I focus on the little forms that make up the surface of a given object, and I look at the shadows each one casts on its surroundings. The little pocks, the bumps, the rough surfaces, etc. I use these patterns of shadow to move from dark and dense to light and sparse.

Your form intersections are looking solid. You're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space. I did mention in the exercises that you should stay away from any forms stretched in any one dimension (like the longer cylinders), but aside from that, you did well. Just be more mindful of the instructions in the future.

Lastly, your organic intersections do convey a good grasp of how these forms would interact with one another, how they slump and sag against each other and find a state of equilibrium, rather than feeling as though they've just been pasted on top of each other as flat shapes. My only issue here is that you've filled maybe a fifth of each of those pages, which is a pity. It suggests to me that you see these exercises as things to get through, rather than exercises that are helping you to develop your grasp of space and form, and things that should be taken advantage of. Keep that in mind as you continue to move forwards - you benefit from making the most of each exercise.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You definitely have a lot of room for improvement with texture, so I recommend that you continue to practice that on your own, and also tackle the 25 texture challenge as you continue to move forwards. That challenge in particular should not be done all at once, but rather in parallel with the other lessons.

Uncomfortable

2019-04-15 19:39

Nice work overall!

Starting out with your arrows, they flow quite nicely across the page, and I can see that you're being mindful of making the far end of the arrow smaller than the closer end. One thing that is sometimes missing from your arrows however is that you need to ensure the space between the lengths of zigzagging arrow shrinks as we look farther and farther away. It is, after all, all of space that compresses as we look into the distance, not just the objects themselves. I explain this further here.

Your organic forms with contour lines are looking solid. You're maintaining confident linework, and are achieving fairly solid control, with the ellipses and curves falling snugly between the edges of the forms. One thing I want you to be more attentive to however is the degree of your ellipses/curves, as it should be shifting slightly along the length of a given form.

Your texture analyses are very, very well done. You're focusing on precisely the core of this exercise, demonstrating excellent observational skills, along with a good sense of how to organize that information to control the required density of the texture at any given point. This carries over to your dissections, where you're doing an excellent job of wrapping the textures around these rounded sausage forms.

Despite your struggles, you really did a great job with the form intersections, and conveyed a strong grasp of how these sit in 3D space, and how they relate to one another. Same goes for your organic intersections, where the challenge is specifically to make these forms feel as though they are slumping and sagging and brushing up against one another, pushing each other aside to find a state of equilibrium, rather than falling into the trap of making them feel as though they've been pasted on top of one another as flat shapes on a page. You did a great job in conveying the form and mass of each form, as well as their relationships to one another.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-04-22 19:03

To start with, your arrows are quite well done. They flow nicely through all three dimensions of space, exploring the depth of the scene and avoiding the sense that they're merely moving across the two dimensions of the page you're drawing on.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are fairly solid, though I'm noticing on occasion that your ellipses have a slight tendency to stiffen up. You are however fairly mindful of their alignment, and of keeping them snug between the edges of the form. One area you likely do understand but need to perhaps think a little more about is the shift in the degree of the ellipses through the length of a given form. In many of these cases your ellipses maintain a consistent degree, although in a few they seem to be a little more arbitrary.

For your contour curves, there's one issue that stands out - you have a tendency to draw the curves such that they fall outside of the silhouette of the form. This breaks the illusion that we're after - we're trying to make it seem as though these lines run along the surface of the form, so they can describe directly how those surfaces flow through space.

I do see some improvement in certain areas in this regard, but it's not always necessarily a conscious thing - so you need to be more mindful of keeping the contour lines snug between the edges of the form here to push that illusion as far as you can. You are however doing a good job of hooking those curves around so they give the impression that they're wrapping around the sausage form, which is good to see.

Though you did have difficulty with the texture analyses, you actually didn't do a bad job. You took the time to study and analyze your textures carefully, and worked to the best of your ability from direct observation rather than from memory. The one area that I believe will benefit most from some advice is your tendency to try and enclose each and every element in your texture. That is, in the case of scales, you outline each and every scale completely.

This doesn't work particularly well for texture - it's something that we tend to do when it comes to construction for the major forms of an object, but when dealing with texture (and the little forms that exist on the surface of an object to give it the impression of texture) we have to shift to a different tactic.

As explained here, relying instead on drawing the shadows cast by a given form rather than trying to outline the little form in its entirety gives us a lot more freedom. It allows us to control how much linework we actually put down without having that determine how many forms are actually present. By adjusting the lighting scheme, we can plunge the texture into shadow, leaving a large, solid area of black (there are still scales there, even though we haven't drawn any of them inside of this area). We can also plunge them into light, overexposing with a direct light source to create a clear area of white - where again, the scales are still present, even if they're not drawn.

You actually did a significantly better job of applying this in your dissections, so it's good to see that moving in the right direction.

Your form intersections were very well done. I'm really pleased to see the volume of work here, and the fact that you're really demonstrating a strong grasp of how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. Similarly, your organic intersections demonstrate a further grasp of how forms not only relate to one another in space, but how they interact with each other, slumping and sagging against one another as they reach a state of equilibrium without interpenetrating.

Overall, you've done a good job. Keep in mind what I mentioned in regards to the contour lines, but feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-04-23 19:51

Your arrows are well done. You're doing a good job of having them flow through all three dimensions of space, playing with perspective by both having the far end of the arrows shrink, as well as having the space in between the zigzagging lengths compress as well. This demonstrates a pretty good grasp of the idea that you're constructing objects and forms within a three dimensional world, rather than just drawing shapes on a flat page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are reasonably well done, though there are some issues that are present in some of them, but not in others. For example, in some places the degree of your ellipses shifts pretty erratically (rather than shifting gradually over the length of a form), and in some places you're doing a pretty good job of keeping the ellipses fairly snug between the edges of the form (giving the impression that the contour lines run along the surface of the form, which is what we're after), and in some other places they have a greater tendency to float more arbitrarily and feel less grounded.

This merely suggests to me that you've got a decent idea of what to aim for, but that you will continue to improve with practice. One thing I do want to point out however is that these sausage forms are essentially two spheres of equal size connected by a tube of consistent width, as shown here in this diagram from a later lesson. I'm noticing that the ends of your sausages tend to be a little stretched - that is, the roundedness of the "sphere" at the end gets a little more elongated. Try and remember to keep spherical proportions here.

Your contour curves are doing a good job of wrapping around the forms properly, though keep an eye on their alignment relative to the central minor axis line. I can see that you are doing a good job of striving to keep the contour curves snugly within the silhouette of the form - they fall outside every now and then, but the intent of what you're aiming for is pretty clear, so keep that up.

Very nice work on your texture analyses. You're observing your reference images quite carefully and showing a good eye for the detail that is present, rather than drawing from memory. You also apply the information very effectively to those density gradients, controlling your shadow shapes expertly to achieve the kind of effect you're aiming for.

That shadow control and observation is definitely a little weaker when you get into the dissections, though I think this may be because you perhaps weren't as focused at the time. Some of these textures were fairly decent, while others did seem a little oversimplified (mars terrain, black widow, jaguar fur, etc). Also I noticed that in the rope texture you utilized more generic hatching rather than actually studying your reference carefully.

I know you're capable of solid observation, but it's important that you invest the time to actually execute the work to the best of your ability.

With the form intersections, there's two elements that I look at. The first and most important is whether or not you're drawing forms in a manner that makes them feel consistent, as though they belong together in the same scene. This is pretty important, and is at the core of this exercise. On this point, you're doing a solid job. It doesn't feel like you've cut out forms from different scenes and pasted them together - they feel cohesive, like they belong together.

The other point that I look at is the actual intersections you've drawn. I don't expect students to nail these at this point, but I do like to see how they approach them. This is definitely where yours are considerably weaker - the actual intersections between most of your forms on this page for instance don't entirely make sense.

Specifically, if we look at this section as an example (from the upper left corner of the aforementioned page, we see two different intersections. Here's how I'd tackle them. I'm constantly keeping in mind the idea that the intersection between two forms, or rather the line that defines them, must run along the surface of both forms at the same time. In order to determine this, we need to take into consideration the orientation we're asserting for the given form in space, and how it relates to the other forms around it.

This mental model of 3D space is something that develops over time, and you're definitely on your way there. As you continue pushing yourself to handle these 3D forms in later lessons, you will gradually grow more comfortable with this sort of spatial problem.

Your organic intersections actually show just that - These are quite well done, and demonstrate a pretty good understanding of how these forms relate to one another, how they push one another aside, slumping and sagging in order to find a state of equilibrium without pushing into each others' volume.

There are a few areas to work on, but by and large you're doing a great job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-04-23 20:23

You've got a good start on your arrows. They're flowing quite nicely across the page, and I can see you playing with the width of the arrow as it moves farther away from the viewer. One thing that I do want to recommend however is that perspective doesn't only shrink the width of the arrow as we look farther away - it also compresses the space in between the zigzagging lengths, as explained here. This is something that you can definitely push a little further to help exaggerate the idea that these arrows flow through the depth of the scene, exploring all three dimensions of space.

With your organic forms, the first thing I want to point out is that this exercise really benefits from the use of simple sausage forms, as explained here. You can also take a look at this diagram, which shows how the sausages are essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. No pinching through its length, no swelling, etc. Keeping these simple allows us to focus on the contour lines themselves. In the future when we get into utilizing these kinds of forms as part of our constructions, you'll see that we rely on the idea of everything starting out as simple as possible, so as to maintain the illusion of solidity. We can always add complexity as we go by adding additional forms after the fact - but all of the components we play with are at their core, very simple.

You're doing a pretty good job at keeping your ellipses and curves snugly contained within the silhouette of the organic form. I'm also pleased to see you drawing through most of your ellipses - there's a couple where you didn't, and they definitely came out much more stiff and uneven than the others.

I'm also seeing signs that you're aware of how the degrees of your ellipses shifts along the length of the form, though there are a few places where you may not have been thinking about this, and as a result drew them with the same degree across the entire length. Just be sure to keep this in mind.

Moving onto your texture analyses, there's definitely signs here that you didn't fully grasp the purpose of the exercise:

• Your observation on the first one is pretty good - you kept an eye on your reference image and focused on individual details, capturing that information and transferring it to your drawing. I can also see that on this first one, you attempted to use the cracks in what I assume to be a wood log to convey a shift in density from left to right. That's pretty good, though the far left side is meant to be completely black, with a gradual transition to becoming more sparse. The point of the black bar on the left side is to give you something to blend from - but from the looks of it, you didn't pay too much attention to it, and didn't create a smooth transition.

• Textures are made up of little forms that exist on the surface of an object. Whether they're bumps, cracks, bits of bark, etc. In the lesson, I explain how instead of attempting to think in terms of drawing with line, that you should think in terms of the shadows these little forms cast. I don't see too much of this in your work - you should definitely reread this section, along with this "common mistake" from the exercise page.

• While you did a good job of observing your reference carefully in the first one, the second and third fell short in this area. You seem here to be working more from memory - that is, spending a lot of time drawing without looking back at your reference. As explained here, the moment we look away from our reference, our brain goes to work simplifying what we've seen - resulting in us drawing symbols that represent the information we'd witnessed, rather than accurate depictions of it.

All in all, I think you started off on the right track, but ended up forgetting the actual parameters and instructions of the exercise, and continued based on what you remembered about the task. Be sure to reread the instructions as much as is necessary - just as our memory is faulty when it comes to observing and capturing texture and detail, it often fails us when it comes to remembering complex concepts and instructions.

Your textures on the dissections were decidedly more successful than the texture analysis exercise. There's still room for improvement, but you had some particularly nice results with some of these. Your linework was more mindful, and I think you paid more attention to your reference images. You also did a good job of wrapping the textures around the organic forms. There is still room for improvement of course, but here you're on the right track.

You've got a good start on your form intersections. The forms largely are drawn in a manner that feels fairly consistent with one another, and the intersections are demonstrating a well developing grasp of how they relate to one another. I did notice that you seem to have missed the instruction about avoiding forms that are stretched in one dimension (like longer cylinders) - I specifically want students to keep their forms equilateral (roughly the same size in all three dimensions) so as to avoid any unnecessary complications from foreshortening.

Lastly, your organic intersections are moving in the right direction, though remember that you want to convey the idea that each of these forms has weight to it. If there's nothing supporting its weight underneath, it's going to be sagging down to whatever will support it. Additionally, keep these forms simple in order to reinforce the illusion of solidity (as discussed before).

By and large you're doing well, but you do have a habit of forgetting or missing important instructions, so as you continue to move forwards, take care and read through the instructions as many times as you need to. Sometimes when you revisit an exercise, or come back to it the next day, giving it another read will be worthwhile.

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

As for your question about 'compound form exercises', I'm not quite sure what you're referring to. Could you give me an example of what you mean?

Uncomfortable

2019-04-26 16:47

Hahaha, it happens.

To start with, your arrows are looking pretty good, as they flow through space. One thing I do want to emphasize though is that while making the width of the arrow shrink as it moves farther away from the viewer, don't forget that the space between the zigzagging lengths of arrow (like in your top-left arrow on the first page) will also compress, as explained here.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally pretty well done. I'm seeing an effort to keep the ellipses snug between the edges of the form (rather than letting them slip out of the silhouette or float arbitrarily within it). I'm also seeing experimentation with shifting the degree of your ellipses along the length of the form. There are a couple places where your alignment can use some work, but generally speaking it's well done.

The only thing I want to mention on this front is a reminder to keep your sausage forms simple. Sausages are essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. No pinching in the middle, no unexpected swelling of the form, no shrinking towards one end.

Your contour curves generally are okay, though I am noticing a slightly higher prevalence of alignment issues, and the degree of your curves tends to be a lot more consistent and static here. As explained here, make sure they're shifting gradually along the length of the form.

You've got a good start on the texture analysis exercise. You're demonstrating a gradual development of your observational skills, and a shift from drawing more symbolically to actually attempting to capture what it is you see before you. This carries over into your dissections, where you're tackling each texture with care and purpose, picking on specific visual information and detail to transfer over into your drawing rather than relying on any kind of scribbling, randomness, or generic hatching.

Your form intersections nail the first point I look for - which is whether or not you can draw forms that feel consistent within the same space. You're doing a great job on that front. Your actual intersections, which are a secondary aspect of this exercise, are getting there but there still do seem to be some mistakes here and there. Always remember - as covered in the lesson, the intersection line is something that exists on the surface of both forms simultaneously. If ever you find your intersection line leaves the surface of either one of the two intersecting forms, then you'll know something's gone wrong.

Additionally, don't forget that in the instructions, I mentioned that you should avoid any forms that are stretched in any one dimension, and stick to those that are more equilateral (roughly the same size on all three axes). This helps keep further complexity away by avoiding unnecessary foreshortening.

Lastly, your organic intersections are doing a decent job of demonstrating how these forms sag and slump against one another, finding a state of balance without pushing into each others' volumes. One suggestion I do have however is to focus on using basic, simple sausages (as explained earlier in my critique). The more complex you allow them to get, the more you compromise on their illusion of solidity. Construction, which we'll get into in the next lesson, works on the basis that everything starts out as simple as possible, so as to start out with as strong of an illusion of solidity as we can. From there, we add more and more forms, building things up towards our final intended object. That solid, simple foundation is key.

Overall you've done quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-04-26 17:02

Very, very well done! Your work here has a couple of minor things that I want to point out, but by and large you've done a great job.

To start with, your arrows are generally flowing fairly well through 3D space. Keep in mind though that while you're playing with the width of the arrow getting smaller as we look farther away, the space in between the zigzagging lengths of the arrow will also compress, as explained here. This will help sell the idea that we're looking farther into a 3D scene, rather than the arrow simply flowing across the page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are fairly well done, though at times your ellipses get a little stiff. Always remember to draw these with confidence, following the use of the ghosting method, and draw them from your shoulder. Maintaining the flow and evenness of the shape is your first priority. Also worth mentioning, keep your sausage forms simple. A sausage is basically two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (as shown here). Don't let them get pinched/narrower through the midsection, and keep their ends equal in size.

Your contour curves are similarly looking good, though keep an eye on their alignment to the central minor axis line.

Your texture analyses are looking great. You're demonstrating excellent observational skills, and generally a good sense of how the lines you're putting down are in fact shadows being cast by actual forms. We can see in your first two rows a really nice sense of how the amount of detail being defined diminishes because it's being blasted away by an overexposed lighting scheme, leaving the rest to be implied.

I did notice that in the last one (that is, the last if the page were right side up), with the porous material (I think it says bone?), that you didn't take into consideration the fact that the layers on top would themselves cast shadows onto the layers beneath, and instead outlined the individual layers fairly uniformly.

The texturing carried over nicely into your dissections, where you extended the same principles and added the challenge of wrapping them around already rounded forms. Very well done.

Your form intersections demonstrate a strong grasp of how these forms exist within the same space, and how they relate to one another. You've clearly developed your understanding of 3D space a long way. The only thing I want to mention here is that on your first page of intersections with spheres, ellipses, cones, etc. the additional line weight you've drawn has a tendency to be a little stiffer than your original linework. This suggests to me that you're drawing it with less confidence - always remember that you want to execute each and every mark with the same kind of boldness, applying the steps of the ghosting method. If you hesitate and hold yourself back, then you'll imbue the overall drawing with that sense of rigidity, and undermine the solidity of your construction. The second page with various forms was definitely better on this note.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a great job of conveying how these forms sag and slump against one another, attempting to resolve their position in the pile without cutting into each others' volumes, and ultimately finding a state of equilibrium.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-05-02 19:55

Great work to start on your arrows- they're flowing very nicely through all three dimensions of space, and I can see a lot of dynamism in how they're moving. Generally here I look to see whether the student is demonstrating an understanding of how space itself compresses as you look farther and farther away - I can obviously see you shrinking the width of the arrow-ribbon as we look farther, though here it's a little difficult to tell whether you understand that the distance between the zig-zagging lengths would shrink as well. As such, I figure I'd call it out anyway, just in case. I explain this concept in this section. It's just something to keep in mind, and is a minor point.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are solid - you're doing a good job at generally sticking to fairly simple sausage forms, your ellipses are pretty smooth and even, and you're doing a pretty good job of keeping the ellipses snug within the confines of the sausage's silhouette. Continue to keep an eye on the alignment of your ellipses to the central minor axis line - you're very close, but there are slight deviations here and there. Additionally, I can see some minor shifting of the degrees of your ellipse but often times they're remaining pretty consistent. Give these notes on why the degree of the ellipses should widen/narrow over the course of the form's length a read.

Your contour curves are quite similar - generally very well done, and you're wrapping them around the form in a convincing manner, but keep an eye on the degree shift and the alignment to the minor axis.

You've done some fantastic work on your texture analyses. A lot of careful attention to detail, excellent demonstration of your observation skills, and you've also shown a keen understanding of how texture relies on the use of cast shadow rather than actually drawing the individual forms themselves. You've got a lot of great variety here, and you applied what you learned from studying each texture to great effect when transferring it to the density gradient. This also was carried over nicely into your dissections. You handled the spatial challenge of wrapping those textures around the 3D form well, and I can see you pushing into breaking the silhouette a little with your details. You could probably stand to take more advantage of the silhouette, but you're absolutely headed in the right direction here.

Your form intersections were generally quite well done. For the most part you're demonstrating a well developing grasp of 3D space and how these forms relate to one another, though I did feel that, especially earlier on in the exercise, you did have a tendency to apply more dramatic foreshortening to your forms than you perhaps should have. As explained in lesson 1, foreshortening can imply the scale of an object (dramatic foreshortening suggesting large scale and shallow foreshortening suggesting something smaller and more relatable to the viewer). When you have a lot of forms together, leaning on shallower foreshortening helps to make the objects feel more consistent and cohesive. All the same, you are doing fairly well, and the intersections themselves suggest a spatial awareness that is developing nicely.

Your organic intersections are also fairly well done, and I can see a grasp of how these forms occupy the same space, how they interact with one another, slumping and sagging as they find a state of equilibrium without violating each others' volumes. One thing that would help with the overall presentation as well as with the sense of solidity, is playing more with line weight to clarify overlaps. Right now you stuck to fairly uniform lines and cast shadows, but there's not much in between to suggest where one form sits in front of the other.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-05-07 20:12

Very well done! Overall your work here is pretty stellar. To start with, your arrows flow very nicely through 3D space, demonstrating a strong grasp of how it gets compressed the further away we look, resulting in the arrows getting narrower as well as the space between their zigzagging lengths shrinking. You've done a good job of conveying how these arrows plunge into the depth of the scene, rather than remaining along the surface of the page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are pretty solid. There's still a little work to be done on getting the ellipses and curves to fit more snugly between the edges of the silhouette (to promote the illusion that the contour lines run along the surface of the form), but this is pretty normal, and you're getting fairly close. I'm also seeing attention being paid to the alignment of your ellipses to the central minor axis line, as well as signs that you're shifting the degree of your ellipses along the length of the forms.

