Chieftang

Hello Harshdeep! It’s been a while, and I hope you’re doing well. As promised, here’s your critique for lesson 6.

Looking at your form intersections, your work here demonstrates a fairly well-developed understanding of how these forms exist in 3d space. This exercise really speaks to the core principle of drawabox as a whole. When it’s introduced in lesson 2, it’s more of an opportunity for students to dip their toes into the vast pool that is spatial reasoning. The constructions drawing exercises that we do throughout lessons 3 to 5 work to further refine this understanding. And so even though you shouldn’t expect to be completely solid, by the time you reach lesson 6, you should have a strong understanding of how flat surfaces intersect in 3d space. I’m also happy to see that you’ve got a decent grasp of how round objects intersect with both flat objects and themselves. While you don’t always get there (mostly when your pyramids poke into round objects), there’s plenty here to be proud of.

Now, moving onto the meat of this lesson is proving to be a bit difficult. Having been so active on discord, you’ve pretty much gotten every pointer I could give you for each of your individual objects. You’ve also gotten about every piece of advice about this lesson, its purpose, and how we go about constructing hard surface objects. So instead of repeating those points - as I’m sure you understand them well - I’d like to take the opportunity to go through your object constructions and give you the key takeaways you’ll need for lesson 7.

The thing you should be most proud of is the level of care and patience you employed when constructing your orthos. I’ve gone over orthos over and over again before, so I’ll spare you the long-winded rant this time. Suffice to say that your use of detailed, labeled, and explicitly subdivided orthos lines up with this lesson’s core focus on precision. I’ll borrow some of comfy’s words on the subject, as he’s able to put it far better than I can:

“Precision is often conflated with accuracy, but they're actually two different things (at least insofar as I use the terms here). Where accuracy speaks to how close you were to executing the mark you intended to, precision actually has nothing to do with putting the mark down on the page. It's about the steps you take beforehand to declare those intentions.

So for example, if we look at the ghosting method, when going through the planning phase of a straight line, we can place a start/end point down. This increases the precision of our drawing, by declaring what we intend to do. From there the mark may miss those points, or it may nail them, it may overshoot, or whatever else - but prior to any of that, we have declared our intent, explaining our thought process, and in so doing, ensuring that we ourselves are acting on that clearly defined intent, rather than just putting marks down and then figuring things out as we go.

Through the use of orthographic plans here, your constructions are all decided upon before you actually start constructing it - that saves your brain a whole lot of trouble when it comes time to actually draw the 3D object, as you can follow the recipe you've already concocted. It's still pretty challenging of course, but it allows you to focus all of your available mental resources on repeating the process, rather than also having to make decisions alongside it.”

As for your work, you’ve done an excellent job making detailed orthographic plans and sticking to them. As you progress as an artist, these processes will eventually become streamlined as they move into your subconscious. For now, having the planning phase be so explicit and so complicated really forces your brain to consider the object you’re trying to construct before you actually go about constructing it. Borrowing comfy’s ghosting comparison, detailing your orthos is essentially like “ghosting” the entire construction; you go through the motions and do all the hard thinking about where your marks should go, which leaves your arm free to execute on your decisions. Instead of being for a line, this exercise takes it up a level to a whole-ass object.

And the complexity becomes greater still. Moving onto lesson 7, it’s easy to get lost in all the additional detail that vehicles bring. However, at the end of the day, we’re still dealing with the same fundamental process – object, ortho, bounding box, subdivisions, draw – just on a much different scale. And yes, it will certainly take much longer for you to determine where each feature goes, which subdivision to use for its placement, how it proportions out etc. etc. But it is still the same process that can be broken down into multiple steps. Take your time. Make your decisions. And don’t stress too much. The headaches that accompany the lesson just mean that you’re learning!

