Good evening Marshall and dear peers! I wanted to share kind of a vulnerable view, so maybe others can share how to overcome it. I had a lot of resistance with this assignment, as well as the previous one of creating a personal library of authors/masters we admire. I personally get discouraged and side tracked by looking at others work. I did a good amount of copies back at Art Academy, and I realized that the satisfaction of emulating somebody’s trick or style was a very short lived ego satisfaction. I became really good at copying a look, but the essence of interpreting and valuing based on my own tastes and beauty standards, didn’t develop. My reaction was to not look at the work of others trying to steal, but to struggle myself trying to decipher my own values. Even today, when I look at these pieces of art, I feel my heart sinks because I am still far away from reaching those levels. I do enjoy working on assignments that test my thinking/sensibility skills because those align with the idea of growing my own library of visuals. Does anyone can offer a perspective shift to provoke a change of heart? Thank you in advance to all of you for your honest, personal responses.

Interesting Exercise. As you can see I couldn't rotate the paper, but ended up rotating myself around it, 😂. In my case I have more stability pulling at the rhythm of my exhale. Also, doing the airplane landing and launching technique when I pull the pencil when drawing the line helps a lot. I learned that Airplane technique from Wood burning courses, and it works in drawing the same! The thickness and feel of the marking instrument is essential for control. I used two different tools, I found out the thicker one is harder for controlled lines, while the mechanical pencil was a breeze. So, lesson learned, the instrument is vital for the type of work we want to do, duh...I tested my pluck and can say: Thank you for this challenge! PS: I don't have a compass but used different lids for two dimensions. Small and Medium. I will look around for a bigger circle, to try again. Definitely it will take a longer exhale, will have to train those lungs, 😂

Finally, I played around with a shape of my own. Experimenting with the form inside. Shading helps me to clarify the form and play with the design. At the end I cleaned it up with only lines to see if still is readible.

Hello everyone! I tried to start simple with a non-complex shape and make it rotate in different directions. Not as easy as it seems, but fun :) Maybe this is a silly question, but how do we know if the depth side of a shape is correct in terms of lenght?

Hi, Marshal and group! After watching this critique many times (due to my iPad spontaneously replaying videos on an opened page); I finally grasped the objective of these studies with optical illusions! I wanted to share my visual thinking and analysis based on the last shape Marshal shared (the outline one that Stepka and Mike worked on. It is a David's star rotated 90 degrees on the side, with added thickness. I elevated it from a regular square grid graph paper, which presented its own set of challenges and visual mischiefs. After playing with the shape, I have a better grasp of where we are heading with the forms.

This assignment is so much fun! Also using translucent paper to try things out without redrawing the entire image from scratch is such an awesome idea. Curiously, it seems that in Australia the word 'vellum' is not in much use. The only 'vellum' I found in Sydney was an old pack of absolutely gorgeous Arches drawing paper. I wouldn't have noticed it if I wasn't looking for 'vellum' 😉

What I learned from my mistakes with this assignment is: when you could build it with your hands (and it looks the same from different angles), your drawing is not an optical illusion. It’s a graphic drawing. I wanted to invent my own design and I think I made the mistake to combine 2D and 3D in one drawing like in the first image. I posted and deleted it here earlier, but I still like the cute figure that appears in it. Now I’ll try to make an optical illusion of it so that the text applies - but maybe it’s not possible ( to make it impossible), but I’ll add it later if I find out which lines to add/delete/correct. I hope the third image helps in the process.

It was really fun to do. I tried to make some little flips of perspective in the third image, but I don't know, It looks just floating or something like this. Maybe I should try it on the whole image to make it work.

Tried to fit them all on one page, I hope it's not too confusing to read! I also added little notes to the side to keep me focused on certain issues I'm having. Definitely got me more used to using the new tools! The ruler and 0.05 mechanical pencil were mainly used here. I'm going to have to use the Triangle Rulers more because I don't think some of these are accurate to 60 degrees! Definitely something I need to hammer in to me in the future. I think the main problems I'm having here are consistency with line angles and proportion. I can't seem to get them consistently down, even if I do measure with the ruler. The ruler does come in handy though, and it does help with measuring proportions more accurately than by hand. That and other problems like angles of ellipses and other box angles; topics that will probably be addressed in our studies later down the line. Also tried to make a some of the boxes transparent; this really made me have to think about accurate form, but it sure made the exercise feel more challenging and fun! Also for the one at the bottom, I went and did a little peer study of one of Sandra Salem's pages. It's not accurate, but I thought the shapes she choose were so cool! Definitely need to work on accuracy, proportion, and angles as the lessons continue, but this was a really fun exercise regardless!

It was interesting. Nice exercise to undust all that geometry from Elementary. I did all the angles with the triangles, adding and subtracting. To be honest I rely on this little friend at the end to make life easier. Nonetheless I am pretty confident now, that if I find myself stranded on an island I won't die for a lack of shelter. This was worth my Google search: Ecclesiastes 4:9-12. Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone... 😂 By the way, your jokes are awesome! Keep working on that comedic material.