You've done pretty well with your texture analyses, especially the density gradients towards the right side. I do have a couple pieces of advice to offer however:

• on your first texture, I do feel that you were a little more tightly bound to the idea of working with individual lines, rather than seeing the marks you put down as the shadows being cast by small forms resting along the surface of your object. You definitely leaned harder into this in the latter two studies, which is great, but it's definitely something to always keep in mind - lines never truly exist. We're either making them up to describe and enclose the space an object occupies (which we do quite often), or what we think of as lines are actually very narrow shapes. Thinking of them as shapes instead frees us to be much more flexible in how we use them.

• Along the left side of the page, the focus is more on observing our reference as closely as possible, carrying over the detail and information there without really processing it. I'm seeing you doing a fair bit of processing (thinking in terms of shadow, trying to organize your details, etc.). Instead, for this section, focus on just replicating all of the density that you see without trying to group it together. That organization and processing is reserved for the right side of the exercise.

You really demonstrate a solid grasp of the use of texture and detail throughout your dissections, and tackle a number of different textures without resorting to any sort of one-size fits all solution to the marks you make. You're avoiding any sort of generic hatching, in favour of specifically studying your reference and finding the kinds of shadows and forms that are present there.

One thing you'll want to keep an eye on is pushing the idea that these textures are wrapping around a form - so the surface itself turns away from the viewer along the sides, resulting in the texture getting more compressed. You are certainly showing signs of grasping this, but need to push it a little farther.

Your form intersections demonstrate the primary thing I'm looking for - you're able to draw many of these forms together within the same space in a manner that feels consistent and cohesive. I did however only notice you attempt the actual intersections between the forms a couple times. I can understand not wanting to push those attempts further due to being worried that you'd "ruin" your drawing, but that's not really the mindset you need to be pushing here. Whether or not you get them right isn't really an issue here - it's more that you make the attempt and try to get your head around these forms cut into one another and how they relate to each other that's important.

Finally, your organic intersections are looking good - you're demonstrating a developing grasp of how these forms rest atop one another, how they push and sag and slump as they find a state of equilibrium between them. I do feel that the forms get a little stiff, but by and large these are quite well done.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like you to submit one page of form intersections with the actual intersections drawn in.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-08 20:12

Pretty good work overall! To start with, your arrows flow very nicely through space, conveying a grasp of all three dimensions and pushing into the very depth of the scene rather than remaining along the surface of the page.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves both are executed quite well. You're doing a good job of keeping your lines smooth and your ellipses evenly shaped, of hooking your curves back near the edges to continue along the opposite side, and are generally mindful of both the alignment and degree shift of your curves/ellipses (though there is room for improvement on that end).

Your texture analyses are really quite nicely done, though I do have some thoughts. Overall I think you're very much heading in the right direction, but there are two main points that I want to raise:

• On the first one, you definitely had some trouble getting from those deep darks to the lighter tones - not so much in terms of the overall gradient (you managed the density fairly well), but rather in terms of the actual marks themselves. The challenge is however very similar, just on a different scale. You fell back into hatching/crosshatching lines because it's a common technique here, but it is also one you should generally avoid as a rule - purely because it has a tendency to block out any other options. In this case, what I would have leveraged is the fact that the surface was likely to have all kinds of little pits and cracks that would create little shadow shapes you could leverage to create your transitions from dark to light. Hatching is really just a generic catch-all that does nothing to convey information about what is actually present - so instead, look deeper into your texture, and find something to use in place of that hatching.

• I noticed that as you moved from left to right on your density gradient, you tended to make things bigger in order to make the texture more sparse. That is certainly an option, but it does certainly force you into changing the texture itself in a particular way. But what if the object was covered in, say, scales that were all uniform? The trick there is not to make the elements themselves larger, but rather to imply their presence without necessarily drawing each and every one. That's where the fact that we're dealing in little cast shadows (rather than outlining each and every little form) comes into play. Shadows are subject to the lighting scenario we choose to apply. We can make things very dark by removing most of the light. Alternatively, we can overexpose the image, blasting all of the detail away with light, resulting in only a few little shadows along the corners or edges of an object, with a lot of lost-and-found elements. This results in far less linework present, but without changing what we're saying is actually present.

Your dissections are looking pretty good as well, though there are a couple minor points I want to mention in terms of the specific textures you chose - or more specifically, which aspect of them you determined to be the texture.

• A maple leaf is not a texture, it is an object. It has a texture, however - so the exercise should not have involved drawing a maple leaf, but rather taking the surface of that maple leaf and wrapping it around the section of the basic sausage form.

• A zebra's stripes is not a texture either, but for a different reason. This is instead a pattern - it has nothing to do with light and shadow, but rather is a matter of local coloration. If instead the stripes were of red and blue instead of black and white, you may have not considered them to be appropriate for this exercise - at the end of the day, local colour isn't something we deal with at all. Instead, you might have considered the short hair of a zebra, and attempted to capture that without the distraction of the stripes themselves.

Moving onto your form intersections, I primarily focus on whether or not you're able to draw these forms together in the same space in a manner that feels cohesive and consistent. In this regard, you did a good job - the forms don't feel as if they've been cut out of other drawings and pasted together - they feel like they belong within the same scene. You also made a good effort on the intersections themselves, though these do have plenty of room for improvement. This is entirely normal and expected - you will continue to develop your understanding of how these forms relate to one another as you keep moving through the lessons.

Lastly, your organic intersections do a good job of conveying how these forms slump and sag against one another, attempting to find a state of equilibrium without actually pushing through each others' volumes. That's one key factor here - I look to see if students can actually convey a believable sense that these forms are resting against one another, rather than simply occupying space on an individual level. I am quite pleased with how you've been able to create this illusion that the forms are all aware of each other and respecting each others' physical presence.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-05-14 22:10

To start, your arrows are flowing quite nicely across the page, though you do need to take greater lengths to push into the depth of the scene. Right now the arrows flow primarily along the surface. I can see you playing with the width of the arrows themselves as they move farther away from us, but a key point you're missing is that the space between the zigzagging lengths should also compress and grow smaller as they move farther away from the viewer. I explain this in this particular step.

You're doing a decent job with your contour ellipses and contour curves, but there's a couple things that stands out to me:

• Remember that the organic forms should essentially be like two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (like this). Avoid any pinching through their midsection, keep the ends the same size and avoid situations where the roundedness at the end gets elongated along the form.

• There is a little stiffness to your contour lines here. A little bit on the contour ellipses, and moreso on the contour curves. Try to apply the ghosting method a little more to increase the overall confidence behind the execution of your marks. This will help keep them smooth and even. Right now you're definitely focusing a great deal on keeping things accurate and keeping your ellipses/curves snug between the edges of the form. That is certainly good, but it should never be done at the cost of the fluidity of your strokes. Increasing your accuracy all happens during the planning/preparation phases, not during the execution.

Moving onto your texture analysis, I'm noticing that you're definitely thinking about your textures very much in terms of lines. In the lesson itself, I talk a lot about how texture consists of little forms that exist along the surface of an object. The lines themselves that we may interpret to be present don't actually exist. They're a construct we use to define the borders between things, and to assert how much space the things we construct tend to take up. They're a useful tool, but they simply don't exist in reality. Instead, when drawing our textures, we need to realize that we are not defining the bounds of these little textural forms, as this would get far too cluttered and visually confusing. Instead, imply their presence by drawing around them. That is, we draw the shadows they cast, rather than the objects themselves. These shadows are solid black shapes, rather than lines. I talk about this more in these notes.

In your dissections, I'm noticing that you're falling back onto drawing less from direct observation of your reference images, and more from your memory. You have a tendency of looking at your reference and making a list in your head of the things you see. Then you go on to draw what you think those things look like. Due to the fact that we as a species have very poor memory when it comes to accurate detail, this doesn't end up working well.

Instead, you need to get in the habit of observing your reference almost constantly, only breaking away for a moment to carry a mark over onto your drawing - something specific that you saw in your the image - before returning to it. As a rule, try not to think in terms of details you can assign a name to. For example, you might be drawing a snake, so you might see a scale. Don't attempt to draw a scale - instead, focus on the shadows cast by that SPECIFIC scale, and try to draw those. The more you think in terms of things you can name, the more you will attempt to draw what you think that object looks like, resulting in representative symbols rather than an accurate depiction of what was present.

This of course is a skill that takes a great deal of time to develop and refine - this was the first step, so keep this stuff in mind.

You've done a pretty good job with your form intersections - you're demonstrating that you can draw many forms together within the same space such that they appeal consistent and cohesive. I did notice though that you seem to have missed the instruction about avoiding forms that are overly stretched (like longer cylinders), and to stick to those that are more equilateral (the same size in all three dimensions). Be mindful of the instructions, and make sure you follow them more closely.

Lastly, your organic intersections do leave something to be desired. While you are beginning to demoinstrate a grasp for how these forms relate and interact with one another, you definitely went to great lengths to make especially complicated forms. This was something you were instructed to avoid.

Stick to simple sausage forms - as mentioned before, two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, and try not to make them too long. One of the reasons we stay away from complex forms is because construction - which we'll get into more in later lessons - focuses on building things up from their most basic elements. It is considerably more difficult to draw something complex as your first step, and to have it feel solid and three dimensional. This is exactly why you ended up way overdoing it with contour curves - your complex forms didn't read as solid, so you tried to get around that with contour lines. They can only do so much however, and they can never achieve what we can by starting simple and building up complexity as we go.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want you to reread the instructions on the organic intersections and do two more pages of that exercise.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-14 22:24

You've done a pretty good job! To start with, your arrows are flowing fairly nicely through all three dimensions of space, exploring the depth of the scene instead of lingering at the "surface" of the page. When practicing this in the future, while the large arrows are quite good, see what you can achieve with smaller ones as well, as subject matter like leaves and flower petals don't have the benefit of being quite so big, but still exhibit much of the same kind of flow.

Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along well, and I'm quite pleased with how you've packed each page full. There are a couple things I'd like you to adjust in your approach however:

• Remember that the forms should be simple sausages - that essentially means that they should be shaped like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube that remains consistent in width, as shown here from later in the lessons.

• It looks like you're not being entirely mindful of how the degree of your contour ellipses and contour curves should shift over the course of the form. Based on where the cross-sectional slice sits in space relative to the viewer, the degree will get wider or narrower, as explained here.

You've got a great start with your texture analyses, and I can signs that you're definitely grasping the idea of the marks we put down for our textures representing shadows rather than actual lines or features. Especially in the bottom right of that first page of this exercise (as it's oriented in the imgur album), you're showing a good sense of how you can manipulate those shadows. Very nicely done.

Your dissection studies were definitely very heavy on the detail. It shows that you're demonstrating well developing observational skills, which is great to see. Don't be afraid to let those areas that reach towards deep, solid blacks to go all the way, however. The reason that allowing for areas with lots of contrast (a lot of little bits of white and black all crammed together) can be problematic is that it draws the viewer's eye. Doing this unintentionally can have a negative impact on the result of a drawing. In the case of the carpet, it would have been more successful had you allowed areas to become full black, and to use the transition area from white to black to create your carpet texture.

It's also worth mentioning that while in many of your other textures, you were a lot more purposeful in the information you carried over from your reference. In the carpet, you relied a lot more on randomness and repeated strokes (rather than direct observation). In general, stay away from approaching things in this manner.

The last thing I wanted to mention about your dissections is in regards to the honeycomb and lizard scale textures. Remember that lines do not exist - try not to think in terms of line when building textures, always fall back to those shadow shapes. Lines are just a construct that we use to establish the boundaries between objects - but those boundaries themselves are just things that help us understand the real world, rather than the things that actually exist within it. In this regard, your second page of dissections was much stronger.

With your form intersections, you did a good job of demonstrating how these forms could exist within the same space together while remaining consistent and cohesive, as though they belong in the same scene. You also achieved this quite well in your organic intersections, especially the first page, with a similar challenge but where the forms were not allowed to cut into one another, and instead had to give the impression of slumping and resting against one another. Well done.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep the points I've mentioned here in mind as you continue onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-21 20:01

I was a bit confused at first, until I dug through your history. Would have been best to provide the full lesson submission, with the newer pages you'd done replacing the same exercises from your previous attempt. So I'm going to try and piece them together across the two albums.

To start with, your arrows are looking fairly well done. A lot of these flow through all three dimensions of space, although you could definitely push that impression of depth in the scene by exaggerating the scale of your arrows more dramatically. That is, make one end much larger and the other smaller. Additionally, keep in mind that not only does the size shift across the course of the arrow, but the space between the zigzagging lengths of the ribbon will compress as well, as shown here.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines (from the new album), you've done a pretty good job at ensuring that the contour ellipses and contour curves fit snugly between the edges of the form, and you're fairly attentive to their alignment relative to the central minor axis line. I can also see a visible shift in the degree of the ellipses and curves, which suggests an understanding of how the orientation of these cross-sections shifts in 3D space, relative to the viewer.

One piece of advice I do have however is to ensure that you're sticking to relatively simple sausage forms here - that means a form that is akin to two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (as shown here). No pinching through the midsection, and make sure that the rounded portion at the ends is not stretched across too much of your sausage form.

It looks like you neglected to complete the texture analysis exercise. I should have noticed previously and called it out, but unfortunately I was only giving your work a cursory glance since it had been submitted out of order. I am however going to waive this because your work on the dissections demonstrates a well developing grasp of the concepts the texture analysis exercise is meant to promote.

Specifically, I'm noticing that your observational skills are coming along well - you're not drawing from memory, but rather carrying over specific detail from your reference as you see it. You're also experimenting with the use of deeper shadows and combining areas into large shadow shapes of solid black.

One point I do want to mention is that you are still inclined to outline your textural forms a fair bit - for example, you're enclosing each individual kernel of corn. While these outlines are very useful to us when constructing large forms and establishing where they sit in space, this is far less useful when dealing with texture because it closes off the flow across a given surface. Instead, I want you to focus purely on the shadows cast by these forms onto one another, effectively describing and implying the presence of one object without actually drawing it directly. This is a better strategy because as you noticed when drawing the corn, you were unable to transition from a state of dense to sparse. You always had those outlines, and were forced to jump between binary states - that is, a state of having an outline, to a state of having no outline.

Instead, when dealing with shadows, you can gradually decrease the weight of each shadow, eventually wearing them away so much that it appears like a photograph that has been overexposed (with only the deepest pockets retaining their shadows).

Additionally, try to avoid any kind of chaotic scribbling. I noticed you being less controlled in some of the earlier texture work, and it appeared that you were trying to be rough and sketchy rather than controlling each mark you put down. Your later textures were considerably better in this regard.

Your form intersections are coming along well, though I noticed that your box constructions still do need work (your sets of parallel lines are fairly inconsistent in terms of how they converge). You also neglected to follow the instruction about avoiding overly stretched forms (like long cylinders). I specifically added this instruction because this exercise is challenging enough, and I wanted students to focus on specific spatial relationships without having to worry about extreme foreshortening.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along pretty well. I can see a good grasp of how these forms rest atop one another without infringing upon each others' space. Instead, they find a state of equilibrium by sagging and slumping against one another.

I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You do have room for improvement, but overall you're doing well. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-23 20:10

Overall you've done some great work here, there are just a few things I want to point out.

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely across the page. When you've got places where they overlap, don't be afraid to draw through them (drawing each arrow in its entirety rather than letting it stop when it gets passed over by another). We're really here to understand how the things we draw flow through space, and drawing each one in its entirety helps us relate it to an actual object rather than just lines on a piece of paper.

Additionally, you've done a good job of making the far end of the arrow small to play into the basics of perspective, though keep in mind that as we look farther away, the actual space between the zigzagging lengths of the arrow/ribbon will also shrink and compress, as shown here. This will help give your arrows more of a sense that they're coming at us from far into the depth of the scene.

Your organic forms with contour lines are coming along great. The lines wrap convincingly around the forms, and do a great job of imbuing them with a sense of volume and solidity. One minor point here - remember that we want our sausages to be really simple. As mentioned in the lesson, they should essentially behave like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. This kind of simplicity will come into play later on as we work on combining them to create more complex constructions. Constructional drawing itself relies heavily on the idea that we start as simple as possible and build up complexity. This diagram from a later lesson shows the whole spheres + tube combination.

It took me a second to understand the layout of your texture analyses - in general, try and stick to the instructions as closely as possible (for example, here your density gradient boxes should have been much wider to give you more room to make that gradual shift.

That said, you've demonstrated keen observational skills, and definitely shown a growing understanding of the material. I can see how you tried to focus on the shadows cast by the various textural forms, and how you attempted to use them to blend from more densely packed detail to sparser territory. At the same time, I am seeing that you're still a little trapped in terms of thinking in terms of line as being the barriers between objects and forms, with shadows being added on top of that. As you work on textures in the future, try and take line/borders out of the equation entirely. Every mark we put down is essentially a shadow - and therefore how it is drawn is entirely dependent on how we choose for light to interact with it. In the case of the mushrooms, the long lines used to define its gills didn't have to flow across continuously - they could have been lost-and-found along the way, allowing the area of solid white to pass through it.

I could see some of that approach towards the sparse side of your feathers, so you are getting there. There was some of it in the romanesco as well, though here instead of seeing individual flowing shadows that would get lost and found, the timidity and continually broken nature of the edges made it difficult at times to perceive the marks as actually being shadows cast by a present form.

Anyway, overall you're doing well, and heading in the right direction. Keep working at it, and you'll continue to see progress.

Your dissections continue along the same vein, with a lot of great textural exploration, keen observation, and experimentation on how to tackle different kinds of problems. I definitely think that many of these - for example the ice cream - continued to push a stronger understanding of working with cast shadows rather than outlined forms. Great work.

Lastly, both your form intersections and organic intersections demonstrate a great grasp of 3D space and how forms can interact with one another inside of it. The form intersections show a good understanding of how forms can intersect one another, while the organic intersections shows a grasp of how they can push each other aside until they find a state of believable equilibrium.

One thing worth mentioning is that in your form intersections, the way you added line weight was definitely somewhat clumsy. You ended up making a lot of rather stiff looking passes resulting in areas that were needlessly heavy. In general, always try to add weight to your lines with the same ghosting method you would have used to draw them initially. If you end up slipping up, you don't need to worry about correcting it - line weight is meant to be subtle, so fixing the mistake would end up adding far too much, which would do more harm than good.

Anyway, you're doing a great job across this lesson, so I'm going to go ahead and mark it as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-25 21:01

Overall you've done pretty well! I do have a few things to call out and a couple areas where you can improve, but it looks like you're moving in the right direction.

To start with, your arrows generally flow quite nicely over the page, and I can see you playing with the size of each end to push the idea of perspective and that the arrow pushes into the depth of the scene. One thing to keep in mind however is that the space between the zigzagging lengths of arrow/ribbon is also going to compress as we look farther away, as perspective applies to the distances between objects as well as to the objects themselves, as demonstrated here.

I've also got a couple things to share about your organic forms with contour lines:

• Your ellipses and curves are a little stiff - make sure you're applying the ghosting method, which involves planning and preparation first followed by a confident execution. Right now you're slowing down and attempting to mix them together, resulting in linework that wobbles a little, and ellipses that come out a little uneven.

• Remember that the sausage forms should be very simple. They are essentially like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, as demonstrated in this diagram from a later lesson. Avoid having ends with different sizes, pinching through the middle section, and having the roundedness at either end stretching over too great a distance.

You've got a good start on your texture analyses, and I can see you trying to figure out how to apply the techniques described in the notes. You do have a long way to go, but this is a good start. The first thing that jumps out at me is that you were very patient and observent with your lizard skin study (the first square on the left), but this definitely took a hit through the other two texture studies. Remember that this first square is intended to be an attempt at faithfully reproducing everything you see, without attempting to process or manipulate it. Continually look at your reference image, taking only a moment or two to put down a very specific mark to transfer some piece of information, before looking back at your reference.

As for the density gradients on the right, I can see that you are trying to apply the use of cast shadows, though you are still quite dependent on the idea of drawing everything first with line. Line is a very useful tool that we use to define the boundaries between objects, but it doesn't actually exist, and it doesn't apply to every scenario. When it comes to texture, I want you to set line aside and capture the little forms that exist on the surface of your object with shadow alone. The reason this is important is that when you're, say, enclosing each scale with an outline, it becomes very difficult to let those scales bleed together. You're committing to saying that every scale that exists in my drawing is going to be drawn - any scales that have not been drawn are not present. Instead, when we work purely in cast shadows, we can start with having many discrete, specific scales, but we can slowly start to reduce the amount of those cast shadows we draw, until eventually all we can see are the deepest gaps between scales where light cannot penetrate. Finally, when we put no cast shadows at all, we're left with blank space, but the viewer will still interpret it as being full of scales - scales they cannot see. We achieve this by convincing the viewer that we are not reducing the number of scales that are present, but rather by changing the intensity of the light that is shining on them. When we leave everything blank, we're "overexposing" the drawing, blasting all of those shadows away with direct light. This is the same as taking the light away completely and filling that area with black ink.