Looking at your lesson 6 work, it’s very clear that you’re well on your way towards completing drawabox as a whole. If you keep the critiques you’ve gotten on discord in mind, as well as the points I’ve brought up here, then I have no doubt that you'll do great. With that being said, I’m happy to mark this lesson as complete. I’ll try to get to your 25 wheels sometime in the next few days here. Until then, make sure you’re keeping up with your 50% drawing and we’ll see each other in the #lesson7 channel.

Ok, I lied. I might repeat at least one more tip from discord.

Please draw through your forms.

heheheheeeeeeeee…

Hello Jojo, this is Canoe from the discord server. I’d be happy to take a look at your lesson 6 submission.

Starting with your form intersections exercise, for the most part they look alright. Mostly it looks likw you struggle with the intersections of the round forms like spheres and cylinders. For example, the cylinder intersection on the bottom right of your first page, the come intersection on the bottom right of your second page, and the cylinder intersection on the top left of your third page. There’s also in instance where a cone clearly pokes into a box on the bottom right of your third page that you didn’t mark as in intersection. If you need an example, feel free to write in the lesson 6 channel and I’ll see what I can do about giving you something more concrete. For now, though, I think your understanding of this exercise is sufficient.

Moving onto the real focus of this lesson, I’m happy to say that your understanding of how to construct objects has really developed over time. I’ll use the rest of this critique to talk about some of the things to keep an eye on for the upcoming lesson 7 and 25 wheel challenge, as well as highlight some of the things you’ve done well.

One things I would really like to see you implement going forward is an increased precision in your orthographic studies. For the first six objects, you often seemed to place features like buttons, curves, and indents based off of observation. This is fine for lessons 3 through 5 because organic forms generally don’t conform to any specific design. However, when dealing with man made objects, they’re often manufactured en masse in a way that each item will be exactly the same as the last one. That means we need to be exactly as precise when constructing these objects. What I mean by this is that each feature should be placed with a specific subdivision. There’s a great example of this here in the discord: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/368871313231708172/1364641711904526579/PXL_20250422_1953044822.jpg?ex=68d02a21&is=68ced8a1&hm=eb140dced19d16a689c891190672028aaec7f62ca56125febbc6b77cc8843129&

Doing so helps offload the tricky bits of thinking about where these features go in the final construction, because they're based off of objective subdivisions, and leave our brains free to process how the object actually occupies 3d space. This will be especially important for lesson 7, so it's best to hammer it home here.

Second thing to look out for is faming your cylinders in boxes like you did for the last 100 cylinders in the 250 cylinder challenge. This applies to every cylinder you would include in your object, even if the object itself isn’t mostly a cylinder. For example, the camera lens for your third object could have been constructed within a box to help you place it and get its degree relative to the rest of the camera consistent. You can apply this practice to lenses, buttons, holes, and anything roughly cylindrical. This can also include wheels and headlights later on for the cars.

The final thing I would like you to look out for, and this is definitely something that you improved on over the course of your lesson, is to try and use your bounding box more efficiently. For example, your fourth object had a lot of unnecessary space for your bounding box. This is admittedly something that isn’t too big of an issue, especially since lesson 7 so heavily uses proportioning along with orthographic studies (you’ll see what I mean when you get there). However, efficiently using your bounding box does reflect better preparation on your part and overall really forces you to consider every mark you’ll be making for your constructions.

So to summarize, I’d like you to be more specific with your orthographic studies and their use of subdivisions, frame your cylinders in boxes, and cut the unnecessary sections of your bounding box.

Overall though, like I stated in the beginning of this critique, I believe that the last two objects show enough understanding of how objects are constructed that you’re ready to take on the cars in lesson 7. Keep these tips in mind, as well as any tips you may have gathered from the discord server, and you’ll be alright. Of course, if you have any questions, please feel free to write them in #lesson6 and I’ll get back to you in more detail.

So congratulations! Before moving onto the cars, you must first tackle to great cylinders upon which they stand.

Congratulations on completing lesson 2. I will try to give you some feedback on your homework.

