Chieftang

Hi there, I saw you recently submitted your work so I figured I'd take a look:

... Unfortunately, Chrome crashed and I lost everything I typed. So I'm going to go through this kind of fast, but I promise to try and be comprehensive if I can, so let's give it a shot:

Organic Form Intersections.

• Forms looked squished or deflated, and when they wrapped around the sausages beneath, they were not drawn through. We rely on these for structure in our constructions, so make a habit out of forming complete sausages with clear contour information. Drawing through them helps improve our spatial perception of 3D within the 2d plane of the page, so make sure you draw through your forms for this exercise.

• Application otherwise looked similar to how added forms are applied in lesson 5, so it's not necessarily a bad thing here, it's just worth reinforcing the intent and purpose of this exercise.

Construction as applied to Animals.

The core of the lesson as I look at it:

• Looking for a body constructed as two balls connected to form a sausage, with the arms and legs formed by sausage forms with equilateral ends.

• muzzle construction as per the diagram in the informal demos

• Additions are almost exclusively three-dimensional organic forms that are placed with its edges following the contours of any forms beneath it.

All of the constructions here are quite well-done observational drawings. There are elements that can be improved upon in order to better convey dimensionality.

Leg forms appear to be segments that closely mirror the subject’s actual forms. This limits our ability to see the constructive elements of those forms. As I demonstrate here with your horse, the goal here is to show as much of the underlying structure as we can. Sausage forms intersect into each other, with their intersecting contour visible. It can help make the leg feel like a truly solid piece.

Head construction can be very difficult for many students. The muzzle is especially tough, but it helps me to treat it like a form intersection that juts up against the eye sockets. I like your approach of carving the socket in a way that more closely mimics the creature’s actual skull; I have been experimenting with this approach myself in my own work. The payoff of the muzzle construction as DAB performs it is in how it conveys the planes of the muzzle and how it clearly shows the front and sides of the muzzle as it connects to the head. Keep this in mind as you work on future constructions.

Additions on a fair number of your creatures are two-dimensional with the exception of the larger forms on the body and arms. I believe there’s a certain amount of visual conflict that can occur when your additions don’t directly interact with the surface of their adjacent elements. That said, your work still conveys a fair bit of dimensionality through use of contours (though you don’t need extra contours on added forms in most cases). Here’s a useful diagram that also demonstrates the difficulties presented in using them. I will say from personal experience, they do seem to work okay for flat elements like fins like your lionfish, so there’s a degree of finesse to using them. For most cases, 3d additions will be used though. On a related note, I have another good diagram that I'll share here that shows how organic additions are best applied, with all of the changes occurring where the form interacts with others. These diagrams here, here, and here are just really good ones to look at for examples of eyes, feet, and dogs.

At the end of the day, I do feel like you have a good handle on creating dimensional-looking creatures. There's room for improvement, but you should be well-equipped to improve as you continue to draw more and more animals.

Hi there Paradosso, happy to see you finally made it through lesson 5. Now I'll be honest, having helped you through your work in Discord, I already know that you understand the core concepts of the lesson what you've submitted is quite competent. That said, I'll try my best to see if there's anything we missed, just keep in mind that it may come across as nit-picky.

Organic Intersections.

Okay, looking through here, the first thing that jumps out to me is that the sausages here are creatively formed, with tapered ends and spheroid forms. The excercise page here recommends avoiding anything too complicated, though I'm unsure of the exact reason here. At lesson 2's level, I imagine it's more about keeping things simple.

For the most part your cast shadows on these pages turn out just fine, but I did point out a couple where the shadows could have followed the form a little more. Generally speaking they will follow the contour of the receiving form pretty closely, taking into account any bend or change in the surface of the added sausage becoming part the shadow shape. That said, it's tricky when the added sausage runs opposite to the orientation of the base sausage. Either way, I think your work here is just fine and it'll improve as you continue to work on exercises like this one.