Both of these points - in terms of taking more time to observe your reference carefully and carrying over specific information you see, and focusing on implying those details with shadows rather than imaginary lines - apply to your dissections exercises as well. You've done a good job of thinking about how those sausage forms have rounded surfaces however, and how the textures wrap around them.

Your form intersections are very, very well done. Your forms both read as solid and three dimensional, and also show a strong grasp of how they all relate to one another in space. I do believe there is room for improvement in terms of understanding how the specific intersection lines between the forms would actually work (especially when you introduce a rounded surface to a flat surface - rereading the notes in the lesson and focusing on the idea of an intersection line existing on the surfaces of both forms simultaneously may help), but this is quite normal. Understanding how intersections work is something that students take time to grasp, and is intended to develop as you push through these lessons. This exercise is specifically focused on getting students to show that they can draw forms existing within the same scene such that they feel consistent, and you have done that quite well.

Your organic intersections are a good start. You are showing a grasp of what the exercise focuses on - that is, getting these forms to slump and pile up on top of one another, showing you understand how they relate to each other without having them feel like flat shapes pasted on top of each other. I can clearly understand the volumes involved, and they are pushing each other aside as they find a state of equilibrium rather than cutting into one another and occupying the same space. That's exactly on point.

That said, you have definitely given yourself some extra difficulty in this exercise by drawing so small. These kinds of challenges are spatial problems, and our brains benefit considerably from being given more room to think and work when faced with them. By drawing the sausages relatively small on the page, you end up cramping it up and impeding your ability to work through them. So make sure you draw bigger in the future. Additionally, the points about keeping your sausage forms simple (two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width) from before help here as well.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're doing a good job, and while you do have room for improvement, you're headed in the right direction. Keep the points I've mentioned here in mind and feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-26 18:01

To start, your arrows flow quite nicely across the page. You've got a good, fluid quality to your lines. I can see that you're playing with the size of your arrows as they move farther away, and also playing a little with having the space between the zigzagging lengths compress as we look farther back, though be sure to keep exaggerating this. Don't be afraid to let those lengths overlap one another to get a real sense of the depth of the scene.

Also, I noticed that through some of these exercises, you've split the page up into sections - I'd rather you didn't, as this close-quarters boxing of each arrow/organic form causes them to feel more like they're just shapes on a page, rather than a bunch of forms floating together in space. As always, stick to the instructions as they're demonstrated in the lesson - each one has a clear example laying out what your page should look like at the end. Try not to deviate from that, as such changes can impede the effectiveness of the exercise.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking okay, though there are a couple issues:

• I mention early on in this exercise's instructions that the sausage forms should essentially be like two spheres of equal size connected by a tube of consistent width. This is in the interest of keeping the forms as simple as possible. Try to avoid having one end being smaller than the other, as well as having any pinching or swelling through the midsection of the form.

• It looks like your ellipses are all roughly the same degree. As explained here, these cross-sections are going to be oriented more or less towards the viewer based on their position in space, so that degree will naturally shift through the length of the form.

Your contour curves also encounter similar problems, though I'm also seeing a tendency to have the curves fail to accelerate in their curvature appropriately to give the impression that they hook back around along the other side (as explained here). I see a few places where you attempt to overshoot those curves as directed in the instructions, but you generally do this outside of the silhouette of the form, rather than keeping them contained within it. Remember that these lines are meant to run along the surface of a 3D form, and we're overshooting those curves so we can get a better sense of hooking them back around. It's like we're taking the contour ellipses and following along the same path, but not quite allowing the ellipses to close completely.

You've got a great start on your dissections, and are demonstrating a good deal of patience and care in observing your reference images to identify specific information before carrying it over, bit by bit, into your drawing. This is definitely a great start. There are a few bits of advice I want to offer however to help you keep moving in the right direction:

• In your initial studies, I'm noticing a tendency to try and shade the individual surface forms that make up a given texture. As discussed here, don't worry about that. We don't deal with shading/rendering, but instead focus only on cast shadows. These are different, as they are shadows that are projected onto neighbouring surfaces. Shading on the other hand, is a technique used to self-describe a form or surface, which is something we do not cover at all in drawabox, as I find it to be more distracting than helpful at this time.

• As you draw these textures, you're approaching it with two different tools. You've got your cast shadows, as covered in the lesson, and you've also got the lines you're largely using to enclose each little surface form. Line is a very useful construct that we use to help define the barriers between distinct forms as we draw and construct, but in truth, line does not actually exist. It's something we make up to help define the borders between things. While they serve a very useful purpose, when we're drawing textures, we don't actually want to define clear borders between these little surface forms - we want it all to blend together as all of these little forms are subject to the overall surface on which they rest. When drawing these textures, I don't want you to utilize line at all, and I don't want you to outline each and every form that is present. Instead, we focus on communicating their presence purely by capturing the shadows they cast. These shadows are considerably more flexible, because we can increase or reduce their weight in a texture without changing the actual number of forms that we are suggesting are there. We can plunge a texture into darkness, while still having the viewer believe that there a, for example, scales there in that solid black area. Or conversely, we can overexpose the texture, blasting it with direct light such that the only shadows that remain are those in the crevasses so deep the light cannot penetrate. The key is that when working with line, we're very explicit - this is what is here, and anything I have not drawn is not present. With shadow, we are merely implying the presence of far more than we are necessarily drawing.

You're heading in the right direction with your form intersections, although the use of hatching lines, especially on your cylinders, is not working in your favour. These are generally drawn rather sloppily - remember that any line that runs along the surface of a form is going to describe that form, so if they are not hooking around properly, they will serve to flatten it out. Generally speaking, if I want to add hatching to a cylinder, I don't wrap the lines around it - instead, I run the hatching down the length of the form. Because these lines don't have to wrap around and instead can run straight from end to end, they're much easier to pull off and generally look less distracting.

Also worth mentioning, it seems you do need to work on getting your ellipses to align correctly to your intended minor axes - they have a tendency to slant.

Lastly, your organic intersections are actually looking very good. Some of the contour curves are a little rushed, but generally speaking they're much better than they were previously. You've done a great job of capturing forms that feel solid, of conveying how they relate to one another in that pile, and of demonstrating an understanding of how they each exist in space.

Now, you're almost there, but before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see one page of organic forms with contour curves. I'm confident you can do this well, but handling each form in isolation will help me make sure that you do understand the concepts I outlined earlier in this critique.

Uncomfortable

2019-05-29 20:12

You've done a pretty great job and have demonstrated here a really solid understanding of the concepts covered in the lesson. To start with, your arrows flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space, and do a good job of pushing into the depth of the scene, showing that the page is a window into a larger world rather than the boundaries within which you can draw.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are solid. The ellipses are at times a little stiff, where you're definitely being quite mindful of keeping those ellipses snugly pinched between the edges of the form's silhouette. Keep that up, but try to push some more confidence into the ellipses' linework to keep the shapes even and well rounded.

Additionally, for the most part you maintained each organic form as a simple sausage (like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width) though you have a couple spots where an end is smaller than another, or where a midsection pinches slightly. Just things to keep an eye on.

Same goes for the contour curves - they're well drawn, though just a touch stiff (even less so than the ellipses), and keep an eye on the whole simple sausage thing.

Your texture analysis exercises are superb. You're demonstrating an excellent use of observational skills, as well as a thorough understanding of how to focus on using shadow to imply the presence of forms rather than relying on line to define the concrete borders of each. On top of that, they look fantastic. They're well balanced and convey exactly what each texture feels like, and you achieve considerable detail without creating any unnecessary or unintentional focal areas.

Your dissections really show your ability to take those details and really control them - to use them as tools towards your own ends. You're not necessarily always as detailed here, but you're just as effective in communicating the quality and characteristics of each surface, again, controlling those focal areas.

The only one I'd be a bit iffy on is the sushi roll, where you fell into using a sort of pattern that was created more from the specific pattern of actions (criss-crossing lines) rather than each little bit being intent-driven. It didn't come out badly, and you know what you're doing enough to be able to apply this kind of approach fairly well, but in general I try to get students to stay away from any approach that doesn't involve full control over every little bit that comes out of it - at least as far as the drawabox lessons go.

Lastly, your intersections - both form and organic - are very well done. In the form intersections you're demonstrating an excellent grasp of how each form sits in space and how they relate to one another. They feel cohesive and consistent throughout. Your organic intersections convey a similar impression, but instead showing an understanding of the volumes themselves, how they rub up against each other without interpenetrating. You've done a good job of establishing how they are forced to find a state of equilibrium instead.

You're doing great, so I feel very confident in marking this lesson as complete and sending you onward. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-01 18:32

You're definitely moving in the right direction, but there are a number of instructions that you've missed along the way.

• Your arrows flow well across the page, but keep in mind that as you look farther away, the space between the zigzagging lengths of the arrow will shrink. Perspective applies both to the arrow itself, as well as to all of space. It all compresses the farther away we look. This is demonstrated in this step. Bearing this in mind will help you to better capture the impression that the arrows are coming from deep within the depth of the scene (though you are doing a decent job of that already, this will help).

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses are a good start. You're doing a good job of keeping the ellipses fairly snug between the edges of the sausage form. I am noticing however that the ellipses are at times a little stiff, so work on applying the ghosting method more conscientiously, specifically in terms of make sure that you execute the mark with a confident, persistent pace. I also noticed that the degrees of your ellipses are all roughly the same. Give these notes a read, as they explain why the degree shifts over the course of the sausage form's length.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are coming along well, though you do tend to have some issues with the alignment of those contour curves. This is for a very specific reason: you neglected to include the central minor axis line, to which all the ellipses must align.

• Most of your texture analyses are pretty good, and demonstrate to me that you're moving in the right direction as far as your observational skills go. I did want to point out however that in this study you decided to cross-hatch, rather than ensuring that each and every mark you'd put down was actually relating to some specific element visible in the reference image. In general, I don't want you to rely on these kinds of automatic patterns, where you identify a criss-cross pattern and then go on to draw that. It goes against the principle of ensuring that we look at our reference carefully and continuously, taking only a moment to make a very specific mark to transfer some element from the reference to our drawing before returning to studying the reference image.

• The rest of your texture studies are considerably better, especially this one.

• Your dissections are coming along fairly well. There is definitely room for improvement in terms of how to organize and apply the information from your reference image, but you're moving in the right direction. I'm also pleased to see that you're mindful of how the surfaces turn away from the viewer along the sides.

• In your form intersections, you've definitely missed the instruction of avoiding any forms that are overly stretched in one dimension (like long cylinders). This is specifically to eliminate additional complexity from an already challenging exercise. While there is certainly more room for improvement in your mental model of 3D space, by and large these are going well. You're for the most part able to capture these different forms as though they fit cohesively within the same scene. This will continue to improve and become more believable with practice, of course, but you're headed in the right direction.

Your organic intersections are the only part of this lesson where you've gone way off the mark. The exercise revolves around the idea of drawing a pile of sausage forms, starting with one form, then dropping another on top of it and figuring out how it's going to rest on top of the form beneath it. Then we repeat this until we've got a stack of sausages slumping and sagging over one another.

What you've drawn here is a number of sausage forms, each completely ignoring the presence of any others. They feel like they were drawn separately and pasted onto the same page. The first and most critical issue here is that there's lots of gaps between them. If they were subject to gravity, the forms would be forced to rest directly on top of one another in three dimensions, wrapping around one another.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want you to reread the section on the organic intersections exercise (and rewatch the video there), then submit to me 4 fresh pages of organic intersections.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-01 18:58

Overall you're doing pretty well, though there are a few points I'd like to address.

To start with, your arrows flow very nicely both across the page and through the depths of 3D space. You're applying perspective effectively here both to the arrows themselves, as well as the space between the zigzagging lengths, ensuring that the farther back we look, the more that space compresses.

Your organic forms with contour lines are a good start, though I noticed a couple issues:

• I'd generally recommend drawing these a little larger on the page. As spatial problems, our brains benefit from being given more room to think through this sort of thing, and it also allows us to engage our entire arm more easily.

• I'm pleased to see that you're adding a little ellipse on one end, but you're actually using this incorrectly. This is intended to sit on an end of the sausage that faces towards us. You have pretty consistently placed it one the other end (based on what the degrees of the contour ellipses is telling us).

• This kind of small contour ellipse on the end of the sausage that points towards the viewer is also very useful when working with contour curves. Contour curves are essentially the same as contour ellipses, except part of them is hidden. You can think of it in terms of drawing or not drawing through a box - when we draw through the sausage, we're drawing the entire contour ellipse. In the case of this smaller one on the end, that entire surface is oriented towards the viewer, so we're able to see the whole ellipse rather than just a partial curve.

In your texture analyses, I noticed a heavy reliance on line. Prior to applying any of the cast shadows I discuss in the lesson, you lay down all of the elements of your texture in line. This unfortunately isn't an approach that works very well. Line itself doesn't actually exist - it's a construct that is quite useful when defining the clear boundaries between different forms. This doesn't work terribly well when dealing with texture.

When we attempt to outline each and every little form that exists on the surface of an object, what we're telling the viewer is that we are drawing everything that exists here. Anything we have not drawn does not exist. And therefore we don't leave any room for detail or forms to be implied - we're very explicit about everything that we include. If, therefore we have a very complex, busy texture with a lot going on, we're forced to draw a lot of little marks, which alongside being extremely tedious, also ends up looking pretty terrible. All the resulting contrast draws the viewer's attention to an unintended focal point.

Instead, we don't deal in line at all when drawing texture. We focus purely on implying the presence of a form by drawing the shadows it casts. We're drawing around it to imply the fact that it's there. Due to the flexible nature of cast shadows, we can leave a lot more gaps around a form without declaring that the form itself does not exist. In fact, we can go so far as to plunge the texture into darkness, engulfing the majority of it in black while still maintaining the suggestion that forms exist in that area. Similarly, we can overexpose the drawing, blasting away all but the shadows in the deepest cracks where light cannot penetrate, effectively having an area that is mostly blank, but that the viewer can interpret as being full of forms that they simply cannot see.

So, instead of outlining your textural forms with line, I want you to jump right into fleshing them out by drawing the shadows they cast. This same principle applies to your dissections. In addition to this, I can see signs in your dissections that you likely need to spend more time observing your reference images. From what I can see, you may be working more from memory - spending longer periods of time drawing without looking back at your reference. In general, the process is that we study our reference closely and continuously, taking only a moment to draw a mark or two before looking back at the reference. The marks we put down should relate to specific elements we've seen in the texture that we are trying to carry over.

Don't think in terms of "I see a scale, and so I draw a scale". It's very easy to get into drawing symbolic representations of the names we give these details (the scale you draw may not look anything like the scale that was actually there). Instead, focus on the shadows themselves, or other limited features that cannot be assigned a name. Names exist to take large concepts and simplify them - so by avoiding names, we're forced to take little pieces bit by bit.

Your form intersections look to be coming along fairly well for the most part, and I can definitely see an improvement in your spatial reasoning and confidence as you push through the set - though keep in mind that in the instructions, I did state that you should stay away from any particularly long forms (like long cylinders). Try and keep everything roughly equilateral.

Your organic intersections are similarly coming along fairly well, and conveying a good grasp of how these forms slump and sag over one another. I did notice a few places however where you seem to have added line weight to the wrong lines, resulting in parts of forms that should have been behind others showing up as being in front, specifically on this page.

Anyway, overall you're doing a good job. There are things to work on, though there will be ample time to improve on them as you integrate these exercises into your regular warmup routine. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-01 19:23

Overall you're doing pretty well, though there are a few things I'd like to point out:

• For your arrows, you're generally applying the notion of perspective where the arrows get smaller as they move farther away fairly well. What you're missing however is the fact that the space between the zigzagging lengths of those arrows will also compress as we look farther away, as demonstrated here. This will help push the idea that your arrows are flowing into the depth of the scene, not just across the two dimensions of the page.

• In regards to your organic forms with contour lines, I mention in this step of the instructions that you need to stick to very simple sausage forms. That is, think of them as being two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. These kinds of forms become even more relevant as we move through the lessons, where having them as simple, basic starting blocks is critical. The simpler a form is, the easier it is to make it feel solid - we can then build upon it with more simple forms to create greater complexity while maintaining that solidity throughout.

• For the most part, it seems that you're not entirely aware of how the degree of your ellipses should be shifting over the length of your sausage form, so give these notes a read.

• Your ellipses are also a little stiff/uneven, so keep pushing yourself to use the ghosting method and execute the marks with a confident, persistent pace from your shoulder. This does improve over the set however, which is a good sign.

• Your organic forms with contour curves are coming along well, though I strongly urge you to overshoot your curves slightly as shown here to ensure that they curve properly as they reach the edge of the form.

• Fantastic work on both the texture analyses and the dissections. You've done a great job of utilizing the cast shadows to gain a more fluid, flexible control over the small textural forms that exist along the surface of your object. You definitely did show greater control of that sort in the texture analyses than the dissections (where there wasn't much gradation in terms of dense to sparse on the dissections) but both were still done very well.

• Your form intersections also demonstrate a good grasp of 3D space. While your hatching lines on those rounded surfaces did not go particularly well (generally that's something I avoid - if I have to, I run my hatching lines lengthwise so they can stay straight rather than trying to wrap them around a rounded surface, though usually I'll just leave them out if they're not serving any purpose), you did a good job of capturing these forms in a consistent, cohesive manner within the same scene.

• Your organic intersections also did a good job of demonstrating how these forms relate to one another without cutting into each others' volumes, instead being forced to slump and sag over one another to find a state of equilibrium. The second page was definitely much clearer and more successful of course, but it's understandably difficult at first to negotiate so many different forms being drawn in their entirety.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-06-04 23:57

Your work here is quite well done. There are a couple things to keep in mind, but by and large you're doing a good job of applying the concepts covered in the lesson.

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely across the page. One thing to keep in mind is that just as the arrows get smaller as we look farther away, the space in between them will also compress, as explained here.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are hitting all my major points. You're keeping the sausages simple, you're clearly mindful of the shift in degree across the length of the organic form (although sometimes you make some bigger jumps that don't quite follow the pattern of the other contour ellipses in a given form), and you're keeping those ellipses snugly within the silhouette of the forms.

Your contour curves are coming along well, though I'm noticing here that your degrees are generally more consistent here (rather than shifting as they ought to. Your curves also tend to stiffen up a little, and you're less accurate when it comes to getting them to fit snugly between the edges of the forms. You're not far off, but this is definitely visibly more difficult for you than the organic contour lines. Try and loosen up and focus on applying the ghosting method - planning and preparing before a smooth, consistent, confident stroke.

Your texture analyses are fantastic. Excellent observational skills, good transitions from dense to sparse. The only thing I want to mention is that when doing these kinds of texture studies, try and stay away from hatching (like you did on your first one). Hatching is like a generic filler that people use instead of studying the actual textures that are present, and while you did demonstrate a much more careful and attentive eye later on, it's very easy to fall into picking something generic and focusing on shading - which, as explained here, is not what we're doing.

You've got some more excellent work on your dissections - great use of linework, and excellent control over focal areas. The leather definitely gets a little busy, but by and large you're pretty good at controlling where you allow detail to get dense and where to leave it sparse.The only other recommendation I have is to be a little bolder in terms of allowing your textures to drop into full shadow, even using something like a brush pen. Pushing those full blacks (and eliminating all the little specks of white) really pushes a texture to the next level, as it forces you to control the impression of what's contained within that solid area purely through how its edges are carved.

Your form intersections are nicely done. Your boxes aren't always consistent in terms of the convergences of your sets of parallel lines, but all the same the resulting forms do feel solid, and your use of line weight is coming along well. You're also constructing these forms such that they feel consistent within the same space, and are demonstrating a good grasp of the relationships between them, for the most part, through the intersections.