Arrows

Most of your curving lines are pretty confident, so good job. Also, you do a good job of making the arrows look bigger as they get closer to the viewer. Your shading at the bends looks a little rushed, so just make sure to spend more time planning those lines. Also, on some arrows, the shading is on both sides of the fold, making it confusing which part of the arrow is on top. Make sure the shading is always on one side to indicate the inside of the fold, like this: https://imgur.com/a/yvLaVUX. Also, you forgot to add extra line weight to the overlapping points to show which line is on top.

Organic Forms

Most of your organic forms are equilateral although there are a couple with swelling or pinching. However, I see you improved a lot with your sausages over time, especially in the dissections exercise, so this isn't much of an issue.

Although you have some variation with your contour ellipses, I think it would really help to exaggerate the differences between the degrees, so that you can emphasize how the sausages are turning in space. For example, the ellipses in this sausage are all very similar in terms of degree: https://imgur.com/a/SsZuNOt. Even though it's a straight sausage, there should still be more of a degree shift as the ellipses get farther away from the person's center line of sight: https://imgur.com/rXLBxSg. One thing that could help is to draw fewer contour ellipses, so you only have to focus on varying the degrees of a couple of ellipses.

Good job at hooking the ends and varying the degrees of your contour curves. However, you have a few wobbly/angular ones, so just make sure you continue to apply the ghosting method and draw them confidently in one motion.

Texture Analysis/Dissections

Overall, your texture analysis is pretty good. My personal favorite is the rock wall. However, on the dissections exercise, you sometimes outline the textural forms instead of only using cast shadows. For example, on the corn texture, each kernel is outlined, even the ones in the center, where there should be more broken edges in the center due to the way the light washes out the cast shadows between the kernels. I've attached an example of how you could approach the corn texture more implicitly: https://imgur.com/a/4cP9qBq.

Form Intersections

Your form intersections are pretty good. Just make sure that with your cylinders, the ellipse at the far end has a larger degree than the ellipse at the closer end: https://imgur.com/a/yZgMZCb. You have a couple cylinders where this is flipped.

Organic Intersections

Lastly, your organic intersections are done well. You do have a couple sausages that are not entirely simple (have more than one bend), but most of the sausages feel believable in how they sit on top of each other. I like how on the first page, the cast shadow of the top sausage is split between both of the sausages below it. This shows that you are thinking about how the forms exist in relation to each other which is very important.

It's been a long day. I think you're my 11th critique of the day, I've been working since 11am and it's now almost 11pm. One might reasonably ask, "why are you telling me this," and it's for one simple reason. Submissions like yours, where I get to see all of the hard work come together in a clear grasp of the concepts the course seeks to share, make it all better.

Jumping right in with your form intersections, your work here is almost perfect, and the only mistake I saw was where you accidentally confused the diagonals you used to find the center in this pyramid's base as an edge, and had your intersection line form a corner upon it. Mistakes of course happen, and what's important is that we don't correct them or make too much of a fuss, and simply allow them to stand for themselves. Beyond this however, you're clearly demonstrating an exceptionally strong understanding of the relationships between these forms as they sit in 3D space. Something about how this cone peeks just above the box's top plane to introduce a bit of curve to the intersection is extremely gratifying - but maybe that's just the critique exhaustion kicking in.

Continuing onto your cylinders in boxes, though these could stand to be a bit bigger (drawing bigger is always good for engaging the brain's spatial reasoning), you're executing it very well, and all of your line extensions are applied appropriately to ensure that you're being made aware of anywhere your proportions could be altered or adjusted in subsequent attempts, showing that you're well equipped to use this exercise to its greatest effect going forward.

For your vehicle form intersections, admittedly this is something that confuses most students - they tend to assume it's asking for much more than it is (and so they stray from simple primitive forms and even end up working some subdivision into there). Most still hold to the principle of the exercise, which is to remind us that even though the more detailed demos can make it seem at times like we're only piecing together a final object at the very last stage from a forest of lines, that we're still approaching it from simple to complex, big to small, and effectively working as though we're carving out of a block of wood, rather than building up out of toothpicks.