Now the one thing about organic intersections that I discovered well after I completed this lesson is that there is to be no cutting into the sausages as they're placed on top of each other. It's a recent-enough discovery that I'm still surprised after completing this exercise that way for so long. It'll probably take a good while before you get the hang of it (about 5 months in here T_T) but try your best to minimize the gap between where the added sausage meets the base sausage.

Construction as applied to Animals.

Getting into the bulk of the lesson here. Now many of these constructions are quite familiar to me already! I hope you agree with me when I say that your improvement over the course of the lesson was steady and measurable. I'm especially pleased with how your organic forms have improved. There's several examples (Damascus goat and Dugong) where you found yourself layering multiple forms in order to get the mass just right for your construction. The application of these forms can be such sticking point in this lesson, as it's difficult to determine what bump is made by what type of form. A good rule of thumb here is to keep the outermost surfaces as uncomplicated as possible while letting the additions do the work of conveying the contours of the base form as it droops over the sides. This is demonstrated in a diagram showing complex and simple curves of added forms.

Naturally you stuck to using sausages as your base forms for your limbs, and I'm happy to see that. In my own critique for lesson 4, DIO referred to the sausage constructions as an armature after pointing out that I was trying other construction methods. I don't think you have a problem with that, but I'll share that bit because it's great to keep in mind:

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms.

Lesson 5 adds complexity to this by suggesting a larger mass for the thigh and shoulder joints, but the idea is still the same. Creating a solid base goes a long way to creating a convincing 3-dimensional construction. Incidentally you picked a very challenging pose for one of your weasels, where the lil' guy was facing right and then twisted to look left on the page. When I looked at this one, I wasn't sure if every limb needed to be shown in order to convey a solid animal. I did find that identifying a foreleg and adding that to the form itself helped significantly with helping solidify its orientation in space though. That said, it's a very well hidden limb, and if I was in your position with L5, I'm not sure if I would've been able to spot it, so I know you tried your best on this one.

Last thing I wanted touch on is your texture work. You've been working like crazy since Lesson 2 to complete texture after texture through the challenge, plants as bugs. That said, I'm happy to see you applied a light touch to your work in this lesson, as it helped improve the visibility of the underlying forms. I'm especially fond of this Capybara.

So I think with Lesson 5 complete, I think it's safe to say that you're ready to move on. 250 cylinders await you if you haven't already started that challenge.

Oops, that's a first! Sorry about that, I'll go ahead and mark this one for you.

Oh I love that book! I was actually reading through it before I started DAB, though I never got to finishing it. Funnily enough though, that book really came through when I was struggling with cylinders in boxes. It was that diagram of the cylinder with the cross of the 'T' perpendicular to the minor axis that did the trick! It's got so many great examples in there, it should've occurred to me sooner!

Hi there, Sparrowsky, I'm Chieftang! I saw your submission in the queue, so I figured I'd take a look, though this might not be too long, since the work here is really well done! With that in mind, let's get to it:

Form Intersections.

Looking at your pages here, I'm genuinely impressed to see just how many forms you've managed to cram onto each page. There's really excellent control in managing the intersections and keeping everything easy to read. Although my time post-lesson 6 isn't really that long, I haven't seen many students that can handle form intersections at this level. Very nicely done here!

Construction as Applied to Everyday Objects.

Just a quick note here: As I looked through the pages, I noticed that a fair number of ultra-fine lines were broken up, if not completely missing. Experience has taught me that this is likely because of how your scanning application is processing your pages. Not that this will really change the outcome of my critique, it's just to let you know if I miss anything or point out an error that you don't see on your work. But enough about that, let's jump in.

Okay, so the assignment only called for 8 pages, which most can assume to mean 8 objects in all, but you went above and beyond to fill your pages with numerous objects. There's plenty of variety too, jumping between boxy, and cylindrical forms and everything in between.

I think what jumps out to me more than anything, and this is crucial, is just how consistent everything is. When I look at your cylindrical objects, such as the pen, the uh, tube of superglue (uhu?), and the bottle of hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol, there's a logical shift in the degree of the contour that never falters. Again, not a common sight among other students at this level.