Lastly, you're doing a great job of expressing your understanding of how the organic forms in your organic intersections interact within space, how they slump and sag against gravity and against one another as they struggle to find a state of equilibrium without interpenetrating or violating each others' volumes.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-06-05 00:24

Nicely done overall. There are a few points I want to mention, but you're doing a pretty good job of demonstrating your understanding of the concepts covered in the lesson.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that while your arrows do flow quite smoothly across the page, one thing that's holding them back is that you have a tendency to keep the spacing between the zigzagging lengths fairly consistent. Just as perspective will compress the size of your arrows as they move away from the viewer, so too will the space between those lengths grow smaller. This will help sell the illusion that they're plunging into the depth of the scene.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking quite good. The ellipses are very even and confidently drawn, the steady shift in degree across the length of the forms demonstrates a good grasp of how they flow through space, and you're doing a reasonable job of keeping the ellipses properly aligned (though you can probably improve on this front). One minor thing to mention is to remember that the sausages are meant to be like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You're very, very close, and generally are doing this well, but there are a few places where you've got the roundedness at the ends stretched a little too far. This is generally likely not intentional, but rather coming from getting used to drawing that kind of form without getting hesitant, so it's just something to keep in mind as you move forwards.

Now, it is worth mentioning that when you hit your contour curves, you do get a little sloppy. They're certainly still confidently drawn, but you're a lot less consistent in getting the curves to fit snugly within the silhouette of the forms. Remember that the illusion we're creating here is for the lines to feel as though they're running along the surface of the forms. If we don't keep them snugly pinched between the edges of the form, then we lose the effectiveness of this illusion. What I mentioned before about ensuring that your sausages are simple (two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width) applies here as well. I'm noticing that you're definitely leaning more into forms with different sized ends, and more complexity in that regard. Try to refrain from doing that as part of this exercise.

Moving onto the texture analyses, I generally don't read students' notes - those are largely for you as you process what you see. For all intents and purposes though, I can read some french (though my nine years of immersion has mostly evaporated). The one point I want to mention here is that you're definitely making a move into focusing more on the shadows being cast by the forms that exist along the surface of your objects, but as it stands you're still very much trapping yourself in a realm of line.

Line is a very useful tool to help establish the boundaries between forms, but they don't truly exist. They're something we add to help understand what we're drawing. When it comes to drawing texture, it's very easy to try and capture all of the forms that are present, delineating them with those borders and boundaries. This unfortunately asserts that we're intending to draw every single little element that is present, and from this the viewer gleans that anything we have not drawn is simply not present. If we leave an area blank, it's because there is nothing there.

This obviously doesn't work well for us, and so we need to apply a different tactic. You've definitely been making progress towards moving more towards shadow, but as it stands you are still trying to combine the two. Instead, as you move forwards, I want you to set line aside when it comes to texture. Don't first outline your major elements and then apply shadow. Establish each form by capturing the shadows it casts on its surrounding area, with no lines at all. This will allow considerably more flexibility, allowing us to really push our textures into darkness (with large swathes of solid black) or blast it out with light, leaving it overexposed with the only shadows remaining those caught in the deepest cracks where light cannot penetrate. This tactic convinces the viewer that there are indeed elements where we have not drawn them, and that entire areas of blank white or solid black can contain any number of features, merely suggested by the way the edges of those areas are carved.

You are definitely making further headway in your dissections, and I can see you thinking more in terms of those shadows, though you'll continue to improve on that as well with time and practice.

Your form intersections are coming along fairly well, though there is something about your approach to linework that causes the forms to feel a little less solid. There is definitely a lot of confidence to those lines, but at the same time the way they feather off into nothing before reaching the next corner does make them feel just a little less substantial. It's important to find a balance between achieving smooth, confident lines, but still having them go all the way to their destination. Some slight tapering to your strokes gives them a sense of liveliness, but too much makes them feel too wispy and ungrounded.

Also, I'm very pleased with your attempts at the intersections, and you've done well in some places, though there is definitely room for improvement here. This is fairly normal, as I don't expect students to fully grasp how these forms would intersect and relate to one another just yet. That said, keep in mind the idea that an intersection is essentially the line that sits on the surface of both forms simultaneously. It's where those surfaces meet. There are some intersections you've attempted where that isn't quite true.

For example, the cone-and-cylinder towards the bottom left of this page. The line runs nicely along the length of the cylinder, but cuts straight through the cone rather than running along its surface.

Lastly, your organic intersections are excellent. You're doing a great job of demonstrating how these forms sag and slump against one another, attempting to find a state of equilibrium without cutting into one another or violating each others' volumes.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-06-06 22:39

There is certainly a lot to comment upon. Overall, I get the impression that you have difficulty keeping concepts covered in earlier lessons in mind when tackling new things, causing you to take one step forward and two steps back, so to speak.

Organic Arrows

Starting with your organic arrows, many of these actually flow quite nicely through space especially on the first page, but your linework is very unsteady. It looks to me like you might be drawing those lines more from your wrist, or rather slowly - or more likely a mixture of both. In many cases your arrows tend to be a lot more erratic than the ones I demonstrated in the lesson, which in turn tells me that you're easily forgetting those instructions as you work through the exercise, but not taking the time to go through them again.

If you look at the demonstration from the lesson you'll see that the two edges that make up the 'ribbon' part of a given arrow are very simple. It just goes back and forth, flowing smoothly. Sometimes, especially on the second page, yours get quite complex, like here and near the head on this one. There is really no need to introduce your own complexities here - it's a matter of following the instructions to the letter.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines

For your organic forms with contour lines, conceptually you are demonstrating a few points I look for:

• You're keeping the ellipses pinched snugly between the edges of each form

• The forms are generally fairly simple (though always remember that we're aiming for what is essentially two balls connected by a tube of consistent width, like what's demonstrated here. The only bit that's off is that you have a tendency to stretch the "roundedness" of the balls on either end out to occupy more of the overall length

• Your contour curves wrap nicely around the form

• You're demonstrating a shift in degree over the length of each form

The biggest issue however is that your linework is very stiff, especially in the contour ellipses. As discussed in lesson 1, the single biggest priority with any markmaking is achieving smooth, confident strokes that maintain a consistent trajectory. That is at the very core of the use of the ghosting method, which should be applied to every single stroke.

The ghosting method is more than just ghosting before you put the mark down - it's about splitting the process up into three distinct phases.

1. First we identify the nature of the mark we want to make, the behaviour it needs to exhibit and the specific purpose it serves in your drawing. We put down starting/end points if they apply, identify the space it needs to occupy, and find a comfortable angle from which to approach it.

2. Then we ghost through the motion, getting our muscles familiar with what we are going to be asking of them. It's like your arm is learning its orders, or its script, going through it over and over until it feels familiar and comfortable.

3. This last stage is the simplest - we repeat the motion just as confidently to put the mark down on the page. We do not hesitate, we do not second guess ourselves, the second that pen touches the page we push through without any conscious thought or consideration.

If your resulting mark is not accurate, it is not because you messed up step 3 - it's because something went wrong in steps 1 or 2. Step's 3 only responsibility is to keep the stroke smooth and consistent, so if it wobbles or comes out stiff, then it was not done correctly.

One other point I wanted to mention was in regards to the little circles/ellipses you add at one end of each sausage form. This technique is great, but they feel disconnected from the rest of the contour lines. It's important to understand that these ellipses are contour lines just like anything else. All the contour lines run along the surface of the form - these just happen to sit right at the tip of the sausage form, where things get much smaller. Its positioning and degree should sell the idea that it's at the tip - and often times you miss the mark on that.

Texture Analyses/Dissections

Your texture analyses give me the impression that you may not have absorbed much of what was covered in the notes regarding texture, as there are a number of important concepts that aren't really being demonstrated here.

• Your first texture study (that is, the first square in each row) shows signs that you're attempting to draw what you see, and it's a good start. I also see this in the third one, to an even greater degree. Your second however seems to rely very much on identifying a pattern and then going to town on applying that pattern. When drawing from observation, that means avoiding any situation that results in you drawing more than one or two marks at a time. You need to be looking at your reference almost constantly, and the details you transfer should be actual features that are specifically present in your reference. A good rule of thumb is that if you can describe what you're trying to add to your drawing in words, then it's oversimplified. For example, if you see scales on a picture of a fish and go draw a bunch of scales on your drawing, that's too simple. Instead, you need to look at the specific nature of each individual scale, the specific shadows they cast, and the way they all interact on an individual basis. You're not drawing "scales" in general, you're drawing very specific individual scales, one by one.

• Your studies focus entirely on the use of line, rather than thinking in terms of shadow as described here. Line is a very useful tool that we use to define the borders between forms. They do not, however, actually exist. They're imaginary, and as with all tools, they do not fit every situation. When we think in terms of line, we end up having a habit of enclosing every little form that sits along the surface of our object, because we're outlining them, defining where they exist and where they don't. This tells the viewer that we intend to draw every single form that is present there, and if we haven't drawn something, it doesn't exist. It doesn't leave any room for implying the presence of features we haven't explicitly drawn. Working in shadow however is very different - rather than drawing the little forms themselves, we draw the shadows they cast on their surroundings. We imply their presence not by drawing them, but by drawing around them, creating hints as to the fact that they're there. This is considerably more flexible, because the weight of those shadows is in our control. We can plunge our object into large areas of solid black, where the shadows are so heavy that they merge together, or we can blast those shadows away like an overexposed photograph, where the only shadows that remain are those in the deepest cracks where no light can penetrate. These options do not change what is actually present in the texture, but they do change what kinds of marks are used to communicate the surface quality of our object.

This critique ended up exceeding reddit's 10,000 character limit, so I'm continuing in a reply to this comment.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-07 22:24

It appears that whatever payment method you had setup was declined when patreon attempted to charge it at the beginning of the month. Until you get that sorted out, I will not be able to critique your homework.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-09 22:57

You've got a number of strong points demonstrated here, but there are a few issues I want to address. More than anything else, you're exhibiting strong overall skills, but a lack of patience when it comes to reading through the instructions carefully and following them to the letter. That kind of care and focus will definitely save you time and help you use that time more effectively as you continue to move through the lessons, so strive to be more mindful in the future.

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely through space, although for some of them, I'm noticing that as we look farther and farther away, the zigzagging lengths of the arrow's ribbon-section don't quite get closer together. Instead, some of these maintain the same spacing. Remember that due to perspective, just like the ribbon itself gets narrower, the space around it will also compress, as explained here. Also be more mindful when drawing those arrow heads - I mean, I don't care that much about how they're drawn, but you definitely went out of your way to change how they were drawn relative to the instructions, which isn't a great sign.

You're demonstrating the main points of the organic forms with contour ellipses quite well - the ellipses are fitting snugly within the silhouette of each form, and you are in many cases (though not all) demonstrating a solid grasp of how those ellipses' degrees shift over the course of the form. The one major point you missed was that the sausages should be simple - basically like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. as shown in this diagram. The reason for this is that sausages become a pretty fundamental form in later construction, and focusing on keeping our basic components simple allows us to focus on making them feel solid and three dimensional. The more complexity we add (like variable sizes and so on) the more difficult it is to maintain that illusion at the most basic levels.

Aside from that issue, your contour lines are also looking good, generally wrapping nicely around the forms.

Your textural work on the texture analyses and the dissections is all fantastic. You're demonstrating an excellent understanding of the use of solid cast shadow shapes instead of outlines to create fluid, flexible textures that can be used effectively to convey the surface texture of an object without having to draw every little detail and end up with an overly noisy result. I can also see that you're doing a good job of wrapping those textures around your forms, and in general, you're demonstrating pretty solid, well developing observational skills.

With the form intersections, I primarily look for two things - first and foremost, I want to see if the student is able to draw many forms together within the same space, such that they feel consistent and cohesive, rather than like they've been cut out and pasted on top of one another. The secondary point I look for are the intersections themselves - these are by no means expected to be entirely successful. All I look for is that students are giving them a shot. I can see that you focused on the first point in your first few pages (which is frankly not a bad idea), and then delved a little bit into the intersections afterwards on that last page.

That's entirely fine. It is worth mentioning that your intersections were generally not correct, but they're a good start. The most important thing to keep in mind - and it may not sink in initially - is that the intersection line sits on the surface of both forms simultaneously. I'm not sure how much you remember of high school mathematics, but it's like how the intersection between two lines is the single point in space that sits on both simultaneously. I explain this in this section of the lesson though I fully understand that it may not necessarily be easy to absorb the first time around, as it is a very complicated thing to wrap one's head around.

Lastly, your organic intersections are mostly coming along well, although the last page shows the kind of thing we're trying to avoid. That is, despite the name the exercise is really all about avoiding actual intersection of forms, and instead focusing on how these forms would lay on top of one another, avoiding interpenetration but instead deforming to slump and sag over each other to find a state of equilibrium. Overall, I do feel you understand that, and have otherwise demonstrated it reasonably well, but it's worth pointing out that in this case, those two forms in the center should not be cutting into each other, but instead the top one should be actively bumping up and over the one beneath it.

Anyway! I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. There are certainly a lot of areas where you need to read the instructions more carefully, but by and large you're doing a good job. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-12 21:53

To start with, great work on the arrows. They flow very nicely and do a great job of showing how they flow into the depth of the scenes, especially when you play with the effect of perspective on them - not just to make the arrow smaller as it moves farther away, but also to compress the space between the zigzagging lengths. One thing that you may want to play more with is pushing more overlap, where the space between those zigzagging lengths eventually becomes nil, and the lengths are forced to pass over each other in a more meaningful way, giving the impression that the arrow is coming right towards the viewer.

Your organic forms with contour lines are decently done, though I have a few things to point out:

• Remember that as mentioned in the instructions, your forms should be simple. Stick to those that resemble two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You've got some here that pinch in the midsection, or have ends of different sizes. This kind of complexity is something I want you to avoid for this exercise.

• Your ellipses are coming along well, though many still have a bit of stiffness to them. It's definitely important to focus on getting them to fit snugly between the edges of the organic form, so as to push the illusion that they're running along the surface of the object, but only once you've succeeded in getting the ellipses to flow smoothly, creating an even, confident, rounded shape.

• Your contour curves are visibly smoother, which is good, though I'm seeing signs that you may still either be drawing them quite slowly, or applying too much pressure. When we draw naturally, our lines will have a tendency to taper slightly towards the ends, where our pen touches down and lifts off the page. This has the benefit of making the strokes feel a little more lively. Yours on the other hand appear completely uniform, which happens when the mark is made too slowly to taper at all, or with too heavy a stroke that such tapering is not possible. Usually it's a combination of both, so keep an eye on that.

You've got a great start on your texture analyses, though I do have one important thing to point out - you're still pretty heavily invested in the use of line first as you draw your textures, followed by a strategic application of shadow. Instead, I want you to stop thinking in terms of lines altogether. Lines are a very useful tool we use to delineate between regions, forms or masses - they produce borders that don't really exist in the world. This works great when constructing objects from complex arrangements of form, but they very much get in the way when dealing with texture, because their presence tells the viewer that we intend to draw each and every form that is present in an explicit manner, and that anything we have not drawn simply does not exist. Instead, we want to work in a more implicit manner - relying on the shadows cast by forms (rather than drawing the forms themselves) we from the very start work based on implying the presence of objects.

Shadows are considerably more flexible, allowing us to change their weight and presence by modifying how we want the light to play across a given surface. We can plunge part of a texture into darkness, making the shadows heavy and large such that they all merge together into a large shape along the surface of our object. That doesn't mean that the contents of that shadow shape is completely smooth - rather, all kinds of things could be there, and they are generally implied by how the edges of that shadow shape is carved.

Conversely, we can do the opposite - hit the texture with direct light such that it becomes overexposed, with all the shadows being blasted away, save for those in the deepest cracks where light cannot penetrate. The result is a surface that is mostly blank, but with little shadows here and there that suggest the beginnings of the presence of the forms that actually cast them.

Now, you are certainly attempting to move in the direction of relying more on shadow, but you need to strike line away completely - don't try to plan it out first with those lines and then add shadow afterwards, instead actually think in terms of the forms that are present, and draw the shadows that are cast accordingly. That's something I don't quite feel you're doing yet - that is, thinking in terms of the forms that exist along the surface of an object, and deriving the shadows from them. Right now you're thinking more in terms of putting shadows down a little more arbitrarily, and hoping to achieve the appropriate effect.

This of course applies just as well to the dissections, though here you have been forced more into dealing with the textures as being the result of solid forms. I can see you playing a little more with shadow (for example on the chicken skin), though you still have a habit of outlining a lot of these (like the feathers, corn, etc.)

Jumping forward to your form intersections, these are demonstrating a good start, and a well developing grasp of 3D space and how forms can relate to one another within it. It's worth mentioning that the actual intersections themselves are not the focus of this exercise, and are instead something I'd like students to start taking a stab at, so the gears in their brain can start turning in regards to this. As such, you do have plenty of room for improvement in terms of how the intersections themselves work, but you're headed in the right direction.

What I primarily look for here is whether or not a student can draw many forms together within the same space such that they feel consistent and cohesive, rather than as separate forms pasted on top of one another.

Lastly, your organic intersections are similarly working well, and demonstrate a good grasp of how these forms wrap around one another as they find their place in this ever-resolving stack of forms, all finding a state of equilibrium without cutting into each others' volumes.

All in all, you're doing well, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-19 20:10

All in all you're doing a pretty great job! There are a few minor points I want to address in terms of how certain exercises are being approached, but you're definitely nailing all of the core elements of the lesson, and are demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space.

Starting with the arrows, they're flowing very nicely. One small suggestion is to get the space between the zigzagging lengths of arrow to actually compress as we look farther away from us. You don't actually have a lot of arrows that zigzag all that much, but I noticed that when they do, there isn't really any noticeable shrinking in the amount of space as we look farther back - it remains fairly consistent, which erodes some of the sense of depth. I explain this further in these notes.

Your organic forms with contour lines are looking pretty good - you've got pretty good degree shifts (although the bottom right of this page seems to be a little off - remember that the wider the degree of that cross-section, the more it is oriented towards the viewer, so that arrangement doesn't seem entirely believable).

I did notice however that your organic forms pretty consistently had one big end and one smaller end. As mentioned in the instructions, you should be treating these forms as though they are two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. This is important, as it keeps the form as simple as possible, which will come into play in the future when we use them as the building blocks for more complex constructions. Constructional drawing is all about building up complexity through the addition of more forms in successive passes, rather than increasing the complexity of the base building block.

The other point I wanted to raise was that in the contour curves section, you may still benefit from placing a little contour ellipse on the end that faces the viewer, right at the tip, like the "pole" on a globe. It'll help sell the illusion quite a bit.

Really phenomenal work in your texture analyses and dissections. You're demonstrating excellent observational skills, as well as a good sense of the difference between relying on line (which is important in construction but quite limiting when working on texture and detail), and on cast shadows (which are extremely useful to imply the presence of many small textural forms). As a result, your textures are well balanced, and don't shy away from allowing many shadows to merge together to create large swathes of solid black, or from allowing the blank areas to merge together similarly to create an "overexposed" look where the only shadows remaining are those in the deepest cracks where the light cannot yet penetrate.

Your form intersections are definitely coming along well. I'm very pleased with your ability to construct solid, believable forms all within the same space in a manner that feels cohesive. This is the main focus of this exercise - the intersections themselves are coming along quite well too, and are demonstrating a well developing grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space.

Lastly, your organic intersections are spot on. You've got a very strong sense of how these forms relate to one another in a believable manner, as they slump and sag against one another in search of a state of equilibrium without interpenetrating. You're also leveraging line weight and cast shadows very nicely here to separate the forms out and clarify their overlaps.

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

Deecerp27

2019-06-22 01:30

Hey good job on this. I just submitted my homework and it feels like we had a similar level of struggle with things. keep it up!

Uncomfortable

2019-06-23 01:13

Overall you're doing a pretty good job throughout this lesson. There are a few points I want to draw to your attention, but you seem to be absorbing most of the core concepts to great effect.

To start with, your arrows flow quite nicely through space, though I am noticing one thing that is holding you back from fully exploring the depth of the scene. That is, while you do play with the scale of your arrows as they move farther away, the actual distance between the zigzagging lengths of the arrows remains the same. Based on the rules of perspective, it is all of space itself that compresses as we look farther away, so there should be less and less room between these zigzagging lengths as we go farther back.

For your organic forms with contour lines, you're doing well for the most part. The degrees of your ellipses and curves seem to shift appropriately, your ellipses are evenly shaped, and your curves do a fairly good job of wrapping around the form (although they're a little rushed sometimes).

The main issue here is the organic forms themselves - in the lesson I specifically state that they should be kept simple, as though they're two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Here you've got a lot of forms that vary all over in width, and often have ends of dramatically different scale. We want to keep the forms themselves as simple as possible because later on in the lessons, as we get into construction the concept of starting with simple forms and reaching greater complexity by combining more simple forms (rather than increasing the complexity of each base component) is going to come into play in a big way.