That said, your work here, while remaining within the confines of what the exercise prescribes, actually demonstrates just how far those primitives can be taken even without the complexity of subdivision or non-primitive forms. The excavator is really stealing the show on this one, although all of your constructions for this section really show how these complex objects are made up of the simplest of building blocks.

And lastly, your more detailed vehicle constructions. Here you demonstrate an exceptional degree of patience and care with every aspect of the construction. Ultimately these are 99% planning, 1% execution, and that can really wear on one's patience. Of course, that's not remotely uncommon in this course, and so our students tend to be better prepared for such things than most - but it's still nice to see it put into practice to such great effect.

Unfortunately, I have no critique to offer in terms of your execution of the concepts from the lesson - the work is very well done - so instead I will give you a couple of stylistic suggestions. These likely aren't things that you're going to make use of, since they're very specific to the limitations of this course (working strictly in black and white, for example, narrows the choices we have down considerably).

A lot of it comes down to how those filled areas of solid black are leveraged as a visual element. Ultimately the more separate things a single type of visual element can potentially represent, the slower the viewer will necessarily be able to interpret what they're looking at. Now, we're talking about a difference in milliseconds, but it does make a difference. So for example, if you use filled areas of solid black for both cast shadows and to represent form shading (in this case we'll use form shading to also refer to the separation of planes, like how in this vw beetle's wheels the side planes are filled with black, while the outer face is left white), then the viewer's brain has to spend an extra moment processing whether what they're looking at is intended to be a cast shadow or form shading, and so their read of the image will slow down, impeding how effectively it gets the idea depicted across.

If instead it is only used to represent one thing, the viewer will process that more effectively. But, which do we use? At this point, we consider what information each one will provide that isn't already present. Cast shadows are very useful, because (and this is a major focus of how we engage with texture in this course) cast shadows through their specific shape define the relationship between the form casting the shadow and the surface receiving it, in 3D space, which is very much up our alley for this course. Form shading however doesn't actually give us much that isn't already conveyed by the silhouettes of our forms (and how those silhouettes "turn" to imply the presence of a side plane alongside a front plane (as shown here - this is what "turning" of the form means, and it took me years to understand that as a beginner with no foundation in spatial reasoning).

So, in effect, using filled areas of solid black for cast shadows in these scenarios is inherently going to give us a lot more information than using them for form shading. Of course this'll change drastically if we're able to include midtones between black and white, but that's a story for another day, and another course (preferably one on shading).

I would also generally avoid using black to identify the local colour of darker objects (the closest example of this is your steering wheel and seat in this truck, although I'll explain in a moment why it's not a great example), simply because it's inconsistent - we're not identifying the local colour of anything else, so singling out dark things doesn't really make sense. Consistency is key.

And, having said that, I'm going to immediately break that rule and mention that when it comes to vehicles, what does generally work out fine is filling in the entire interior of a vehicle with solid black - so taking what you did with the steering wheel and seat, and applying it to the whole, like this - although the more cut-outs, the better. I usually explain it away in terms of the exterior frame casting shadows to cover the interior, but technically that doesn't entirely hold up to scrutiny since you'd get light coming in through the windows.

The last thing I wanted to share is much more subjective. I find that when drawing objects in isolation like this, it's best to fill in the shadows that are cast back upon other parts of the object itself, but to simply outline them when they fall onto the ground plane - and to do so with the same line thickness as the rest of the construction (so like the chevy step van, but without the extra thick line). It keeps the shadow from being too distracting, whereas the self-shadows like those we see on this biplane are extremely... well, the technical term is "juicy".

That's not even a joke, it is very much what they're called.

Anyway! As should be clear through my gushing throughout my critique, your work here is phenomenal. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson, and the course as a whole, as complete. Congratulations!

Hi! Here I am for the critique. Overall, your lesson 4 is very good, and the progress is evident within the images you posted.