Subdivisions seem to applied very nicely here too. Small details such as the array of holes on that small case next to the tube of glue, for example, demonstrate just how deep subdivisions can really go. I find your subdivisions within the handgun are especially noteworthy, as there are numerous features here that remain consistent throughout the construction. Looking at the radio on that same page, it looks like you didn't align those u-shaped features to the box itself(I could be misreading that of course, and it's still consistent either way), and I think that was a missed opportunity to practice more subdividing, but it still turned out great. Unrelated note, there's also a way to subdivide a circle in perspective without a box, but that's a)outside the scope of DAB, and b)not something I've taken the time to research; really just something to think about.

The only thing left to comment on, I think, is the use of orthographic diagrams. I was under the impression that they had to be used for every construction, but seeing as this isn't the official track, I don't have the drive, or the certainty, to enforce it. The diagrams you do use however, are well laid out and translate into a well-done final product. That faucet for example is very impressive.

I also wanted to add just a little bit here if it helps. This is just an extra bit beyond the scope of the critique You have a number of objects with hinges on them. This is something we learn about in the 100 treasure chest challenge, and I just wanted to share it with you. If you extend your box's dimensions with subdivision, you can essentially lay out the framework for a cylinder, with your two ellipses on both the close and far sides of the box. This allows you to align your object to the path of the ellipse and you can keep your object's proportions aligned as it moves along the path. I did a diagram here with your pencil case to show you what I mean. I used a slightly different angle for my example, but as it was, your proportions were still pretty close either way.

So with everything evaluated, I think it's fair to say that your work demonstrates the solid comprehension of the lesson's core concepts that are needed to be marked as complete, and I think I will do just that.

Hi there, glad to see you're still at it. Let me start by saying that it looks like you're using the tools introduced in lesson 5. You're head construction still needs work to improve, but I'm going to try and help you with that if I can.

I want to start by addressing your mark-making. I'm seeing a clear effort and improved care with how you draw your forms. Take a look at your elephant, compared to your horse from the original submission. This particular horse has straying and fraying lines, elliptical shapes that aren't drawn to solidity(that pelvic ball), and some very inconsistent leg forms. Your elephant however, has solid elliptical shapes, strong solid forms, and none of the stray tangential lines or fraying that we see in that horse. I can't stress enough how crucial careful linework is when you're working on complicated subjects like animals and objects (like in lesson 6). Those fraying lines that go nowhere tend to lead or distract the eye, and subconsciously pick away at our conviction that the subject we're seeing is three-dimensional. It's that same reason that 2-dimensional additions don't work well in lesson 5's work. Any time spent where the features we're examining aren't immediately and obviously three-dimensional eventually breaks down the illusion we strive to create.

So looking at the elephant, I can clearly see where you used a box as the base form for the head. I don't have too much experience in the way of changing the cranial form. but it does seem like a believable form. This decision is one of the key tenets of Drawabox. As we strive to gain mastery over the tools that we've learned in this program, we can begin to use them in ways that differ from how they were introduced. A cranial ball may work for most animals, but in the case of the elephant here, there's clearly more mass than the ball and a few forms can embody. Ultimately what we're looking at is an exercise in problem-solving.

Incidentally, in that gallery of diagrams that I shared, there's a demonstration of a rhino's head construction. In that case, and in the version I approached in my own diagram, a boxy form is used to fill in the mass of the head. I believe the cranial ball here is still utilized because it is very effective at establishing the front, sides,and forehead of the head, but I think a box like you used is suitable too. I made a diagram that shares some of the observations that I made, but by comparison to your other work, the notes here are contained to this specific construction. The only note I want to make here is about line weight used to outline the elephant. This particular tool is good for outlining simple forms, but in our complicated constructions, it's best reserved for emphasizing certain lines when overlapping makes identifying the foremost lines difficult.