For the most part, your texture analyses are pretty good. There's certainly room for improvement, and a couple little bits I want you to keep in mind, but you're moving in the right direction. The first thing I want to stress is the importance of leaving lines behind. In the first texture, you employ shadow shapes very well, but you do so over top of the outlines you've drawn for each and every surface form. This means that you've been very explicit about everything that is present, leaving no room for the implication of other textural elements. You're effectively telling the viewer that every little bump, scratch, etc. that is present in this texture that has been drawn, and none exist that have not.

On the other hand, the big advantage of working with shadow is that we don't actually draw any of those forms themselves - we don't draw bumps, we draw the shadows those bumps cast. This means that the way the texture is drawn can change based on how much light we decide to apply to it (drowning it in shadow, overexposing it with direct light, etc) without changing what we are communicating to the viewer.

The other point I wanted to raise is that in your third texture analysis, you get rather scribbly and erratic with your linework there. Always fight against the urge to just draw random strokes - always ensure the marks you put down match specific features you see in the reference image, and when doing so, think about the forms that actually cast those shadows, and use your understanding of those forms to determine how you draw the shadows they cast.

Now, all in all I think you do a much better job of all of the things I've mentioned here in your dissections, which shows a continued growth and understanding. You don't scribble there, and you're less dependent on explicit lines. Definitely a move in the right direction.

Jumping onto the form intersections, these are generally pretty well done, with forms that feel consistent within the same space, and intersections that define a clear understanding of how all the forms relate to one another. The sets are quite cohesive - my only recommendation is to ease up on the use of hatching, and rely instead on line weight more to clarify the overlaps of different forms.

Lastly, your organic intersections are very well done. They nail the idea that these forms slump and sag against one another, finding a state of equilibrium without infringing on each others' volumes. These feel believably three dimensional, rather than like shapes pasted on top of each other on a page. Very well done.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-06-24 00:47

Starting with your arrows, they're definitely flowing quite nicely across the page. One thing to keep in mind however is that as your arrow moves farther back in space, you want the space between its zigzagging lengths to compress. Just like the width of the arrow itself gets smaller, so should the space around it.

For your organic forms with contour ellipses, you're doing a good job of aligning them (mostly) and your degrees generally have a nice shift going on, though there are a couple things to watch out for:

• The sausage forms should be, as mentioned in the instructions, essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You've got a lot that are much more complicated than that, and this will bite you in the future. We want to keep them as simple as possible so when we employ them as part of constructions later on, we can build up complexity by combining many simple forms rather than by increasing the complexity of our base elements.

• Keep working on your accuracy with your ellipses - they're falling outside of the bounds of the forms. Keeping them snug between the edges of the form is key to help push the illusion that the line runs along the surface of the form.

In your contour curves section, I'm noticing that the degree of your ellipses remains more constant rather than having that nice shift over the length of the form, and your alignment is off for some of them.

Your texture analyses are definitely coming along well, but there are a couple things to keep in mind:

• Avoid outlining things entirely. Remember that we're NOT drawing each individual element or form that exists along the surface of your object. This tells the viewer that everything you have drawn exists and anything you have not drawn does not exist - it doesn't leave room for anything to exist there that you merely are implying. Instead, when we deal in cast shadow, we're not drawing the elements and forms themselves - we're drawing around them, drawing the impact they have on their surroundings. This is ALL about implication, and therefore whether we plunge our object into darkness or overexpose it with direct light, it's not going to affect what is present in the object being drawn (as far as the viewer is concerned).

• In your third texture, your use of straight lines was okay - but on the second texture, the hatching lines did not actually reflect what was present in your reference. You instead applied a generic pattern and drew it in an auto-pilot fashion, rather than actually carrying over specific details one at a time. When you're carrying over details, don't focus on the marks themselves. Think about how each little mark is a shadow, and consider what little form might be casting it. Then try and imply its presence by drawing a shadow it might cast in your drawing.

In your dissections, don't be afraid to let your textures fall into solid black. You've got a lot of areas where you've got a lot of tightly packed white/black specs, and this causes a lot of high contrast focal areas that you may not intend to create. These will draw the viewer's eye - and where your viewer's eye goes should always be in your control.

Your form intersections are alright, though your linework on that first pageis visibly scratchy and haphazard. Don't forget about the ghosting method - every mark should be drawn using that three step plan-prepare-execute process, including when you're putting down line weight. Additionally, if you make a mistake, do not correct it. This is just going to make the problematic area darker, and draw more attention to it. Lastly, when adding line weight, make sure it is with tapered, confident strokes, so they blend into the original line rather than having visible stopping points.

Your organic intersections are coming along fairly well. You're doing a good job of demonstrating how the forms exist together in space, wrapping around each other as they pile up in three dimensions, rather than being simple shapes pasted on top of one another on the page. Do watch your cast shadows however - you have a tendency to draw them as though they're glued onto the object casting them, rather than actually projecting them onto the surface below. I explain this a little further in these notes.

Overall you're doing a good job, but you do have a few things to work on. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-25 20:00

Woops, I wish I'd checked this sooner. No issue on the whole tier/upgrade thing, but your link points only to a single image rather than the full album!

Uncomfortable

2019-06-29 22:11

Starting with your arrows, these are generally demonstrating a good awareness of all three dimensions in which they're moving. On your June 2nd attempt, towards the upper left, we see a common mistake of having the spacing between the zigzagging lengths remain fairly consistent, but towards the upper left of the next page, you're doing a much better job, allowing the gaps to compress - applying perspective not only to the width of the ribbon itself but rather to the entirety of space.

I am however concerned about the quality of your linework - it tends to look a little chicken-scratchy, and breaks a cardinal rule of markmaking: lines must flow continuously. Now, I believe this may be something happening after the fact, as you attempt to add additional weight to your marks, but the same rules still apply. In this case, when adding weight, don't try and add in to the entirety of a long, complex line. Instead, add it only to key areas where you need to clarify overlaps. Apply the same ghosting method to achieve a confident execution, and work on getting your stroke to taper in and out, so as to blend better with the underlying lines.

Moving onto the organic forms with contour lines, there are a few key points that you're missing:

• First and foremost, the instructions state that the forms should be simple, essentially like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. No pinching through the midsection, no ends of different sizes, etc. Your contour ellipses page is definitely better, though with a few issues, but your contour curves page is all over the place.

• You need to work on the alignment of your contour ellipses

• Your contour ellipses tend to be the same degree throughout each form, rather than having a visible shift in degree as explained here.

Now from what I can see, you are certainly moving in the right direction, but you need to pay more attention to the instructions.

Moving onto the texture analyses and dissections, these are looking really quite nice. You're demonstrating an understanding of the fact that we're dealing with cast shadows rather than individual lines, and aren't afraid to avoid outlining every little thing. You're also demonstrating well developing observational skills - you're not working from memory, but rather are willing to look back and forth between your reference as much as is needed.

The one thing I want to point out is that right now you are using a great deal of hatching, specifically as form-shading. In general, I encourage students to try and set both form shading and hatching aside - the former because students tend to use it as a crutch to help make their drawings feel three dimensional (especially when their construction isn't up to scratch), and the latter because it's very easy to fall into the trap of using generic hatching instead of observing the reference carefully enough to identify which actual textural forms are present.

Now, it's easy to get confused between form shading (which we don't want to do here) and cast shadows (which we are relying on heavily). Cast shadows are the full-dark shapes that are projected by one form onto another surface. When drawing textures, what we're really doing is drawing around the little forms that exist along the surface of our object, rather than actually drawing them directly. We imply their presence by capturing the shadows they cast (and because these shadows are subject to the amount of light available, we can plunge them into deep darkness where many shadows all merge together into areas of solid black, or we can overexpose them with direct light, resulting in only a few small shadows in the cracks where light cannot penetrate - these small shadows are STILL fully dark (in some cases you've tried to imply the shadows themselves being less dark), but they are limited in size.

Moving onto your form intersections, you're making good headway here, though you definitely need to be drawing through your ellipses more consistently, as this is something I expect you to do for each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons. In particular, your spheres end up coming out a little lumpy and uneven, which undermines the illusion that they're solid and three dimensional. And again, your application of line weight has a tendency to stiffen up your lines. Lastly, I can see you utilizing minor axes on occasion - doing this more consistently will help a great deal to align your ellipses correctly.

Lastly, your organic intersections are indeed capturing the spirit of the exercise (capturing forms that rest atop each other such that they slump and sag as they find a state of equilibrium without interpenetrating), but your linework here is quite sketchy at times, and severely undermines the illusion of solidity. You're clearly getting caught up in the "final drawing" you're working towards, rather than treating this as an exercise whose purpose exists in the actual process you apply, rather than the results you achieve.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, here's what I want to see:

• 2 more pages of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 1 more page of organic forms with contour curves

• 1 more page of organic intersections

No sketchy lines, no complex forms - just smooth, continuous strokes and basic sausage forms that match the definition of "two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width".

Uncomfortable

2019-06-29 23:31

Before I get into the critique, one thing definitely jumps out at me - you seem to have done this in ballpoint pen. This lesson should have been completed using fineliners/felt tip pens (as explained here and pointed out in the different homework assignment sections of this lesson). While students were allowed to use ballpoint in lesson 1 in a pinch (meaning if there were really no other way to get their hands on fineliners in a decent time frame), this does not extend beyond the first lesson.

Of course, I will critique your work, but I do want to make it clear that this requirement is important and must be followed in the future.

Starting with your arrows, they certainly do flow quite nicely through all three dimensions of space, with several pushing quite nicely into the depths of the scene. One thing I do want to encourage you to push even further however is the spacing between the zigzagging lengths of your arrows. Right now they're still pretty consistent, but based on perspective, we would generally see those gaps getting smaller and smaller as we look farther and farther away.

Also worth noting is that your linework here is visibly... for lack of a better word, sketchy. Your marks are still pretty continuous, but there's definitely a visibly sloppiness to it all, and you need to slow yourself down. We're not roughing out drawings here - we're executing marks to perform exercises to a particular specification. Confidence behind our marks is important, but make sure you're applying the ghosting method to every single mark you put down, without exception. This definitely comes out much weaker in your second page (the one with black ink).

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are at least in part, quite well done. They aren't entirely consistent however, in that you're doing certain parts very well in some of these, and less so in others:

• You're drawing through your ellipses in most of these, which is good, but there's one where you stopped doing this for some reason.

• You've got a few where you're demonstrating a good shift in the degree of your ellipses along the length of the form, but for most they're still too consistent.

• Your alignment to that central minor axis line is generally pretty decent, though there are definitely some where you're having trouble.

One thing I am very pleased with is that you're keeping these forms quite simple - they're basic sausage forms that are essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, exactly as described in the instructions. Good work on that front.

Your organic forms with contour curves however is a different story. Here there are a few problems:

• You completely neglected to include the central minor axis line, giving you nothing to align your curves to.

• Towards the top of the page you're definitely struggling to wrap your contour curves properly around the form. These also happen to be forms where the forms don't quite match the simple sausage form definition I described above - though as you move through the page you definitely improve both on this front, and in getting your curves to wrap around.

Don't skip instructions - including the minor axis line is critical, and there's no reason for it to be left out.

On your dissections and texture analyses, you're demonstrating a good overall use of observational skills, which is fantastic. This is definitely something that will serve you well as you move forwards. I do however have a suggestion on how to change the way you think about texture that may help as you move forwards.

It comes down to line vs. cast shadows. In these textures, you're carefully outlining a lot of the little textural forms that sit on the surface of our objects. Lines are a very useful tool we can employ to define the explicit border between forms, but in truth they don't really exist. They're something we make up for the purposes of communicating with our viewer. They're a tool we can use, but like all tools, there are times when tools are useful, and times when they aren't going to work as well.

In the case of textures, we've got a lot of different little forms, so if we were to outline each and every one of them, we inevitably end up with a LOT of little lines. Not only is this a pain in the ass to draw, it's also not very appealing to look at, because it generates a lot of visual noise that can draw the viewer's attention without you meaning to.

The thing about outlining everything is that it tells the viewer that we're going to be explicitly drawing everything that is present on this object, and that anything that has not been drawn, simply doesn't exist. That may sound like a no-brainer, but it excludes the possibility of implied detail - that is, things that may exist in this object you're drawing but that have not actually been drawn themselves.

So, how do we communicate all this detail instead? Well, since lines don't actually exist, what you're actually seeing that you interpret as lines and marks that you ultimately go on to draw are in fact the shadows those little textural forms cast on their surrounding surfaces. Shadows aren't lines - they're shapes that can be very skinny and narrow, or very large and expansive. Shadows can change based on how the object is lit - they can be plunged into darkness, resulting in a lot of shadows all merging together, or they can be overexposed with direct light, leaving the only shadows present as those in the deepest cracks where no light can reach them. What's most important is that no matter how many shadows you end up drawing, it doesn't change what is actually there on the surface of that object. You may put down only a few little marks, but if those shadows are drawn properly, they can still imply a lot more to the viewer.

The key here is that we're not drawing the little textural forms themselves - we're drawing around them, implying their presence based on the shadows they cast on the things around them, and those shadows are free to merge together into large solid shapes, rather than all of these noisy patterns.

Moving onto your form intersections, I notice that you seem to have ignored the instruction about avoiding forms that are overly stretched in one dimension (like longer cylinders). This instruction is pretty important because this exercise is difficult enough already, but by introducing longer forms, we bring more foreshortening into the mix, causing the student to focus on these complications instead of the core challenges of the exercise. Again - read and follow the instructions as they're written. You'll likely find that you need to reread the instructions immediately before working on the exercises, as there's a lot of information there and it's easy to forget.

I am noticing that your boxes are certainly a little weak - don't forget what we covered in the box challenge. When drawing a line as part of a box, you need to focus on how that line is going to converge with the other members of its set of parallel lines. Additionally, drawing the forms a little bigger on the page can help, as our brains benefit from being given more room to think through spatial problems. Lastly, make sure that you use minor axis lines to help align ellipses wherever you need to - in cylinders, cones, etc. drawing around a minor axis line can be very useful.

While your organic intersections are spatially conveying what I'm looking for here - the relationship between these forms as they exist in 3D space as they sag and slump against each other and find a state of equilibrium - but the issue here is that your linework is, again very rough. You're not really adhering to the principles covered in lesson 1. You're scribbling, your lines aren't continuous, and so on.

So here's what we're going to do. First, I want you to get your hands on some fineliners. The section I linked above from lesson 0 lists a number of brands from cheap to higher quality. We sell a higher quality brand at lower prices ourselves as well, but are currently out of stock and won't be restocked for another week or two, so you'll probably want to pick from one of the others. Remember that we're specifically looking to work with pens of a 0.5mm thickness, or as close to that as you can find.

Then I want you to do:

• 1 page of organic forms with contour curves

• 1 page of form intersections consisting ONLY of boxes - focus on keeping your sets of parallel lines converging consistently!

• 1 page of form intersections consisting of all the different kinds of primitive forms (keep them equilateral, no stretched forms!)

• 1 page of organic intersections

I don't want to see any sketchiness, any sloppiness, or any scribbling. Draw from your shoulder, use the ghosting method for every single mark you put down, and be patient. Overall you're demonstrating a good grasp of the spatial problems - you're just being impatient with the actual mark making aspect of it, and that's just a matter of taking your time and allowing the exercises to take as long as they need to. Rather than rushing, take breaks. And of course, reread the instructions as many times as you need to, as often as you need to.

Uncomfortable

2019-06-30 00:23

Alright, so you're right in that this post is pretty confusing, but there are a few concerns that definitely jump out at me. First and foremost are the different paper situations you've got going on.

Looking at this page, we've got an example of a kind of paper you use throughout many of your exercises. This paper is very clearly quite rough and has a lot of tooth to it, the sort of paper that is usually intended for either charcoal or graphite, and is actually a really bad choice for ink, because it'll tend to absorb a lot of ink out of your pens, and still make them draw as though they're kind of dried out. What you want to use with fineliners is smooth paper - ideally, we recommend basic printer paper, though sketchbooks with smoother paper will still do the job. This is why you're ending up with lines that look as though you're drawing with a crayon.

So, with that out of the way, let's look at your individual exercises:

• Your arrows (I'm specifically looking at this page) are flowing pretty nicely through space, though your linework is definitely a little uncertain. Make sure you're drawing from your shoulder, as some of these do get a little wobbly (though most are fairly smooth and fluid).

• Your organic forms with contour ellipses showing that you may not have read the instructions as carefully as you should have. In the instructions, I ask for very simple sausage forms that are essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Yours pretty frequently have ends of different sizes, resulting in a much more complex shape. Keeping the shapes simple is critical both to keep your focus on the core of this exercise, as well as because we will be using organic forms in the future to create more complex objects, and this will rely on the idea of combining many simple forms to create complex results, rather than increasing the complexity of the basic forms.

• Your organic forms with contour curves suffer from the same problem, but the contour curves themselves are fairly well done. One other issue I'm seeing is that the little contour ellipse you're adding is actually going on the wrong end. Your contour curves tell us that the OTHER end is facing the viewer, but by putting the ellipse where you do, you're contradicting what they're telling us. This conflict in the marks you're putting down and what you're telling the viewer breaks the illusion that what you've drawn is a 3D form.

• Your texture analyses are moving in the right direction. I can see that you're CLEARLY trying to play a lot with cast shadows, which is really good. That said, you're still clinging to the lines you draw beforehand, and you're still trying to outline your objects first, before adding the shadows. What I want you to do is try not to use any line at all, and instead work entirely with the shadows that these forms are casting. It'll be tricky at first, like taking training wheels off a bicycle, but you'll find that this really opens you up to work more flexibly. Lines after all don't actually exist - they're a tool we use to establish the boundaries between forms, and are very effective for larger construction, but are not the best tool for the job here.

• The same concept applies to your dissections - focus on the shadows the individual forms cast, and not on actually outlining them in their entirety.

• Your form intersections are all drawn on that rougher paper, so the linework is a little harder to make out. From what I can see, you're moving in the right direction, although you shouldn't be using hatching lines quite as much as you are here. At most, you should really only be applying it to ONE of the front-facing faces of a box to help clarify which side is which. Any more than that is excessive. I'm also noticing that you're applying a lot more foreshortening to your cylinders (in the instructions, I did say that you should avoid any overly stretched forms for just this reason - foreshortening overcomplicates this already difficult exercise, and takes the focus off of what I want you to be paying attention to), and that makes them feel out of place next to the other forms. In general, you should be keeping the foreshortening on all of these forms pretty shallow, as that's going to help all the forms feel more cohesive within the same space. I also noticed that you tended to draw small clusters of forms, rather than filling a page up with a single continuous network of forms, as requested in the instructions.

• Lastly, your organic intersections are moving in the right direction, specifically in how your sausage forms wrap around one another, although focusing on simple sausages as explained above is critical here, and you've only really piled up a few sausages at a time instead of creating one large pile as shown in the exercise demonstration.

By and large, this submission is kind of mixed. You're moving in the right direction in most areas, but there are a lot of issues that I want to resolve before we mark this lesson as complete. So before I do, here's what I want you to submit:

• Two pages of organic forms with contour curves (focus on simple forms that are the same as two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width - if you're not sure what that means, this example should help).

• Two pages of form intersections. Draw your forms bigger on the page, keep their foreshortening shallow, don't overuse hatching all over, and keep your forms equilateral - that is, roughly the same size in all three dimensions, rather than having them stretch in any one dimension.

• Two pages of organic intersections. Keep the sausages simple again, and create one big pile, one sausage at a time, for each page.

I don't want to receive a submission as scattered as this one - it was really difficult to piece together.

• Take full photographs of each page, not zoomed in photos. I get that your camera isn't great, but do your best to capture the full page with as much quality as you can.

• Work on smooth paper - I'd prefer basic blank printer paper over a sketchbook.

Looking back on your previous submissions, you're definitely capable of much smoother, cleaner linework, so I'm fairly confident that the paper is the biggest culprit here (along with a few instructions you seem to have missed - don't be afraid to reread the instructions as many time as you need to, as there's a lot there and it's easy to forget). Once that's resolved, we should be able to identify and iron out any other remaining issues before marking this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-02 20:36

This is definitely an improvement. Your form intersections using boxes along is especially impressive, although when you introduced other forms, you still seem to have forgotten the instruction to avoid any stretched forms. Keeping them equilateral - that is, roughly the same size in all three dimensions (so your cylinders would be rather short and squat) helps us keep the foreshortening nice and shallow, which makes it a lot simpler to deal with. You can even imagine that you're taking the boxes that you used in the boxes-only version, and placing other forms inside of them.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-07-04 23:30

Starting with your arrows, they're looking pretty good in how they flow through space. I'm especially pleased with the fact that the one on the top left of the page shows a clear compression of the space between the zigzagging lengths as they move farther away from the viewer - a lot of students tend to miss that important aspect of perspective, that it applies to all of space and not just to the objects themselves.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along okay, though these will need some additional attention from you as you move forwards. A couple things I noticed include:

• Your ellipses here are still kind of stiff, so you need to make sure you're loosening up, drawing from the shoulder and doing so with a confident pace.