There are some problems with the contour lines exercise and related principles of form wrapping.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines

• simplicity: your forms are all simple with very confident lines, just as they should be

• contour curves: I see you are changing your degrees but sometimes you do it incorrectly* (see https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/ellipses and https://drawabox.com/lesson/250boxes/1/degree). The thing is, as objecs recede, more of their cross section is visible so the ellipse / box / [insert your shape] degree will be higher. A lot of these curves are also “hanging in the air” (see https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/floating), particularly on the 2nd page – perhaps you got tired and rushed it?

• contour axis alignment: mostly good, I see that you are trying to follow this axis, but you sometimes use misaligned contour curves (be careful!) https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/alignment (the contours are just the visible part of these ellipses)

4 Pages: Pure Constructions

An interesting observation here is that you use the contour curves for the big constructions perfectly – you make them fit in the form, use the correct degrees, and also align them to the halves of your objects. It makes me wonder what happened to the sausage forms above.

• spider and ladybug: you mostly use sausage forms for the legs which is good, but sometimes draw shapes and circles which seem out of place. Your legs are constructed better on the later pages, so keep doing what you did there. The shadows work here, and the texture on the abdomen is good as well. It’s good that you used shapes for the dots of the ladybug, people often color things like this with black which should be avoided – good job!

• wasp and louse: I see you had some trouble with the forms wrapping around the abdomen for both. The contour curves you used before these should be your guides. In fact, this is one of the main reasons you have to draw them for Drawabox. They help you orient these wrapping forms. Also, when you draw them, draw through other forms. If you don’t you will get discontinuities* which flatten the image or send wrong messages. The underlying constructions, as well as the head, antenna and leg constructions are good.

• scorpion: here you actually followed the implied contour (it might be of help to draw it) with additional forms, which is the cross section of the abdominal box. Try to do this more intentionally, it will help you with constructions like the wasp and louse above.

There is a problem with the shadow: in general, shadows will fall in a specific direction, away from the light source(s). When you pick one direction, you have to stay consistent. Here it seems you picked the shadow to fall directly below the scorpion. Because of this choice you shouldn’t draw any shadows above or on the side. See the link below.

• fly and spider: here you made the shadows much better. It is great to see improvements between just consecutive pages :D You also followed the contours with your forms on the fly. Great job!

6 Pages: Detailed

You seem to have taken all the good stuff from the pure constructions and applied it here. Nice.

The leg constructions are good, but the ones for the grasshopper are excellent. It’s really good to see how these forms interact and it gives it an extra 3D feel. I wish you used a similar technique with tour black widow as well. I can see you defaulted to 2D shapes here and sometimes went over your lines which should be avoided.

• ladybugs and beetle: now you colored them. With these constructions, it’s better to keep that pure black for shadows and textures. Color like this can easily distract and flatten the image, e.g. the patterns on the leaf. Was that supposed to be some kind of texture?

The usage on the beetle is how you should approach this. The black implies an indent here, and it transitions from a texture, which gives you 2 things at once: texture and form reinforcement.

• grasshopper: as I said earlier, it might not be 100% as the reference, but the constructions are excellent. I would go a little easier on the thick lines but other than that, great!

• planthopper: overall good, but beware of using lines this thick on the wings. It makes them look too stiff and solid, like they are a part of the form. Try to outline these so they look like veins, see the wasp’s wing above this step: https://drawabox.com/lesson/4/2/step6

• for the crab orb weaver I’d taper the texture more slowly. You also seem to have used outlines instead of form shadows (https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/6/notransition) Also leg construction – try to make it more like the shrimp or ideally grashopper (you don’t have to be so detailed, but the way you used the ellipses and sausage forms is really good).

• the last scorpion is excellent. You did the texture right, and the shadows, and the legs. Keep doing constructions like this! Also – are you using a fineliner here? The lines on the legs look much thicker than those on the abdomen and shadow outlines. There is no need to change the thickness / medium like this.