Moving on to your lynx, I see you made a solid pass at constructing the head using the traditional cranial ball. The heavy line weight at the front of the muzzle flattens the overall form, but it otherwise a good effort. Just a quick note about eyelids; they are supposed to be drawn with additional, as the diamond shape doesn't effectively convey the roundness of the eyeball. Other than my thoughts on the head construction, the rest of the subject is spot on for the most part. I made another diagram, this time demonstrating the process of head construction as I approach it. I mostly just wanted to show how the contours drawn across the cranial ball are actually intersections for the boxy form of the muzzle. That intersection line between forms is one of the things that I see consistently missing in all of the work I've seen from you in this lesson. I've tried to explain it a few times now, but this diagram from Lesson 4's wasp demo also explains the purpose of that line. But anyway here's that diagram.

There is the matter of the hind leg having an ovoid form that was cut into for the sake of creating a more accurate-looking leg. As I mentioned in the previous evaluations, this is one of those things that's meant to be avoided. With so many additions being applied to the subject, a subtraction conflicts with the visual logic of building upon established forms.

At the end of the day, I believe the work here is finally at a level I can feel good about passing. I have to emphasize here that the work we do is not about creating perfect recreation of our subject; that sort of thing requires more effort and study that isn't required. The goal is to create something that looks believable as a living creature. Ultimately my own evaluation falls along those same lines, but since this isn't an official track, I look more for effort to complete the lesson rather than clear mastery over its methods and tools. As it stands I feel you're in good spot as far as applying the core ideas of creature construction.

As a post-script, my health was never really taxed by doing critiques. I tend to try and create a comprehensive critique that demonstrates what areas a student should work on, and I try to provide as many resources as I can find; the goal I have in my mind is to put people on a path that brings them to my own level. My own tendency to be unorganized makes compiling this information harder than it needs to be, but I also haven't taken the time to improve on that(yet). This is probably the biggest factor in why I spent so much time on this critique. The work had note after note to make and trying to demonstrate each element required significant and careful explanation. Now that I see that your work has care put into it, I have a significantly clearer look at where you're at with this lesson, and so setting up this follow-up was a lot faster to put together. It still took an afternoon, but I had a clear direction to follow with my evaluation.

Hi there, and welcome back. I wasn't expecting you to have a full response so quickly, but that's okay, we can work from here. I'll go ahead start by saying that I am seeing noticeable improvement throughout the work. There's still some rough spots, but we'll talk about those in a hopefully more organized fashion.

Organic Intersections.

First, the marksmanship is vastly improved. There's more uniformity across the forms here, and those contour curves shift more noticeably. That's great to see! There are still a few areas where the additions didn't wrap around the far side of the form they fell on. As always, we're trying to internalize the illusion of 3d with our constructions, so these small areas where our forms don't interact create subconscious contradictions in our perception that ends up flattening our image. I noticed some other areas where the forms don't intereact where they ought to.

Looking over this , I think it's fair to say there is better application of shadow across these forms, with the exception of the one I noted in the corner. It may help to think of cast shadows as 3d projections of the form that creates them. This information doesn't really change how they follow the form, which your work does show, but it will help when determining the shape of the shadow.

Animal Constructions.

So in the original critique, I saw some confusion as to the construction method to follow for our animals. So in setting up the revisions, I considered what I deem essential to the construction process, which I'll just repeat again to be complete:

1. complete basic form construction, with sausage legs serving as bases for the leg.

2. additions are 3-dimensional, and build on the form it attaches to.

3. muzzle construction.

Starting with the tiger, I've marked out where I identified the core components. I'm happy to see that you're adopting the sausage-leg construction, and while it's still missing the contour intersections, it already looks considerably more solid. Cranial ball here is a little big, but you made sure it connects to the torso here. It's possible you missed the note on the bottom of this graphic about making sure the neck-tube connects with the contour ellipse of the torso sausage, but in this case it isn't part of the larger problem I have with this particular construction.

As you mentioned, I can see where you used additions to fill in for your torso. It's possible that I'm misreading it, but the conflict I see is that there are several 2D additions that complete the torso here. I cautioned against relying on 2d additions in the "Organic Additions" section in my original critique. The problem with these is identical to the problem when organic sausages in the intersections exercise don't overlap; we cannot see how these shapes interact, if at all, with the neighboring form.