• Keep your sausages simple - yours are MOSTLY pretty simple, but really we want to aim for what is equivalent to two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Anything that breaks that pattern adds complexity - for example, ends that are different sizes, ends that are more elongated (rather than spherical), a bit of pinching through the midsection, etc.

• On the top right you've got some thought towards how the degrees of the ellipses shifts over the length of the sausage, but you don't seem to think about this as much in many of the others. Just keep aware of it.

Your contour curves are a little on the stiff side too, but they're wrapping around the forms well enough, and you're doing a good job of keeping them snug between the edges of the sausage. Just keep at it - they're not all the way there, but I think you largely just need to keep practicing on loosening up overall and drawing more confidently.

I'm very pleased with the willingness to go very bold with your heavy blacks in the texture analysis exercise. One thing I'm noticing however is that while you're applying your observational skills quite well, and drawing exactly what you see, you're looking at 2D information and executing them in two dimensions - what you're missing is the section in between where you understand how these things exist in 3D space. When you see a mark or a shadow in your reference, I want you to take a moment to think not about how you're going to transfer that exact stroke, but rather think about what is causing it. Every shadow is cast by a form - think about the form that casts it, then try and figure out where that form is going to sit in your drawing, and what kind of shadow it will cast there. This will make your marks more directly relate to the actual textural forms that exist along the surface of your object, and your shadows themselves will actually be implying the presence of something specific, rather than simply being a series of marks on the page. This manner of thinking will also help with your dissections, since it really emphasizes the relationship between the shadows you're drawing, and the forms that cast them.

Your form intersections with boxes only came out reasonably well - you constructed each box mindfully, and did a pretty decent job, demonstrating a developing grasp of how they relate to one another in space. things went fairly well as you introduced more forms, although I noticed that you skipped the instruction about avoiding any forms that are overly stretched or elongated in any one dimension. The main offenders here are your cylinders - you ought to have kept them more equilateral (shortening them so they are the same size in all three dimensions). This helps us reduce the amount of foreshortening going on, to avoid any unnecessary complexity in an already difficult exercise.

Lastly, your organic intersections are looking good. You're demonstrating an understanding of how these forms slump and sag against one another as they find a state of equilibrium. At no point do they feel flat, like a drawing on a page, or like shapes that have been pasted on top of one another. They feel solid and three dimensional, so good work on that.

Overall you do have plenty of room to grow, but you're headed in the right direction. Be sure to incorporate these into your regular warmup routines along with the exercises from lesson 1, and feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-05 17:18

Starting with your arrows, they're quite well done, and flow very nicely through all three dimensions of space. You're demonstrating a good grasp of how perspective is applied to them, both shrinking their farther ends as well as compressing the space between their zigzagging lengths.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along decently, though there are a few things I want to call out:

• Firstly, your ellipses are a little uneven at times. Many of them are quite smooth, confident and evenly shaped, though there are a few that stand out as being a little bumpy. You did mention that your desk may be screwing you up a little, but also make sure you're drawing from your shoulder.

• You're generally doing a decent job of keeping the forms simple, but remember that the instructions state that the sausages are essentially 'two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width'. You're getting the second point well, but you do have a tendency to either make one end smaller than the other, or to stretch the ends out so they are no longer spherical (resulting in a longer section of curvature).

Your contour curves are coming along pretty well - they wrap around the form quite nicely, though keep an eye on your tendency to make them a little stiff. Again, draw from the shoulder, and make sure they flow smoothly.

Now, your texture analyses have a few good points, but by and large they're somewhat lacking:

• The main strength here is that you are indeed starting to think in terms of the shadows cast by your textural forms. What you are still struggling with is a need to draw each and every form entirely. With your scales, you've drawn each and every one. This tells me that while you're moving into the territory of using shadows, you're not leveraging their greatest benefits. The thing about cast shadows is that while they may change based on how we manipulate our lighting situation, that does not impact what is actually present on the surfaces of our object. We may plunge it into darkness, causing the shadows to deepen and grow, merging into large swathes of darkness, or we may blast the shadows away with direct light, like an overexposed photograph, where the only shadows that remain are those in the deepest cracks where light cannot penetrate. Being able to blast your shadows away, to leave them only where forms meet or overlap, and allowing the viewer's brain to fill those gaps in is key to being able to create gradients from solid black to solid white.

• On your second texture, the arbitrary hatching lines you put down quite sloppily are something I never want to see in an attempt at drawing texture. Generally when students add hatching lines, it's because they want to try and give the impression of a middle-grey, instead of sticking to solid black or solid white. Black/white are all we have to play with, so we need to work within those realms. Pushing outside of them is going to cause our drawing to appear sloppy. Secondly, hatching falls into the territory of drawing on auto-pilot. Drawing texture requires a lot of careful observation of your reference image, transferring one element at a time, and never attempting to scribble in order to fill a space.

• On that point, right now your observational skills definitely do need work - there's a lot of signs that you're still largely drawing from memory, rather than actively drawing what you see, and transferring it bit by bit to your drawing. Beginners will often look at their reference, and attempt to find some element that they can ascribe a name to. For example, "a scale" or "a blob" or "a bump". Then they go to their drawing and draw the word they identified. They'll draw a scale, or a blob, or a bump, but it will be a genericized version of that thing, not the specific individual they had seen in their reference. This is essentially what we call symbol drawing - that you draw something that represents what was present, not the thing itself. As you tackle texture in the future, I want you to try to stay away from naming anything you see. Focus on the nature of the form, the things that makes it unique. You'll find that you can only carry a limited amount of this kind of information in your head, because you're no longer simplifying it - you're taking it exactly as it is. This will requires you to draw just a couple of marks, before looking back to your reference and studying it closely again to find the next bits to carry over.

These principles apply to the dissections as well, where you've ended up with many similar issues of oversimplification, and attempting to draw everything a little too explicitly.

Moving forwards, your form intersections are generally quite well done. They demonstrate a good grasp of how these forms sit in space, and how they relate to one another within it. I noticed that you included some forms that were longer in one dimension, despite the instructions to avoid such things as longer cylinders, and to keep your forms equilateral (roughly the same size in all three dimensions). Please be more mindful of the instructions in the future.

Lastly, your organic intersections came out very nicely as well, and your contour lines here are much more fluid and smooth than before. You did a great job of conveying how these forms interact with one another in 3D space - instead of feeling like a series of shapes pasted on top of each other on a page, they feel believable and solid in how they slump and sag against one another, in search of a state of equilibrium. Very well done.

Usually issues in the texture section are fine and expected, and I allow students to work on that as they move forwards. In this case however, before I mark this lesson as complete, I would like you to try the texture analysis exercise once again (1 page of 3 rows). I'm also going to include a lecture I gave to someone who'd complained about not knowing how to approach textures as a whole. I can't fit it in this comment due to reddit's character limit, so it'll be in a reply to this comment. Be sure to give it a read, as it may help you better grasp what you should be aiming for.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-07 02:54

Starting with your arrows, they are flowing well across the page, but you need to push yourself to think more about all three dimensions of space. Specifically, make sure that you're both applying perspective to the arrow itself (making the width of the ribbon decrease as it moves further back in space, as you have done a few times but entirely consistently) and as importantly, make sure you're shrinking the actual space between the zigzagging lengths of ribbon as it moves farther back, as explained here.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses and contour curves are pretty well done. Your ellipses are smooth and evenly shaped while being quite accurate and fitting snugly between the edges of the form, and your contour curves wrap very nicely around the forms. Your actual forms in the contour lines section are definitely better however, as here you stick more closely to the definition of a sausage form as being two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Avoid any swelling of the sausage through its midsection, and also try and keep the ends as spherical as you can (rather than stretching their rounded portion out over a longer distance).

Your texture analyses are a really great start, and demonstrate remarkable patience and care with observation, and the fact that you're definitely grasping the importance of thinking in terms of the shadows cast by the little textural forms that exist along the surface of your object rather than restricting yourself by outlining everything. You're moving in the right direction, and while at times you're still a little afraid to leave lines out and focus entirely on shadow (like in the snakeskin texture), you're definitely pushing yourself out of that comfort zone. Keep it up. Same goes for your dissections.

Your form intersections are coming along quite nicely - you're demonstrating a good grasp of 3D space and the relationships between the forms themselves. A couple things however:

• You seem to be relying on drawing things in with a lighter stroke - don't. Every mark should be drawn with equal confidence, without any attempts or efforts towards making some lighter than others. If you want to go back over it with line weight afterwards, make sure that's sticking to clarifying overlaps only, and limiting yourself to portions of existing lines rather than trying to replace entire strokes.

• In the instructions, I mentioned that you should stay away from any forms that are stretched in any one dimension, sticking instead to those that are more equilateral (the same length in all three dimensions). You seem to have some longer cylinders here - not a huge issue but still something worth calling out as far as following the instructions go. The reason for this one is to avoid bringing additional foreshortening into the mix of an already challenging exercise.

Lastly, your organic intersections are coming along very nicely. You're doing a great job of conveying how these exist in 3D space as individual forms, rather than as flat shapes that have been pasted on top of one another. The drawing is quite believable, and gives a good sense of how they are sagging and slumping against one another as they attempt to find a state of equilibrium.

All in all you are definitely doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-07 18:23

So I'll address your pen concerns first. You're probably right that it is an issue with pressure - a lot of students will, early on, apply way too much pressure and this will damage their pen tips, which in turn can impede the flow of ink. It's good that you've identified this yourself, as it is indeed the main cause of tip wear. Additionally, using an overly toothy, rough paper can also be a problem, as it'll cause more friction and also soak up a lot more ink. Your paper doesn't seem to fall into that category, however, based on your photos.

You don't have to purposely try and make as little contact as possible to keep your pen healthy - just don't go out of your way to press into the page. Additionally, you are welcome to rest your hand gently against the page to help with your pen's stability, as explained here.

Moving onto your actual work, let's start with the arrows. You're doing a good job of decreasing the width of the arrows as they move farther back in space, although you do need to be a little more aware of the spacing between the zigzagging lengths of ribbon. Perspective applies here too, compressing the space in between those lengths and bringing them closer together and even causing them to overlap as they move farther away from the viewer. I demonstrate this here, and it helps a great deal to convey a sense of depth to your scene.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour ellipses, the ellipses are generally pretty well done. I can see a slight degree shift from ellipse to ellipse (although you should probably exaggerate this further), and you're generally doing a good job of keeping them snug between the edges of the form. They're also very smooth and evenly shape. One thing I did notice however is that the sausage forms themselves are a little off. In the beginning of this exercise, I explain that your sausage forms should be the equivalent of two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Yours tend to continue to widen slightly through the length of the form, and your ends tend to be more elongated, like the spherical ends have been stretched out somewhat.

Your contour curves are also looking solid, and are wrapping around the forms quite nicely.

All things considered, I do feel that your texture analyses are coming along quite well, and that you're moving in the direction of understanding how to shift from relying heavily on line to thinking more exclusively in terms of the shadows cast by the little forms that exist on the surface of our objects. Now, you're not there yet - you're still relying a lot on line, for example with the standstone bricks, but you are definitely moving in the right direction. I also noticed that parts of your old bark did get a little scratchy and scribbly - relying more on little bits of auto-pilot drawing rather than directly identifying the little textural forms that exist in your reference and determining what kind of shadows they'd specifically cast, but again - you're headed in the right direction. Keep at it.

I actually feel you're continuing to improve on this through the dissections, where you're relying even more on cast shadows, so that's great to see.

Your form intersections are generally looking pretty good, although some of your boxes seem to be a little exaggerated in their foreshortening, which throws the sense of scale and cohesiveness off a little. Try and keep the foreshortening here more shallow, so you can ensure the forms relate to one another a little more consistently. Your pages were also somewhat bare, so in the future make sure to fill in all the space you have access to on a page.

Lastly, your organic intersections are solid. You've got a good grasp of how these forms exist in 3D space, and how they sag and slump against one another in search of a state of equilibrium. You're not giving the impression that they're just flat cut-out shapes pasted on top of each other - they relate to one another in three dimensions in a believable fashion, so you're definitely pushing that illusion quite strongly.

Keep up the good work. You've got a few things to work on, but by and large you're doing quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-09 21:33

Alrighty, let's step through these one by one.

To start with, you definitely went kind of hard on your organic arrows - that is to say, rather than taking it slow, you jumped straight in and started drawing arrows as complicated as you could. That's not necessarily the best choice - I can definitely see some interesting flow here, but by and large they're so erratic that I feel you may have been distracted more by the focus on making these arrows more complicated.

When doing this exercise, try and focus on long arrows swooping through space in large, fluid arcs. Keep their turns gradual and smooth, rather than sharp and tight. Furthermore, a lot of these were drawn quite small, or at least narrow - try to make them wider, so as to give your brain more room to think through the spatial problem of moving through all three dimensions of space.

For your organic forms with contour ellipses, these are definitely drawn a little sloppily, on two fronts. Firstly, note that in the instructions I describe the sausage forms as being essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Yours don't really maintain a consistent width - they're generally getting wider and narrower, pinching through the midsection, etc. Your ends also tend to be more stretched rather than basic spheres, resulting in that roundedness covering a much greater distance. If you need a visual aid to think about how these should look, this diagram from a later lesson may help.

The other front is that your ellipses definitely do struggle to fall within the bounds of the sausage forms, with a lot of them falling well outside. Remember that this exercise is all about creating the illusion that the contour line rests along the surface of the form - so we can very easily break this illusion by having the contour line fall outside of the silhouette of the form.

Now, I do commend you on the confident, even shapes of the ellipses - this is definitely the most important thing we can follow when drawing the ellipses, but reinforcing them with the ghosting method should help you draw them more accurately within the space they're meant to occupy.

The contour curves are getting a little better, though I can still see the two main issues here as well, just to a lesser degree.

Your textures definitely do have lots of room to grow, but you're moving in the right direction here. I can see you pushing yourself to pay more attention to your reference images, and develop your observational skills further. There still are signs that you're drawing partially from memory (looking away from your drawing for a while and drawing what you remember seeing, rather than moving back and forth, drawing only one or two specific marks before looking back at your reference). I see this especially in the second and third attempts of the texture analysis exercise. This is pretty normal at this stage, though you do need to push yourself to continue focusing on transferring just a little bit of information at a time.

For the density gradients on the far right side of this exercise, I can see you trying to figure out how to move from heavy blacks to sparser marks, though from what I'm seeing, you aren't entirely thinking in terms of cast shadow (though you may have the beginnings of it). You're still focusing very much on patterns, and then reproducing those patterns. Instead, I want you try and set aside any use of line altogether. Line doesn't actually exist - it's something we make up, a tool that is very useful to define the boundaries between forms as we construct them. When we deal with texture however, it becomes more difficult to rely on line because we'd otherwise end up drawing many little lines within a confined space, resulting in a lot of visual noise that can easily distract the viewer and cause us to lose control as we try to guide their eyes.

This is something you're starting to understand and pick up on, but there is another side to it. Since line is no longer an effective tool in this particular context, we instead have to rely on something else. When we look at a reference image, we see a lot of things we initially perceive as lines - but in truth, they are the shadows cast by all of the little forms that exist along the surface of our object. These shadows are much more flexible, and as you've done here, can combine with one another to create large swathes of solid black. Similarly, we can shine direct light at them to blast them away like an overexposed photograph, leaving only the shadows in the deepest cracks where no light can penetrate.

The part you're missing currently is the fact that every single mark you put down is being cast by something. Some form exists that is resulting in the line you perceive - and so when you draw it, you need to be aware of what is casting it. We are effectively drawing around those little forms, rather than outlining and enclosing them (you still end up relying a lot on enclosing things with line, especially with your scales) - so for every mark, think about what you are trying to draw around, what form are you trying to imply is present without drawing it directly?

Moving onto your form intersections, there are a few little hiccups - like drawing elongated cylinders despite being told early on in the instructions not to draw any stretched forms and to keep things fairly equilateral - but by and large you are starting to demonstrate a developing grasp of 3D space. There certainly is a lot of room for improvement, and the more you work in those longer cylinders, the more you get distracted by the challenges of increased foreshortening rather than focusing on the core of the exercise, but you are moving in the right direction and are generally constructing these forms such that they exist together in the same scene in a cohesive manner.

Now, your organic intersections are similarly rough, but I can see signs that you're grasping what this exercise is about. You're showing me that these forms are slumping and sagging against one another, that they're existing together and trying to find a state of equilibrium within three dimensions, rather than being pasted on e on top of the other, ignorant of each others' influence on their own position in space.

Individually, the exercises are indeed moving in the right direction, but each and every one of them imbues a certain sense of... sloppiness. Of being rushed. Some more than others - for example, your texture section is much more patiently done, but your organic forms with contour lines were definitely done far too quickly. Furthermore, I can see the date on that album is from 9 days ago. Given that you completed the box challenge on the 25th of June, if you actually completed lesson 2 in just four days, that would certainly explain things. You may of course have instead worked on the box challenge and lesson 2 in parallel, so I really can't say. Either way, the results do tell me that you did not invest as much time into this lesson as you should have, and that you are very likely capable of much better.

What I ask for in this homework is not perfect work - just work done to the best of your current ability, free from rushing, of sloppiness, and following the instructions as closely as you can. I do not quite see that here.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I want you to do the following:

• 2 pages of organic arrows

• 2 pages of organic forms with contour ellipses

• 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves

• 1 page of form intersections - keep your forms equilateral (meaning all roughly the same size in all three dimensions, no stretched forms) and try to keep them roughly the same size as well.

• 2 pages of organic intersections (keep these all roughly the same size as well, and stick to the simple sausage form of two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-10 20:34

Very nice work! There are only a couple minor things I'd like to point out, but by and large you've done very well throughout this lesson. Starting with your arrows, they flow very confidently and fluidly through all three dimensions of space, and don't show any signs of getting stuck in the two dimensional slice right at the surface of the page. I'm also very pleased to see that you're both playing with the width of the ribbon as it moves farther away, as well as the spacing in between the zigzagging lengths. This shows a fairly deep grasp of the major concepts of perspective.

Next, for your organic forms with contour lines, you've maintained simple, basic sausages that match the definition of two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width (aside from the top right of the contour ellipses page, but we'll ignore that one) - you've clearly been paying careful attention to the instructions. You're also showing a healthy shift in the degrees of your ellipses, keeping the ellipses fairly snug between the edges of the sausage's silhouette, and doing a pretty good job of aligning your ellipses to the central minor axis line. A couple are a little off, but generally you're showing a good sense of how to align them correctly.

Same goes for the contour curves, although some of these are a little sloppier, with a greater tendency to have curves that either spill out of the sausage's silhouette, or float inside of it, rather than remaining snug. Pushing the use of the ghosting method here will help you improve your control and nail this more consistently. Aside from that, it's good to see that you're wrapping the contour curves around nicely, and making good use of overshooting the curves as they hook back around.

You've definitely demonstrated some well developing observational skills with your texture analyses and dissections, and are heading in the right direction. One thing I do want to encourage you to do however is to try and push yourself to lean more on "lost-and-found" lines. That is, if you've got scales for instance, and we ramp up the light that is shining on them, the shadows that help us to define their edges aren't going to shrink uniformly - instead, the shadows where scales meet, where we get deeper cracks and such will persist more while those further out on their own will get blasted out much sooner. What results is a boundary for that scale that gets lost (blasted away by the light), then found again as it reaches a deeper section.

You're definitely not afraid to push the heavy darks of your textures, but I do feel that this will help the way you actually transition from dark to light.

Moving onto the form intersections, these are looking fantastic. You're constructing forms together such that they feel consistent and cohesive within the same scene, and you're demonstrating a solid grasp of how they relate to one another through the intersection lines. And lastly, your organic intersections accomplish a similar task, but this time conveying a very strong illusion that these objects are piling up in a believable, three dimensional manner - slumping and sagging as they find a state of equilibrium while respecting each others' volumes and refraining from actually cutting into one another. These don't feel at all like shapes pasted on top of one another, but rather come off as solid, three dimensional forms.

Overall you're doing very well. Keep up the great work and feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-13 19:53

Starting with your arrows, they're definitely flowing quite nicely, though there's a couple things I'd like to mention:

• As your arrow moves farther back into space, keep an eye on the actual spacing between the zigzagging lengths of its ribbon. As explained here, that spacing should shrink with perspective, rather than remaining consistent.

• The little hatching lines you've added are a little sloppy - with any mark you decide to put down, take the time to actually draw them cleanly, rather than treating some lines as afterthoughts.