Summary

Your constructions show a significant improvement. For some reason, you tend to revert to 2D shapes and odd constructions for the legs occasionally. You definitely improved the form wrapping and shadows.

Images with examples: https://imgur.com/a/7MpbrfP

Hello Cornball! I'm Simon and I'll be attempting to review your 25 Wheels challenge :)

First of all for your construction you did a really good job putting the back ellipse with a wider ° than the front one I imagine you had an ellipse guide that's about the best you can do unless you have 200 ellipse guides for all the different °

I'll just note for number 17 and 21 the structured is kind of screwed and it does seem like a few of the latest wheels you put a bit less effort into, so just be careful during Lesson 7 not to rush the construction step since it's the most important one.

With wheels like n°24 I see you got better at drawing the sides of the wheels and taking into account their 3D shape but be careful with wheels like n°9 to use the right ° of ellipse as the center goes further and further inside.

For the textures you started doing a really good job of doing the cast shadows of the texture only with wheels like n°1 or 5 but the more you advance the more it seems like you gave up a bit on it and started losing sight of the texture you were shading like n°21 or n°25. Be sure to always have a distinct light source when shading and I recommend you go back and check the material about shading from Lesson 2(I think) to refresh if needed :)

Little note on the shading, when filling in the dark areas with a ballpoint pen it looks like be careful to not leave little white spots during lesson 7 and if possible get a fineliner brush or just a big fineliner like 1.0 to help you fill in the black areas :)

Other than that all in all great job! Just be mindful not to rush and I'm sure your vehicles will come out looking great!

Best of luck!

Starting with the structural aspect of the challenge, your work here is generally well done - you're doing a good job of building out your wheel structures with successive ellipses so as to control its profile (having it widen through the midsection allows us to create the impression that the tire is more inflated, that it would land with a heavy bounce, whereas keeping the profile flat gives the impression that it's more dense and heavy). There are two main points I wanted to bring to your attention though:

• When constructing the spokes in the center of your wheel, be mindful not only of the outward face of the structure but also the thickness of those individual spokes. In this case you constructed each spoke with many edges, but they all met along the same edge of the wheel's inner tube, meaning that the structure did not have any thickness (at least not where it meets that inner tube). Based on how you'd drawn them, it appears that the intention was to have them maintain a certain thickness all the way through, which the arrangement of your edges did not convey.

• For cases like the bike wheels on this page, where we have spokes that are simply too thin to accurately convey as anything but a single line, this leaves us with a choice to make. A single line isn't enough to define, within the constraints of how we're drawing in this course, something that can be understood as a 3D form, which can create some mild visual confusion for the viewer. The bare minimum we need to convey that these spokes are 3D is to use two lines, enclosing a space between them. This creates a 2D shape, but the absence of internal edges isn't actually a problem - it can still be interpreted as the silhouette of a 3D form. The problem is of course that it's going to end up being thicker than the reference image, but for our purposes in this course (being that conveying solidity and form is our main focus), this would be the better choice.

Continuing onto the textural aspect of the challenge, this is where things become something of a trap for students. Being as far removed from Lesson 2, it's not especially uncommon for students to simply forget that we've addressed the approach for conveying texture (which the treads of our tires, being made up of forms arranged along the surface of a larger structure, definitely falls into). As a result, some students approach it entirely through constructional drawing/explicit markmaking, trying to transfer the visual information directly from their reference to their drawing, while others remember that filled areas of solid black are involved, but aren't sure how to employ them specifically. Ultimately the result is the same (they end up using explicit markmaking instead of the implicit markmaking techniques we talk about back in Lesson 2).