The "Organic Additions" section was really a setup to utilize that graphic that showed the difference between 2d and 3d additions. It's worth reiterating here that organic additions are used to create mass on our base forms and sausages. A [single organic form] does the work of these three shapes. It's not a perfect solution, but we're not striving for perfect, or pretty, but rather a greater understanding of the dimensions of the creature or object we're studying.

(Note. ) This is what I've written so far after an evening of evaluation and drawing. My drawings also include some observations I've made with your rhino drawings, but there's more to add to this critique before it's complete. I'll continue work when the time becomes available to me.

Part 2

Moving onto the Rhino, I was able to spot the base forms of the body here. I point out here that the torso sausage is nonexistant, and instead I see ribcage and pelvis balls. I moved on to try and identify the leg forms being applied as well as the head construction, and it really seemed to spot numerous additions and errors that forced me to stop my evaluation.

... so, here goes...

The additional work I've requested here is rough in the sense that the principles of DrawaBox as a course are applied very inconsistently. The work here feels rushed and poorly executed. I am seeing work that looks like improvement, yes, but in terms of the three things that I was looking for, I cannot confidently say you have markedly improved with what I'm seeing here.

As thorough as I tend to be in my critiques, I also try to be reasonable in the way that I request revisions. There's really nothing stopping a student from moving on to the next lesson, so taking the time to submit the work to even be looked at by another student is a strong indicator of willingness to follow the program and learn. It's for those reasons that reviewers have no power or benefit to set unreasonable standards in their critiques.

As it stands, I feel that I've been as thorough as can be as far trying to evaluate your work and point out where in the lesson additional clarification can be found. I want to see you improve, of course, but I need to see it for myself before I can consider this lesson complete for you.

If you wish to submit another pair of constructions, I am willing to try again to evaluate them. Just understand that the way I evaluate a submission is time consuming; the original post for your review took me over a week to write, and the first part of this reply took me about 4 hours, and then another 3 hours for this one. THAT'S NOT TO SAY THAT'S YOUR PROBLEM. Obviously I'm putting in way more than is necessary. But what I'm getting at is that if I'm going to evaluate your work again, I don't want to find myself pointing out the same type of errors again.

So with that in mind, I highly recommend you look through the lesson material. Do the demos if you haven't done them already, or follow along with the video if you are able. Also study the informal demos; you don't have to draw all those, but it will help to try drawing the muzzle on a couple heads.

I also have a collection of diagrams that I've taken from other critiques or even hidden away on discord in the pins. I don't think I shared all of them in my original critique, but I definitely used a few. However, I'll offer them here partly because you'll find diagrams from those informal demos and other similar stuff from other lessons.

Above all else, I really, truly, don't want you to feel bad about this essay I've put together. As I said before, reviewers have no benefit from being unreasonable, and, if anything, I feel I stand to lose something if I end up scaring away a student I'm trying to help.

Last thing I want to mention is that this is just my recommendation. You don't really need my specific critique to advance to other work, and really, anyone else can produce a critique and mark your work as complete. If someone else marks your critique as complete, then there's no need to have this critique marked as well.

Hi there G4rinuun, looks like I'll be critiquing your work again. So without too much fanfare, let's get to it:

Organic Intersections. Okay, so looking at these two pages, the first thing that stands out is the use of the space. I get a strong sense of the plane upon which the sausages rest. There's a couple errors though that throw the illusion a little bit. On this first page here, I've marked a few spots that stand out to me as being particularly disruptive to the illusion. Namely, you want to make sure you draw through your forms. Now when it comes to their contour curves, they follow the same principles as described back in lesson 2. It can be a little tougher to maintain their alignment without the gestural minor axis used in that assignment, but the degree shifts adhere to the same idea. The other thing I wanted to touch on was the shadows; I didn't mark them in my review, but there's a couple that follow the form that makes them rather than fall on the forms beneath them. In the case of this exercise, it's better to maintain the illusion if you keep one light source hitting across all the sausages.

I will say that the second page has more complete forms, but the shadow work and the contour shifts are still lacking. If it helps, here is a diagram of a banana with rubber bands that captures the behavior of contour curves as the banana exists in space(not that a banana has much agency beyond existing).