One important part of the organic forms with contour ellipses that you missed was the point about sticking to simple sausage forms that are effectively two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You did a much better job of this in your following page with the contour curves, but here you've got different sized ends, pinching through the midsection, etc. There are also some areas where your ellipses aren't quite oriented to align to the central minor axis line correctly, although many are decently done. Lastly, keep an eye on the degree of your ellipses - they should be shifting over the length of the entire form.

As I mentioned, aside from a couple of these where they continue to widen through their length like a stretched ball rather than a sausage form, you've done quite a good job with these. Most follow the definition of a sausage form, and you've done a good job of wrapping each contour line around the form in a confident manner. Keep an eye on your overall accuracy - your lines are confident which is great, though you do have a number of cases where the contour curves end up falling short of one edge of the sausage's silhouette, or where they fall outside of it.

Your texture analyses are definitely moving in the right direction. You're mindful of relying on the shadows the individual textural forms cast on their surroundings. One thing to keep in mind however is that right now when you move towards areas where multiple textural forms meet, the shadows are going to be much deeper, since light has a tougher time penetrating into these areas. That is, compared to the outer edges of those forms that are more open to ambient light. Because of this, as that ambient light increases (as we move towards the sparser end of our density gradient) certain parts of the cast shadows will disappear much more quickly than others. Right now in your texture drawings, you're picking which parts disappear somewhat arbitrarily.

Give these notes a read. I actually took a break from your critique to write them and draw the demo, as it covers issues that many students have encountered. You demonstrate a grasp of many of the overall concepts, though I do feel I touch upon aspects that you may not fully understand just yet.

The same applies to your dissections, though there are also a few other issues I noticed that are worth mentioning:

• You have a tendency to fill things in with solid black, rather than actually thinking about the solid black areas as being shadows (which wouldn't always fill everything in). This has a tendency of flattening your textures out.

• There are a few places where you get a bit scribbly and random - remember that every single mark you put down should be informed by the reference images you're studying. Don't go relying on memory, or on techniques that kick you into a sort of auto-pilot, as in doing so you will end up drawing symbolic representations of the textures, rather than accurate depictions of them.

Your form intersections are coming along reasonably well, especially those focusing on boxes. Your spheres do tend to come out kind of squashed though, so you'll want to get used to drawing full circles (rather than narrower ellipses). Lastly, your organic intersections are looking decent. You're getting into the groove of conveying the illusion that these forms exist together in a three dimensional world, slumping and sagging on top of one another. That said, the particular arrangement you've gone for is a bit precarious, with the sausages being laid out more parallel to one another than they reasonably should. Laying them out instead to be more perpendicular to each other would definitely lend to the illusion of overall stability of the set.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3, but be sure to keep what I've mentioned here in mind and apply it during your regular warmups.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-13 20:21

Starting off with your organic arrows - ohnoes! Looks like you didn't include them. I'm assuming you did complete them and just forgot to include them in the album, but I will want to see them before signing off on this lesson.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour ellipses, you're doing a pretty good job overall, with a couple things to keep in mind:

• Your ellipses' alignments are generally pretty good, in relation to the central minor axis line.

• You're showing a good shift in degree over the length of the forms.

• Your ellipses tend to be kind of uneven - make sure you're drawing from the shoulder and applying the ghosting method. Rotate the page as needed as well in order to find a comfortable angle of approach.

• Your actual sausage forms aren't quite right. In the exercise instructions I explain that the form should essentially be like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. Yours have a tendency to get just a little bit wider through their length, and the ends are more like spheres that have been stretched, resulting in the roundedness being much more gradual than it should. Always try and aim for spherical-type ends, followed by a consistent width between them.

Same thing about the sausages goes for your contour curves as well, though otherwise these are fairly well drawn. They're a little less confident than they could be, but you're doing a pretty good job of wrapping them around the surface of the form in a convincing manner.

Your texture analyses are definitely moving in the right direction, though there is definitely more room for growth and improvement, which will come with practice. I do have a couple things to point out however:

• Remember that we're focusing on cast shadows - not form shadows. Form shadows are what you see on a form's surface caused by the form itself, whereas cast shadows are what is projected by other forms by blocking a light source. For the time being, don't worry about the actual form shading.

• It looks like you got a bit scribbly on your wooden log's study (on the left side). Remember that again, we're just focusing on those cast shadows - meaning you don't have to worry about adding hatching to apply some kind of local colour, or create midtones.

• On the last one - the pebbles - i think the stippling you used on their surfaces was a good thought, although you didn't necessarily focus enough on what you were actually seeing in your reference as far as the nature of that actual texture. Pebbles do have little pocks in them, along with scratches - but what we're really seeing are the shadows being cast by them, so rather than simple dots we might be more likely to see crescent moon shapes (where the edge of the pock blocks the light on one side, but not on the other). Additionally, as shown here (these are new notes I wrote today), those kinds of shallow pocks would be the first thing to be obliterated as the ambient light increases, since it's not particularly difficult for the light to reach those areas, as opposed to deeper cracks and the spaces where different forms meet.

Honestly your dissections' textures were considerably improved, largely because you didn't get caught up in trying to make up midtones, and instead plunged yourself head-long into the stark black and white of the ink and page.

Lastly, both your form intersections and organic intersections are coming along quite well. They both convey a strong understanding of how these forms exist in and relate to one another in 3D space. Don't forget to draw through your ellipses though - even if they're coming out well, I want all my students to draw through the ellipses they draw for these lessons in order to push the additional muscle memory and keep the confidence of the stroke at the forefront.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto lesson 3. I forgot! Show me your organic arrows.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-15 19:14

All in all, you've done a pretty good job. I'll go through them exercise by exercise and touch upon any areas that could use improvement.

To start with, your arrows are very well done. They flow quite nicely through all three dimensions of space. You're also not afraid to have the zigzagging lengths of the arrow's ribbon grow closer and closer as we move farther away, even overlapping beyond a certain point. This conveys an excellent sense of the depth of the scene.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally coming along well, save for a couple minor issues to be aware of:

• Your ellipses are roughly maintaining the same degree. As explained here, they should be shifting towards wider/narrower degrees along the length of the form, as their orientation relative to the viewer changes.

• You're doing a pretty good job of sticking to simple sausages, with a few very minor deviations here and there. Sometimes you've got ends of different sizes, sometimes the ends are a little more elongated (stretching the tapering/curving portion over a longer distance), and sometimes you've got a little pinching towards the midsection. Don't worry about it too much, just keep this in mind an give these notes a read.

These points also apply to your organic forms with contour curves. I also noticed that your contour curves were a little less accurate - they had a greater tendency to fall outside of the silhouette of the organic form, where your contour ellipses were more consistent in sitting snugly between the edges of the form. Keep working on that - continuing to practice proper use of the ghosting method in this context, along with drawing from your shoulder, will help.

It's completely normal to find the texture exercises difficult - these are not meant to be a test of your skill, but rather an introduction to the concept. You have however definitely made some important strides in the right direction. You're definitely starting to think about how the marks we put down are shadows, and there are visible signs that while you're still to a point thinking in terms of line, you are trying to toss that aside in favour of expressing these complex textures entirely with more flexible shadows as explained in these recently added notes. Give them a read, as they should help solidify part of what you're already pushing.

It's fair to say that your use of texture definitely feels a lot more natural in your dissections - I expect this is because the exercise forces you to think more in terms of form and construction, how you're going to tack on little textural forms to the underlying sausage. Either way, you're definitely continuing to develop in the right direction here.

Finally, both your form intersections and organic intersections are looking good. They both convey a strong grasp of how these forms sit in 3D space and how they relate to one another. Neither feel like individual, flat drawings pasted on top of each other - their specific interactions in three dimensions are clear and believable.

I have just one small recommendation - your sausage forms had a tendency to wobble at times, so keep working on keeping them as simple, smooth and confident as possible.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-07-17 20:25

You're definitely doing a pretty solid job with the arrows' main focus, although I definitely noticed a consistent tendency to get a little sloppy with the actual arrowheads themselves. Remember that they're just triangles in 3D space - find the center of the ribbon's end, then project that out into space to find the tip of your arrow head. Also when you practice these in the future, try and play more with arrows that move through the depth of the scene (you've got a lot that move from side to side across the page but only one that attempted to move towards the viewer. For that one (big one on the right side of the first page), one thing to keep in mind is that as we look farther away, the spacing between the zigzagging lengths of the arrow will get closer together, as space itself gets compressed. I demonstrate this further in this section.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses and curves are generally looking pretty good. There are just two things I want to point out:

• You're keeping your sausage forms pretty simple, which is great - just one little hitch. The ends often tend to be kind of elongated - rather than spheres, they've been stretched out, resulting in that roundedness taking up more of the sausage's length. I explain what we're looking for in these forms in this diagram - you've hit most of the points, just missed that one minor thing.

• It doesn't look like you're necessarily allowing the degree of your ellipses to shift much through the length of the forms. Give these notes a read, as they describe why the degree of the ellipses/curves should change to reflect the change in orientation of that cross-section relative to the viewer.

Honestly you're doing a pretty solid job with your texture analyses. You're definitely thinking more about relying on shadow shapes rather than line. As you continue to work on this, try to think about the actual little textural forms that exist along the surface of your object and how every shadow you mark down on the page is actually being cast by one form or another. Attaching the marks you put down to the forms that produce them will help you continue to develop your grasp of how those shadows can be manipulated and conveyed in a convincing manner.

Also, I added these notes to the exercise just this past weekend, so I expect you didn't have a chance to see them. They're definitely relevant to this topic, and are worth reading.

Your textural experimentation extends quite nicely into the dissections - you're definitely leveraging good observational skills and exhibiting a great deal of patience and focus. As you continue to learn to leverage those shadows, and control the density of your textures, you should be able to gradually shift towards conveying an appropriate amount of visual information without necessarily having to go quite so heavy with each individual texture - but for now this is a great point to be at, as the first step is always to be able to identify and carry over the large swathes of detail and information little bits at a time.

Your form intersections demonstrate a pretty good grasp of 3D space and how these forms exist and relate to one another within it. I did want to mention however that in the instructions I specifically ask students to avoid forms that are overly stretched in any one dimension, instead sticking to those that are more equilateral. It seems you missed that bit, as you've got a lot of longer cylinders here, which bring the additional complexity of further foreshortening into the mix, especially in the last page. Additional challenges can easily distract us from the core focus of a given exercise, causing us to gain less from it. Still, great work on the other pages.

Lastly, your organic intersections are similarly coming along well. They're conveying a good grasp of how these forms slump and sag against one anotherm and how they can find a state of equilibrium in a believable three dimensional manner without having to cut into each other, or give the impression of just being flat shapes pasted on top of one another.

Your use of cast shadows here is pretty good, though you definitely do need a little extra use of line weight to help reinforce some of the other silhouettes and clarify what's going on as far as overlapping forms go.

Anyway, you're doing a pretty good job overall. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-18 20:14

Starting with your arrows, these are really well done. You're conveying a strong sense of how each one flows through all three dimensions of space, including the depth of the scene. They all flow fluidly and show a good reliance on your shoulder as you draw. Admittedly when the arrow gets particularly narrow you do end up with more wobbling and inconsistency, but I can certainly understand why that happens at such a tiny scale where it's quite easy to accidentally get your lines to touch.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are looking pretty well done. You're generally keeping the forms pretty simple, though I noticed a few here and there where the ends are different sizes. I actually added this section very recently to help emphasize the individual qualities we want to look for in our sausages, so it's worth taking a look at.

Additionally, I did feel that some of your ellipses tended a little bit towards being a little more stiff. You were definitely focusing very much on maintaining the accuracy of having them fit snugly between the edges of the form. Remember that at the end of the day, while this is certainly important, our first priority is always to achieve a smooth, confident stroke, and in the case of ellipses, maintaining the evenness of their shape.

The same points largely apply to your organic forms with contour curves as well - some of these forms aren't quite matching the 'simple sausage' standard, and some of the curves do stiffen up. You are however doing a good job of wrapping the curves around the form and overshooting them slightly along the other side, which is great to see. Once you're more comfortable with nailing the confidence and smoothness of each stroke, continue to work on your accuracy, to improve the illusion that each curve runs along the surface of the form.

Your texture analyses really demonstrate a remarkable degree of patience and care, and you're definitely doing a great job of leveraging the cast shadows we discuss in the lesson to build up a more flexible texture that can be shifted more towards dense or sparse as needed. I have just one thing I want to point out - when it comes to drawing these, or really anything in the drawabox lessons, stay away from form shading. Form shading is different from cast shadows, in that when a form in isolation interacts with a light source, some parts of that form will be darker or lighter than others, based on how it sits in space. This is what we always regard as "shading", and generally relies heavily on being able to transition through levels of grey in between our blacks and whites.

Because we're working with particularly heavy ink that does not allow for such grey zones it does limit what we can achieve with these marks. There are ways around it - hatching for example, as you've done on occasion, stippling, and so on - but as I explain here, I simply want students to leave form shading alone through these lessons, as it can tend to be somewhat distracting. Instead, focus only on what you can achieve with the shadows cast by each form onto their surroundings, and see just how far you can push that single tool to convey convincing textures for your drawings. As a rule of thumb, if you're about to use hatching or stippling, or really about to put down any marks that aren't themselves shadows cast by some sort of form you can identify along your object's surface, then don't draw it, as it likely constitutes an effort to shade for shading's sake. Every mark we put down, every shadow we capture, is there to help communicate some aspect of that object and its surfaces.

As I added a few extra notes this past weekend on the organic forms with contour lines, I also did the same for the texture analyses. Now here I think you grasp all of it, but I felt I should point them out anyway, just in case.

Your dissections similarly are coming along quite well, although I noticed a few places - like the cracked dirt - where you got a little too caught up in the texture and didn't quite sell the illusion that the texture wraps around the underlying form. You did a much better job with this in most other parts of this exercise however, I just felt it was worth calling out, as it's easy for a student to forget that every mark they put down must reinforce the illusion created by the basic construction underneath, and that it is possible to undermine the assertions made during construction quite easily.

Your form intersections are generally speaking, very well done. With this exercise, there are two aspects that I look for most. First and foremost, I check to see if the student is capable of constructing forms within the same space and scene such that they look like they belong together. It's easy to have inconsistent foreshortening that makes the forms all feel like they exist in isolation from one another. You've definitely nailed this well - your collections of forms feel cohesive and integrated, and the construction of each form is generally done quite well.

The second point I look for is, of course, the intersections. This isn't something I expect students to nail just yet, but I do want them to give it a shot, to try and establish the relationships between the individual forms. With this you've done an okay job. There are several intersections that show a well developing grasp of those relationships, while some others aren't quite as good, but still within the range of what I'd expect to see.

This is also a topic that I've addressed in several different ways over the last few years, as I've tried to find a more successful and concrete way of explaining things. The video that is currently available is definitely helpful and valuable, but rather than focusing on that, I want to draw your attention to this section from the notes.

The idea of the intersection line falling on both forms' surfaces simultaneously is the most succinct I've been able to make it. The focus is on the surfaces of those forms, and that if your intersection line can only be said to exist on the surface of one form at a time, then it is incorrect. It is a shared boundary - always shared, never shifting to one form over another. When I do my yearly release of new video content, I'll definitely be redoing the form intersection one to explain this better.

As you said though, it is one of those things that needs to be attempted a lot in order to properly sink in - the explanations can only go so far. Fortunately, you will find this making more sense as you move forwards, as it is inherently a question of our understanding of 3D space as a whole. All of the lessons after this point deal with developing our grasp of 3D space in different ways and from different angles, so even when you're not actively attempting this exercise, you will get closer to having it make sense. That said, when you do this exercise as part of your warmups, definitely give the intersections themselves a shot. I noticed that in the last page of this exercise, you left those out.

Lastly, your organic intersections are doing a great job of conveying the relationships between these sausage forms as they slump and sag against one another in search for a state of equilibrium. At no point do these feel like they've been cut out and pasted on top of one another - instead, through their well defined relationships and the way they've been layered across one another, they create a strong illusion of depth.

I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. This submission is very strong, and I feel quite confident in your work. Feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-20 15:34

Starting with your arrows, you're doing a pretty good job here in getting them to flow fluidly through space. One thing I do want you to keep an eye on however is the spacing between the zigzagging lengths of the ribbon as it moves back into space. I can see some small signs that you're shrinking that spacing a little as it moves back (which is good) but it does seem kind of inconsistent, and it certainly could be exaggerated further. I explain what I mean in this diagram from the lesson.

I'm glad to see that you're prioritizing the confidence and evenness of your ellipses throughout the organic forms with contour ellipses exercise. You definitely do need to keep refining your use of the ghosting method to get those ellipses to fit more snugly and accurately between the edges of the sausage form, but by and large that is a secondary priority that comes after the evenness has been nailed down. I also noticed that your sausages do generally adhere to the definition explained in these notes (two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width) though there's definitely a visible stiffness/wobbling to the outline of the sausage as you draw it, which suggests that you may be slowing down. Always remember to execute that mark with a confident stroke.

In your contour curves section the sausage forms definitely start to loose that basic simplicity, where you end up with ends of different size. Remember that we absolutely want to keep those forms as simple as possible (this comes into play when we get into construction), again as explained here.

Overall you've done a pretty good job with the texture analyses, although your particular question does suggest a slight misunderstanding in what it is you should be aiming for. Luckily this misunderstanding only shows up here and there in your actual work, with your main focus being correct.

You ask about how you should approach shading the forms in your textures, and the answer is, as explained in the lesson, you shouldn't. Instead, we are focusing exclusively on the shadows being cast by the forms present on the surface of our object. There's a difference - form shading is the interaction of the form itself with the lightsource (how its surface gets darker/lighter based on its orientation and the position of the light), and cast shadows are the interaction between the lightsource, a form, and its given surroundings.

The key to understanding the technique we're using here is that we're not actually drawing the little textural forms themselves. We're implying their presence by drawing around them, by drawing the impact they have on their surroundings. Actually attempting to shade them individually works against this premise. I explain this somewhat, along with other useful points in these notes I added to the exercise page last weekend.

In general, if ever you feel the need to add hatching to any part of your drawing, step back and think about it. Hatching is a generic, catch-all-but-describe-nothing approach usually used to shade for shading's sake. That is, it doesn't require us to be aware of the textures actually present on a surface. In the drawabox lessons, we won't be doing any shading without it being used as a tool for something else.

Drawing is, at its core, a means of communication. We have specific things we want to tell the viewer about what is being drawn. As such, every mark we put down helps towards the goal of communicating something. Construction itself (the core of drawabox) is enough for us to convey how our forms sit in space and how they relate to one another. This is often what people will attempt to achieve using shading (making things feel three dimensional), though it is generally a less effective approach that ends up falling flat if the construction isn't already well executed.

So, if we were to try and use shading to that effect, there's a better tool to focus on instead. As such, we only use shading where it can serve as a tool - for example, if we want to convey the texture of an object, we can often do this most effectively by using texture as part of a gradient from white to black (something that hatching lines attempt to do in a more generic fashion). So if we want to sneak some texture in, we can do it as part of shading - but the shading itself is not the goal. It is simply an excuse to communicate that texture. And of course, as discussed previously, within the texture itself we rely entirely on cast shadows to govern the marks we put down.

Now, I've gone off on a bit of a tangent - for the most part here your use of those cast shadows is really quite good. I especially liked the pine cone, and the wooden board was coming along well too. In the cracking paint, the only thing that was somewhat less good was that while drawing, you were focusing on looking at the cracks, and then you carried the cracks over into your drawing. While this is correct as far as observation goes, the missing component is that you weren't thinking about the actual forms that would cast those shadows. Having an awareness of the source of each shadow will allow you to draw it more convincingly (as you did very well in the pine cone).

Overall your dissections were quite well done, though in certain places - like the corn - you definitely exhibited an inability to move away from outlining each textural form (an issue covered in the newer notes I linked previously).

You did a much better job of this in the raspberry, aside from one key point. As your shadows got blasted away by the light, the specific shadows you decided would last longer were incorrect. The shadows that form where more forms meet are going to last longer, while those out in the open will disappear much sooner. The way you drew them, you had that reversed, with those deeper cracks where multiple forms met were obliterated first.

Lastly, your form intersections and organic intersections are both coming along very well. You're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms exist together within the same space, and how they interact given different circumstances - where in the form intersections they can cut straight through one another, and in the organic intersections they can merely lay atop each other, having to respect each others' volumes. Both came out quite convincingly, with only one little last piece of commentary.