When it comes to texture specifically - at least, how we handle it in this course, which is very specific to this course - we are ultimately looking at the same kind of problem that the course as a whole explores: spatial reasoning. We imply the marks we draw (you can refer to the implicit vs explicit markmaking section for more specific information on this) by drawing the shadows our textural forms cast on their surroundings, not by drawing the forms themselves (in terms of outlining them, or otherwise drawing anything about the form itself). It's the shape of the shadow itself, which is designed based on our understanding of the relationship in 3D space between the form casting it and the surface receiving it. And so, as stressed in these reminders, in this course we're never just drawing what we see. We're looking at our references, and understanding what they tell us about the forms in question, and then deciding on how to convey the relationships between them in space.

The reason we use implicit markmaking instead of explicit is fairly simple, although it's not always obvious. For example, looking at any of your wheels like this one, it looks excellent floating in the void, all full of detail. But when it becomes part of an existing drawing, all of that packed detail can actually work against you by drawing the viewer's eye to it whether you want it to or not. This interferes with our ability to control composition (which is all about dictating how the viewer experiences a piece, what they look at and in which order), which while outside of the scope of this course, is still something I want to give students the tools to engage with more easily.

Explicit markmaking basically locks us into an agreement with the viewer: whatever is drawn is present, and whatever has not been drawn, is not present. And therefore to convey each textural form, we have to declare its presence explicitly. Implicit markmaking on the other hand gives us more freedom by disconnecting the marks we draw from the specifics of what is present. As shown in this diagram, depending on how far the form is from the light source, the angle of the light rays will hit the object at shallower angles the farther away they are, resulting in the shadow itself being projected farther. Even without necessarily having to think about the light source and where it is (maintaining a consistent light source for an illustration is important, but outside of our scope here), what this means is that we have the freedom to change which marks we might use to convey a given textural form from one location in our drawing to another, without telling the viewer that the form is any different between the two cases.

Now, while you've fallen into this trap and definitely need to go back and review the textural concepts from Lesson 2 (I'd recommend starting with these reminders, this is largely intentional. I find that allowing students to make the mistake allows the correction to stand much more strongly than if you'd simply been told to consider the textural material in the first place. That said, it is also worth considering that this is just an example of something that fell through the cracks, and that you would do well to reflect upon any other areas of the course that may not have received as much attention going forward, and review them as well.

I'll leave you to do that, and will go ahead and mark this challenge as complete.

Hi, I hope you're having a wonderful day. My name is Saif i will be going over the critique for your lesson 4 homework submission.

• 2 pages of organic forms with contour curves: I don't see any major issues here, the contours flow nicely and in perspective. One thing I did notice was that at times the contour didn't hook around but otherwise it's smooth sailing.

• 4 pages of insect/arachnid drawings that are purely constructional with no texture or detail:

1. https://imgur.com/QZwAF19 This was a really good attempt!! There were a few things that were missing like contour lines at the joints and an additional form at the back (don't worry too much about this right now you will learn how to better deal with additive forms in lesson 5)

2. https://imgur.com/P2JICXD This attempt was a lot better than the last one, many of the problems I noticed in no 1 are gone here which is awesome! good job! There is one thing that I noticed that overall the proportions are a little off but it's okay we will tackle that a lot more later on so for now this is good!

3. https://imgur.com/KdiP2t8 No problems here beside the angle of your abdomen

4. https://imgur.com/c7JSUcX I like the construction here quite a bit, some of the problems I saw was the thorax lacking a little structure (this isn't an issue we will be tackling this in lesson 5 so you will learn how to do it even better once you start the next lesson) and the jaw area being a little too big which is completely okay at this stage since you will be taught better ways to tackle the head in the next lesson where you will learn how to properly construct the head.

5. https://imgur.com/s09xMMa REALLY GOOD!! The only things I could find to be a little off was the tail part not aligning properly with the abdomen and thorax and some tiny problems with the shape of the thorax and abdomen (it was a bit too round compared to the ref)

6. https://imgur.com/s46M76d Actually nothing much to critique here, the drawing was missing a few contour curves and i saw some ellipses whos perspective was a little off. The antennas at the top were a bit weird so i added flow lines for the construction in its correct perspective.