Animal Constructions. Alright, the meat of the lesson! There's a good variety creatures here, and I can appreciate trying the non-traditional fish using the principles of construction. For the most part, your creatures are readable, and I can get a sense of their forms, but there's a number of issues that need addressing. There's a few cases, like this fox, where it looks like you cranial and torso balls were starting to fray a little, and this camel where pelvic ball is all but ignored in the construction. As outlined in lesson 1, our work is best conveyed in clear intentioned marks that are smooth and confident.

So looking through these constructions, I can see that balls were used to construct the torso, along with the cranial ball. For the legs, from what I can gather, it looks like you're approach was to use the large muscle forms as demonstrated in the lesson material and continue from there. Something I began to notice is that the legs for these creatures continue through as tubes defined by their contour ellipses.

Legs.

Looking over the work here, there seems to be some confusion as to the construction method for animal legs in this lesson. For example, the second shiba uses sausages, but then your hybrid uses tubes. In other constructions, I'm seeing a conflict between the two, as seen in the first shiba.

Just like with lesson 4, our form of choice for legs is going to be the sausage. I know Comfy is in the process of revising the lessons, so unfortunately we find ourselves in conflicting times where it doesn't feel 100% certain just what we're striving for. The wolf demo does demonstrate the sausage construction. Ultimately though, it's roughly the same idea as lesson 4, with sausages being jammed into each other with a contour curve showing where they intersect. From there, we can add forms and build up from there.

Incidentally, Comfy has also produced a diagram demonstrating a 3d construction for feet that can be a good starting point for our own constructions.

Organic Additions.

On several of these I see good application of organic additions. Your koi and first shiba are especially good-looking as far as additional forms go. Something to keep in mind is that when organic forms meet up against other organic forms, they don't really stop or form straight lines or angles, but rather continue to flow over each other as they continue to spread out. As you can see in this diagram, it can get complex trying to see how the forms relate to each other as they rest on top of the sausage.

It may help to think of the way that the organic form exists in a vacuum. By itself, there's nothing to the form beyond itself, so it appears as a simple form in space. Once applied to another form though, it begins to take on the property of the new form, which creates complexity along the intersection where the forms meet. I have a diagram describing that here that demonstrates this idea.

Something to keep in mind too is that as we continue to add forms to our constructions, we end up developing a set of consistencies that help convey the illusion of 3D. Our work gets in trouble when we contradict those ideas. I only bring this up because there's a few instances where organic forms are connected by a single line or entire additions are missing information. 2D additions are a strategy to construction, but they clash with our three-dimensional approach. In the case of our camel, there's a number of parts here that challenge our 3d illusion.

Muzzle Construction. This is probably one of the harder aspects of this lesson to gain a handle on for most students. Like the other elements of our animal constructions, though, this is merely a base from from which we can build out our creatures. The lesson material as it stands has a number of interpretations, but as you see at the top of the page here, Comfy recommends we follow the method provided in the informal demos section. Again, this has to do with Comfy's planned revisions, so it's an easy detail to miss.

I do see though, a few attempts to follow a semblance of the muzzle construction. Your second shiba looks especially well done, even without the pentagonal eye socket.

There's a few I'd like to help with, starting with the pelican. In my own constructions, I still follow the method comfy introduced in the demo of the [pelican], and it can serve you here. Like all of our forms at this point, they intersect with the other base forms as needed, so make sure it intersects with the cranial ball. Same is true for the eye here with our camel. I went overboard and added the forms, but the important thing to focus on here is the importance of the head construction. The five-sided eye socket, each side a contour carved into our ball, allows us to define the head in a way that lets us see the planes, and that can be very helpful in planning how to apply our additions.

Final Thoughts.

Okay, so I went through here and picked apart your work, to a degree that might be overwhelming at best, or incoherent at worst. I apologize in advance if it comes across as the former, as I tried be comprehensive with all of your work here rather than focus on one or two constructions. BUT what is important here is that I believe you can do these constructions as required; there are many elements in your work that are well done, but not always on the same page. Therefore I'm requesting a few more pieces to complete your critique. They don't necessarily have to be new animals, but I will ask that they be new references. I'm looking for the following:

• complete basic form construction, with sausage legs serving as bases for the leg.