On your organic intersections, I'm pleased to see the use of the contour ellipses along the ends of the forms - you do have a few where these are placed incorrectly however. Those ellipses should be sitting right at the tip of the form, and their degrees should correspond with that cross-sectional slice's orientation relative to the viewer. Yours tended to be too wide, and offset from the actual tip, which breaks the illusion somewhat.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-07-22 03:09

It appears that you've only submitted a few of the exercises (arrows, texture analyses and dissections) in that imgur album. I'll hold off on my critique until you fix that and post the remaining pages.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-22 15:06

To start with, your arrows are flowing quite nicely, though remember that as we look farther back in space, the gaps between the zigzagging lengths of the arrow's ribbon will get smaller and smaller as space itself compresses (based on the basic rules of perspective). I explain this a little further in this diagram. This will help you further sell the illusion of the depth of your scene.

Moving onto the organic forms with contour ellipses, the biggest issue here is with the sausage forms themselves. In the exercise instructions, I mention that these should essentially be like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. This means both ends should be about the same size, and there should be no pinching or swelling through the midsection, as explained here.

The contour ellipses themselves are looking fairly even and confidently drawn, with only a few wobblier ones here and there. You're also doing a pretty good job of keeping them snug within the bounds of the sausage form, without many falling outside of the sausage's silhouette or floating loosely within it. Keep an eye on the alignment to the central minor axis lines however - we essentially want to keep these cross-sectional slices perpendicular to the overall directional flow of the sausage form.

Also, I noticed that the degree of your ellipses seems to be at times a little arbitrary, and frequently you have the same degree used for all the ellipses along the length of a given sausage. As explained here, the degree will naturally shift wider/narrower as the orientation of that cross-section relative to the viewer changes.

The same strengths and weaknesses apply to your contour curves as well.

The things you mentioned while submitting about your texture exercises had me a little worried. The particular phrasing ("I am not a very careful drawer") - specifically how it implies that as being part of who you are, rather than just something you're working on right now was a bit of a red flag, up there with people declaring themselves to be perfectionists. I am glad to see that this didn't seem to reflect itself in your work. You demonstrated, especially in the texture analyses, a good eye for detail and a great deal of patience.

One thing that you do need to work on is your willingness to step away from outlining all of your forms completely. Right now you're doing a good job of thinking more in terms of shadow, but as explained here, you need to be willing to let those shadows evaporate more towards the sparser end of the gradient. This is a common issue, and as such those linked notes were added just last weekend in response to the trend I was seeing, so you wouldn't have seen them yet. Definitely give them a read.

Admittedly through the dissections your observation definitely takes a bit of a dip. You're doing okay, but there are definitely cases that get a little oversimplified and cartoony. Keep working on being patient and taking the time to study your references as closely as possible. Focus on the little forms you see along the surface of your object, and think in terms of the shadows they cast. Don't work with line at all - instead, remember that everything you perceive to be a line in a texture is really just a shadow being cast by some form or another. Finding out what the nature of those forms are, and then figuring out what kind of shadows they'd cast in your particular drawing, will yield much better results.

Moving onto your form intersections, these are generally looking pretty good. You're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms exist in space and how they relate to one another within it. I'm noticing some areas where your boxes get a little weaker, with their convergences becoming less consistent than they ought to be, but this isn't abnormal. Also, note that in the instructions I mention that you should stay away from any forms that are stretched in any one dimension, and stick to more equilateral forms. You didn't stray too much in this, but I did notice one particularly stretched cylinder. Also, when drawing cylinders, make sure your ellipses all sit completely on the minor axis line, rather than hanging half off of it, or barely touching it. Lastly, I'd recommend that you try and stick more to forms that are roughly the same size - the wildly disproportionate ones in the last page of form intersections definitely took away from the focus of the exercise.

Finally, your organic intersections are coming along well. I'm definitely getting the impression that they're relating to one another in three dimensions. The way in which they're slumping and sagging is quite convincing, and they don't feel as though they've been pasted on top of one another in two dimensions. A couple things though - first off, again it's best to stick to sausages that are roughly the same size, rather than one big one and a bunch of smaller ones. Secondly, the top left of your last page doesn't seem to be sitting in a believable manner - the gap between it and those beneath it seems unnatural. Just something to keep in mind when doing this in the future.

Overall, you're doing reasonably well, though you do have a number of things to work on. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-22 15:27

While a few areas are a little rough (quite literally), despite your long break you're doing a pretty good job overall.

Most of the roughness is with the arrows, where your first couple of pages have some visibly scratchy lines. I'm very pleased to see that you sorted this out by the last page, shifting back into smooth, confident strokes. I assume the scratchiness came from the use of line weight - remember that even with this, you're meant to apply the ghosting method, and ensure that your strokes are smooth and confident. Don't chicken scratch, and don't trace slowly along the lines, otherwise you risk stiffening them.

One additional thing to keep in mind with the arrows is that as we look farther back in space, the gaps between the zigzagging lengths of ribbon will shrink, as all space compresses the farther we look (based on the rules of perspective). This is going to eventually result in some nice overlaps of those ribbons, which overall gives a stronger sense of depth in the scene. I demonstrate this in this section.

Remember that the arrows are all about exploring the full three dimensions of a given scene.

Moving onto your organic forms with contour lines, your ellipses are smooth and confident, your curves wrap nicely around the forms, both demonstrate a nice degree shift over the length of the sausages, and you're doing a good job of fitting them accurately and snugly within the bounds of the form's silhouette.

There is however one significant problem - the sausage forms themselves. In the exercise instructions, I mention that the sausages should essentially be like two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. This means the ends should be the same size, there should be no pinching or swelling through their lengths, and the roundedness at either end should only last as far as it would for a regular sphere (rather than being stretched over a longer distance). I explain this further in this relatively new section, added because people kept ignoring that definition of what a sausage form should be.

Moving onto your textures section, your texture analyses definitely move in the right direction. Your'e focusing heavily on careful observation, which is great, and then trying to sort those details out. The key to achieving those density gradients is to actually stop drawing the little textural forms that exist on the surface of your object directly. We're actually not that interested in rendering their form shading, or drawing their internal details - instead, in order to gain the most flexibility, we want to leverage our cast shadows (which you have been to an extent) to IMPLY the presence of each of these forms. In effect, we're drawing around them, implying the fact that they're there through their absence.

These notes dig into this topic. They were also added recently, as this too is a common area of difficulty. I can definitely see you working on how to get your textures to fade from being dense to sparse, but your choices on which elements and marks get cut out is a little arbitrary right now. In those notes, you'll see how certain shadows get blasted away by light sooner than others, with the shadows caught in the gaps between multiple forms lasting much longer than those that are more out in the open.

Now, I'm very pleased with your work on the dissections - I think you've continued to move forwards in your understanding of how to rely more on shadow and less on line, and while these are still generally quite dense, they demonstrate an excellent use of observation, and a balance that is still quite successful.

Moving onto the form intersections, just a couple things to keep in mind:

• You're trying pretty hard not to be sloppy with your hatching lines, but you're still falling a little short - remember to keep those lines stretched all the way across the form from edge to edge.

• Your foreshortening, especially on that first page, is a little on the dramatic and exaggerated side. Making it a little shallower will certainly help with this kind of exercise, especially in keeping the sense of scale more consistent.

• Don't forget to draw through all of your ellipses.

• The instructions state to avoid any forms that are overly elongated in any one dimension (like the many longer cylinders you've got in here) so as to eliminate any unnecessary complexity from an already difficult exercise.

Aside from that, you're doing quite well. You're demonstrating a good grasp of how these forms relate to one another in space.

Lastly, your weights in your organic intersections are weirdly heavy, even on the lower end, and especially compared to the rest of your drawings, so that's a bit odd. All in all however, you are doing a decent job in capturing the relationships between those forms, in how they slump and sag against one another in three dimensions. Do be sure to keep these sausage forms simpler in the future (as explained above), and try to stick to forms that are closer in size to one another rather than a few very large ones with a bunch of tiny babies stacked atop them.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-07-23 20:56

Starting out with your arrows, these are definitely looking quite fluid, exploring all three dimensions of space. Admittedly, the actual execution of the lines themselves are a little bit rushed and haphazard, though I can certainly understand that drawing two arbitrary wavy lines that match one another can be quite difficult. Continuing to leverage your shoulder as the main pivot for your arm's motions can help with this however, as it reduces the amount of small-scale deviation and allows us to maintain a more consistent motion that can be replicated a little more easily.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are generally quite well done, with just a few minor points that I believe would mostly be alleviated by again, taking a little bit more time with these exercises:

• Your ellipses are quite confident, but have a tendency to spill outside of the sausage form. Keep pushing the use of the ghosting method to maintain the confidence while increasing your overall control and precision.

• Great work on the degree shifts across the length of the sausage forms.

• Remember the basic description of what a sausage form should be. Two spheres of equal size connected by a tube of consistent width. You frequently have ends that are of different sizes. Give these notes a read.

In your contour curves, your control definitely decreasesm uch further, and we also start to see them at times getting more uneven. It looks somewhat like you're trying to hit each of these in once go, without necessarily applying the ghosting method, which should be applied to every single mark we put down. Both the confidence of the strokes and their accuracy are certainly on the weaker end - you know what you should be aiming for, but you're not quite engaging the whole of your arm, drawing from the shoulder, and preparing adequately before the execution of each mark.

In your texture analyses, I feel that in terms of how you're drawing the various marks, you're focusing on the right areas. You're clearly paying attention to the shadows rather than trying to enclose every little surface form with an outline, and you're allowing those shadows to dissipate as we move farther towards the sparse end of the gradient.

That said, you're definitely still struggling in creating a smooth gradient especially towards the darker end of things. You're able to get the shadows to dissipate, but you're still overly conscious about having them deepen beyond a certain degree. Give these notes a read. I added them just a couple of weeks ago, so I'm not sure if you had the chance to see them yet. They should help walk you through how to cover the full gradient.

It's also worth mentioning that your overall observational skills will benefit from some more work. Specifically, I think right now you're working heavily from memory - that is, looking at your reference for a while, recording as much as you can to your memory, then drawing from that for an extended period of time. Instead, as explained here, our memory is not particularly reliable and instead we should be constantly looking back at our reference, picking out only little bits of information at a time, focusing in on individual textural forms and drawing the shadows they cast before jumping back to find something new.

You're continuing to demonstrate growth and development in your dissections, though I can see you jumping between different levels of observation and focus. There is definite improvement however, as your strongest ones are towards the bottom of the second page of this exercise.

Your form intersections came out very nicely. You're showing a good grasp of how these forms exist consistently within the same space, and you've defined the relationships between them in a convincing manner. The only suggestion I have here is to perhaps use shallower foreshortening in the future. As that foreshortening gets more dramatic, it can be easy to end up with a sense of scale that doesn't quite feel consistent between such a large group of forms.

Lastly, your organic intersections are similarly well done. You've captured the illusion that these forms are not simply flat shapes pasted on top of one another on a page, but rather that they interact believably in 3D space, that they sag and slump against one another, distributing their weight as they find a state of equilibrium.

You're doing quite well overall, but I am still concerned about those organic forms with contour curves. As such, I'd like you to do two more pages of that specific exercise (contour curves only, your contour ellipses are fine) before I mark this lesson as complete.

Uncomfortable

2019-07-23 21:30

Very nicely done overall! There are a few minor points I'd like to mention, but by and large you've demonstrated a good grasp of the major concepts across this lesson.

Starting with your arrows, you've got a nice flow through each of these, and you're definitely exploring all three dimensions of your scene, including its full depth, which is good to see. I did notice that you had a tendency to draw a lot of arrows that had a pretty low-amplitude ripple through the length (as opposed to the big, swooping ones that go back and forth in a larger zigzag). In general when doing this exercise, I'd recommend going more with the latter - the big swoops allow us to gain a better grasp of the full scope of the space in which we're working, so it tends to be a more valuable use of the exercise.

Moving onto the organic forms with contour lines, I'm glad to see that you stuck primarily with simple sausages that were essentailly two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You also did a great job of keeping the ellipses evenly shaped and fitting snugly within the bounds of the form itself. I noticed a few of these ellipses were drawn in one round - rather than drawing through them. Remember that I do expect you to draw through each and every ellipse you draw for my lessons. I am glad that you held to this for the most part, but don't slip up on that fornt.

On your organic forms with contour curves, I noticed two main issues:

• Frequently your alignment was a little off relative to the minor axis line, resulting in a slant which made it a little trickier to get them to wrap around the form in a convincing manner (although this was still achieved fairly well)

• Your ellipses' degrees didn't seem to shift over the length of the sausage form. Based on your contour ellipses I know that you understand the concept of having the degree shift, but you seem to have maintained a roughly consistent degree in these curves.

You definitely improve on both these fronts, especially the alignment, through the next few pages of this exercise, though I still want you to keep the degree shift in mind. There are definitely still cases where you forget about it.

Jumping onto the texture analyses, these are exceptionally well done. You've demonstrated excellent observational skills, and a good sense of how to transition smoothly from the darks on the left to the sparser, lighter area on the right. My only complaint is a pretty minor one. When we deal with texture, specifically with the kinds of pens we're drawing with, and within the bounds of the drawabox lessons themselves, it's important to distinguish the difference between cast-shadows and form-shading. Form-shading is what we usually think of as shading - it's the relationship between an object's surfaces and the light source. The surfaces that point away from the light source end up darker, the surfaces that point towards it end up lighter. Simple enough. Cast shadows are alternatively the shadows that are cast from one object onto another, when that first object blocks the light source from shining upon the second.

In these lessons, we generally stay away from form shading altogether, even at the level of these small textures. Instead, we focus entirely on cast shadows, specifically the little shadows that the small textural forms along the surface of a given object will cast on their surroundings. This way we can stick entirely to a full black/white binary, rather than trying to use subtle hatching to achieve gradients that don't really lean into the basic properties of the kinds of pen/ink we're using.

The only time we do leverage shading of a sort is as a tool to give ourselves somewhere to convey the texture of a surface. Since shading gives us a demand for some kind of transition from light to dark, we can achieve that by actually drawing the texture (made up of little cast shadows) on the surface of our form, rather than relying on generic hatching lines. This isn't shading for shading's own sake, but rather using it as an excuse to sneak in a little extra communication to the viewer, to tell them about the surface quality of the object we're drawing. So for this reason, shading within the textures themselves - shading of a scale or something like that - doesn't fit into our formula.

Furthermore, when we truly lean into the cast shadows in our textures entirely, we stop drawing the small textural forms themselves, and instead rely entirely on implying their presence by drawing the cast shadows around them. I explain and demonstrate this further in these notes. This allows us to create textures that can fully transition to being completely black or completely white with complete flexibility and the control being in our hands as the ones doing the communication to the viewer.

Of course, these same principles apply to the dissections as well. In your dissections, you didn't really have anywhere to "slip in" some texture or any way to transition in or out of it - that's where using shading as a tool comes in. Remember that our focus is, first and foremost, communicating the properties of what we're drawing to the viewer. Making it pretty is a secondary concern.

Lastly, your form and organic intersections are both done quite well. You're demonstrating a strong understanding of how all these forms of different sorts exist cohesively and consistently with one another, and how their volumes can interact within space. You do a great job of pushing the illusion that these are not just flat shapes on a page, but rather real, tangible 3D forms that can slump and sag around each other, or cut directly into one anothers' volumes.

Overall, despite a few things to keep in mind, you're doing a good job. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so feel free to move onto lesson 3.

Uncomfortable

2019-08-02 18:11

Starting with your arrows, very nice work. These flow very confidently through space, and they do an excellent job of pushing through into the depth of the scene rather than coasting across the surface of the page. You're also not afraid of letting your forms overlap, so I'm very pleased to see how you're drawing through each and every one in its entirety.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are coming along quite well. You're fitting them snugly within the silhouette of the form, you're showing a good grasp of that degree shift over the course of their length, and your ellipses are each drawn with confidence to keep them smooth and even. The same goes for your contour curves - they're wrapping around each form very well and build a convincing illusion of volume.

The only issue with both of these is in the nature of the sausage forms themselves. It's not a big deal at this point, but it will be a much bigger factor - the sausages are meant to be as simple as possible. As explained here, this means maintaining what is essentially two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. The ends have to be the same size, and there should be no pinching or swelling through the midsection. You were very close, but I did see those two issues in small amounts.

In your texture analyses, you definitely put a great deal of effort into paying very close attention to your reference image and all of the details contained therein. Your observational skills are moving along really well. The execution - or more specifically, what you drew and how you drew it, does show pretty common issues that I'm not surprised to see at this point.

The main point here is that you're still relying very heavily on lines. Line itself doesn't exist in the world around us. It's a very useful tool we can employ to define the borders between volumes for our objects, and works really well when dealing with the construction of major forms. Once we start dealing with texture however, enclosing all of our forms in line has a number of downsides that makes it less than ideal.

Firstly, it tends to become really visually crowded and noisy. Secondly, when we enclose every little textural form that exists along the surface of our object with a line, we fall into the trap where we've told our viewer that we are going to draw every form present in this texture explicitly, and anything that we have not drawn does not exist. We don't leave much room for the implication of forms being present. What we want to rely upon instead of line are the shadows cast by those small forms. Instead of drawing the forms directly, we imply all of them by drawing the shadows they cast on the surfaces around them, effectively drawing everyhing but the forms we wish to convey.

Now, you are demonstrating a grasp of some of this more in some textures than others. For example, in your hexagons we can see lines being lost and found, and we can see variable weights to your lines in the blue stone's cracks. They are still, however, line weights, and not shadows. The difference is that a line weight is bound to an edge or line, and follows along its length. A shadow however is bound to some form that is casting it.

When putting a mark down as part of a texture, you need to be aware of the nature of the form that is casting that shadow. In the case of the cracked blue stone, every crack is a bit of stone that is higher or lower than its surroundings, and so one chunk is likely to cast a shadow on one of those around it. The crack may continue on past many different chunks, but each chunk is casting its own independent shadow.

When it comes to handling the actual gradients, I recommend you give these notes a read.

Moving onto your dissections, I do feel that you're generally demonstrating a well developing understanding of these concepts, and you're certainly moving in the right direction. I think what I've said above in regards to the texture analyses will help in general, and apply here as well.

Lastly, your form and organic intersections are very well done, and give an excellent example of your thoroughness, patience, and ultimately your grasp of how forms interact with one another in 3D space under different circumstances. With the form intersections, you've established the relationships between the forms in space and how their volumes can intersect, and with the organic intersections you've established how these forms actually occupy that space, and how they must sag and slump and wrap around one another in order to find a state of equilibrium that does not interfere with each others' established volumes.

Overall you're doing a great job, and I'm very pleased to see the quality of your work. I was concerned that you were jumping straight into lesson 2 here despite the ten odd months since your last submission. You clearly haven't gotten rusty at all.

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

Uncomfortable

2019-08-03 16:51

Overall you've done a pretty good job! To start with, I'm extremely pleased with your arrows - you've demonstrated a great deal of confidence in how you've focused on drawing each arrow in isolation, not worried about how they overlap or interfere with one another. While it makes it a little difficult to critique, I still love what it says about your mindset, so it's worth the trouble. Overall these are flowing very nicely through all three dimensions of space, though one thing I want to remind you of is that as we look farther back in space, the space between those zigzagging lengths of ribbon is going to get more and more compressed. I explain it further here.

Your organic forms with contour ellipses are pretty well done - your ellipses are fitting pretty snugly between the edges of the form, your ellipses are even and confidently drawn, and you're demonstrating a solid shift in the degree along the length of the forms. The only issue is the sausage forms themselves. As explained here you want the sausages to match two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You've got sausages with ends of different sizes and some with pinching through the midsection. Your sausages in the contour curves exercise are much better - though I think you're missing the degree shift in those, so keep an eye on that.

Moving onto your texture analyses, you're definitely moving in the right direction and are paying attention to the right kind of approach. I can see that you're trying to leverage shadows a lot more, and you're diminishing your reliance on lines. There is one issue however - when you actually draw a mark (which is always going to be some manner of cast shadow), try to think about what is actually casting that shadow. Each one is being generated by some form present on the surface of your object. Being aware of that and treating each mark as though it is a shadow being cast by some form blocking a light source will help your textures feel more believable. Right now they're still seeming more like lines with additional line weight in certain areas. You can also read the notes here to get a better sense of how to leverage those shadows as well. This will all apply to the dissections as well, although I think when dealing with these, due to the fact that you're more aware of how the textures are sitting on a three dimensional surface, you are showing more awareness of the individual forms sitting on the surface of the object.

As for the rest, your form intersections and organic intersections are very well done. You're demonstrating a solid grasp of how these forms exist in 3D space and relate to one another. With the form intersections, I'd watch out for the foreshortening you're using - it's a little more dramatic than it ought to be, but it's pretty close. Your organic intersections are doing a great job of conveying how these forms slump and sag against one another as they find a state of equilibrium.

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