7. https://imgur.com/kwLCpPm Nothing major here either, some things that I did saw was that the thorax shape was a bit off so I added some forms to make it more even, similarly the wing size was a bit off. I did notice that you got a bit lazy with the tail part that the insect is balancing on as it's a bit too thin towards the bottom and is basically just a line so I added a little bit of width to that as well.

8. https://imgur.com/gBgRdGH My advice for you on this is more of an reminder than an advice. Focus on your construction first then worry about texture, Your texturing work is gorgeous but the underlying foundation is just as important. The abdomen wasn't aligning properly so I added an ellipse to improve that. The main issues I noticed was with the head as it was a bit squished and didn't resemble the reference much so to start instead of an ellipse i've noticed that it's better to start with a box in such cases where the subject is rather flat than round, As always I use the Y method for your box then aligned the horns at the front by drawing ellipses in that box aligned to it's perspective, There is a much better way to align this but that's not really necessary right now and is more so something you will learn more about in lesson 6 so don't worry too much about that right now.

9. https://imgur.com/jiNJpQV This was really good! I didn't see anything worth pointing out at the bottom half, on the top I noticed that you added the horn a little loosely so to reinforce it I used a variation of the branches exercise from lesson 3 and constructed the horns. For the upper torso I also noticed instead of 2 ellipses it was better to just draw a sausage shape as it looked a lot less messy and matched better with the reference. Overall this was really good! really nice improvement so far! Most of the mistakes I saw in the previous insects were solved at this point so good job! Also special thanks for including a seperate image of just the construction and one with texture it made critiquing a ton easier, on the other image I don't have anything else to critique your texture work is flawless.

10. https://imgur.com/3l0lVgI Aside the alignment being a bit off and some contour lines missing there wasn't anything else that could be improved here. Even the stuff i saw was pretty much all covered and most of it wasn't apparent after the texturing.

Phew that took a while, I saw a ton of improvement throughout the lesson, most of the problems I saw in the initial insects were pretty much gone towards the end, Congratulations on finishing the lesson and good job! Can't wait to see more improvement from you moving on!

Hello! I'm Simon and will try to review your Lesson 6 :)

I can completely understand for the shadow on the duckie that.. happens x)

First of all for the forms intersections you did really well! I don't have that much experience reviewing this but I couldn't find anything that would appear wrong, a thing i like to do sometimes with complex intersections is to try to get the same arrangement of shapes in blender and to play around to see how the intersection changes it can be really insightful so if when you do this exercise sometimes you're left unsure with something feel free to check this way after you've put a line down.

Moving on to the Everyday objects constructions,

Overall it all looks great i'll just go object by object with some thigns I find that could be improved on,

First of all for the airpods, speaker, rubber duck (which all have curves) you didn't seem to first draw straight lines to approximate the curve and then come over and draw the curve, this can seem like it's not that useful but especially with complex curves like the duck's it definitely comes in useful so if you practice this exercise in your warmups try to pick a curved object and first draw straight lines like mentioned in the exercise's page.

Second thing that's also got to do with curves do you have a set of french curves ? Because for all of the curves you seem to have redrawn over them manyyyy times even though your individual lines look clean enough, if you don't I understand why you'd want to redraw over but honestly it just makes the drawing look a bit messier and doesn't really make it feel more solid, so even if you don't have french curves I'd say try as much as you can not to redraw over your lines too too much.

Another little thing I could tell you I guess is for your mug you didn't draw the handle using Uncomfortable's technique (that's fine I didn't either for the first mug) but it's just a reminder to go check it out next time you draw a mug since it's good practice to try out different techniques :)

Other than that honestly great job! you practiced subdividing a ton and managed to transcribe your objects in the right proportions, you used ortographic plans and it worked great!

If you have any questions or if I can help in any way feel free to ask :) I'll be marking your Lesson as complete now

Hi! I'm willing to take a look at your submission, but I cannot see any of the files you've shared.