• additions are 3-dimensional, and build on the form it attaches to.

• muzzle construction.

There's some good examples of muzzle construction as well as leg assembly in informal demos section. Review these along with some of the other diagrams here as you consider your new constructions.

Hey there, I didn't mean to come down on Camscanner so hard. I noticed a lot of students using it recently so its caught my notice. I think the issue may fall on line intensity versus the app's settings and the like. For what it's worth, I thought your work was clearer than lesson 4's so there's definite improvement.

Now as far as stray lines go, it's one of those things that gets tamed with continued practice. It's one of the core principles of mark-making, as mentioned in lesson 1 here. All this section is really saying is that our marks should be as definitive as we can make them. We can do this by drawing single, unbroken lines that connect together rather than crossing through. I also made some notes on one of your bird drawings here. I hope that helps you!

Hi there! I saw your submission in the queue, so I thought I'd take a look. As you know, Camscanner tends to cut out some of the finer lines the work that I've seen that have been treated by it. Lines over-treated by camscanner bring a sketchy feel to the overall work. It can be difficult to judge what a line is supposed to be when it’s broken up or nearly invisible. That said, I tried my best, though I had to compile my notes of your work over several days, so some of my notes may make mention of areas that I couldn't quite make out. Moving on, lets get to the review:

Organic Form Intersections.

Let me start by saying you did a great job laying forms over each other without cutting into them. That's a surprisingly common error as students get used to the nature of forms overlapping, but you skirted that issue here. Make sure to keep an eye on contour transitions. Contours widen as form recedes behind the form its laid over. I have a diagram that I used in another critique that demonstrates that idea here.

Animal Constructions.

This lesson is fascinating to me in how it presents everything we've learned up to this point. Everything in the plant and insect constructions can be applied in this lesson, and what we're ultimately looking at is a toolkit that helps us understand the form of the thing we're trying to draw. It may not help us perfectly recreate the things we want to make, but as the goal of DAB is spacial reasoning, we're well-equipped at this point to tackle the challenge.

To that end, I believe you did quite admirably with your work here. You make good effort to make use of organic additions that roll onto each other without that dreaded “saddle” effect. Sausage armatures are relied on here for the limbs, and that creates a very solid foundation on which to build the lumps and bumps that create our critters. Organic forms tend to follow the form they lie on. It can be challenging to determine just how an organic form is supposed to fall over its base form, but for the most part, those forms will roll softly unless laid over an edge.

Since the complexity of these forms occur where they meet other forms, we can use those lines in place of contour curves to imply the roundness of our animal. Generally speaking, it’s more advisable to rely on our organic additions and the way they fall across the form to create that information otherwise created by contour lines.

One of the key tenets of DAB up to this point is starting with a base and building outward. This is repeated often in all those exercises we end up doing (point-to-point lines, funnels, form intersections, etc.). Very rarely do we see examples of constructions that cut into the form itself to complete the structure of the thing. There are a few older demos to be sure, though I understand that Comfy is in the process of revisions. So in the meantime, make sure to avoid cutting into the forms we’re building. Subtractive construction can be complex when used in tandem with additive forms. Just as a reminder, here’s a friendly diagram that I’ve picked up from… somewhere…

The last thing I want to touch on is your reliance on texture. Just keep in mind that we’re not creating art, but rather applying a rigorous method to gain a better understanding of how objects exist in space through translating them to a 2d medium. Texture in this case is applied to tell the viewer that it’s there, but we don’t need to see all of it. Refresh yourself with this bit in Lesson 2 about implicit vs. explicit details and how it impacts the work at hand. Incidentally, I'm not the best at capturing textures, but hair is one of those things that I've been slowly trying to improve my understanding on, so I put together a quick graphic that I hope will be of some help.

Other that those observations, I think your work here is satisfactory, and I'll mark this as complete.