Chieftang

Hey Canoe, thanks again for looking at my cylinders! As strange as it sounds, this challenge has been profoundly cathartic for me. It was a true test to resist the urge to repeat the challenge in order to find my errors. Thankfully I have finally come to develop a decent understanding of how to construct cylinders, and now I have to see if I can leverage this knowledge into helping other folks in the community to do the same.

I hope you have a great rest of your day!

Oh hey Canoe! I'm glad to see you in the critique game; you certainly have an ethic I hope to achieve some day. But first thing's first. I'll admit when I first looked at the material, I didn't quite understand what we were looking for in a cylinder. I knew on some level we were trying to make a perfect circle in perspective, but I didn't quite understand the "how" of it. And then those degree shifts among the arbitrary axes... I didn't even realize that until you mentioned it. I was more focused on rotating the cylinders through space at the time and wasn't paying attention to the full process like I should have, and my own review was so fixated on the last half of the challenge. Ah well.

As you suspected, I have improved on my cylinder constructions, but it was pretty rough for a good long while before they started clicking. Fortunately those embarrassing pages are lost among my pile of warm-ups until the end of time. And the revisions you requested can be found here, here, and here. I still have a tendency to draw through my ellipses 4-5 times, but I'm slowly working on my speed so that I have less time to think about the mark as I draw it.

At any rate, thanks for looking at my stuff yet again and I hope my revisions are satisfactory. Hope you have a good rest of your day!

Hey there, I finished evaluating your work and provided my review in my original reply. Long story short, there's a few things to look out for, but this lesson will be marked as complete and your clear to move on to the next lesson if you haven't already done so.

Hey there, I appreciate you getting back to me on your submission. Looking over the new uploads, they certainly are darker, and I think for most of them the visibility is sufficient for me to proceed. The only one that remains unclarified is the louse from the demo. That said, I think I have enough to work with. I have plans tonight that will prevent me from completing my review this evening, but I'll edit the original reply and write my review. Would it be okay to reply to this chain to make sure that you get notified upon its completion?

Hi there! Saw your submission in the queue, so I figure I'd take a look:

Lines and Planes. Okay, so looking through these, I'm seeing a clear effort to make straight and confident marks. Your superimposed lines are starting from the same point with every effort. Your ghosted lines are pretty good, but the ghosted planes pages have some notable wobbling and errors, with some diagonals missing the corners, and lines that extend beyond the marked corners.

This is normal and part of the process. There can be a number of reasons for this, a thought of doubt, the impulse to correct the mark, etc. What's important to remember is that these moments of hesitancy serve us better before we put the pen to page. Once we make the mark, remember to commit fully to completing that line to the extent that you planned; with enough time and repeated practice, you'll find that these lines will become straighter and cleaner as time goes on.

Ellipses. I think you're making good effort to keep your ellipses solid. There is some fraying, but nothing that isn't expected, and I suspect that you're ghosting your ellipses before you draw them. Incidentally, the idea behind drawing through them several times is to help tighten the shape and to bring a sense of solidity through the thicker line. You're successfully drawing even ellipses, with no noticeable attempts to correct them mid-stroke. The same is true in the funnels exercise. I'm happy to see that these are well done; ellipses are almost as important as boxes, as you'll come to find as you progress through Draw A Box.

Perspective. From what I can see, it looks like you have the right idea of these exercises. Plotted Perspective is particularly clean, and the inner corner is nicely visible for evaluation. The Rough Perspective exercise is also properly done. There are some of the same wobbles that we see in the ghosted lines and planes assignment, but the most important aspect of this assignment is the line analysis portion. Being able to follow your lines to their convergence is going to be a big part of the 250 box challenge, so being able to apply it properly here is a good indicator that you'll be able to properly evaluate your boxes. Which brings us to the last assignment of this section, the organic perspective.

This one is our first foray into free-floating boxes, and it can be challenging. We can see it here in your first page, where many of the boxes have edges that aren't converging into the distance. This would be cause for concern, and possible revision, if it wasn't for the improvement that I'm seeing on the second page. You still have a few that are diverging, but I can see that you're becoming more aware of how your box's edges relate in space, and that's important to keep an eye on.

Rotated Boxes. This one is a hard one, but there's something to be said about making the effort to complete the entire exercise. And from what I can see, nearly all of the boxes appear to be converging properly into the distance. There's a few outliers that have divergent edges, but those are in the outermost corners, which are admittedly very difficult to properly construct.

So after considering all of the material submitted, I think it's safe to mark your work as complete. There's some things to keep an eye on, particularly your line work and the convergence of your free-floating boxes, but these are things that will be tightened up through the box challenge if you continue to apply the principles introduced here in Lesson 1.

Hi there! I saw your submission in the critique exchange queue, so I figured I'd take a look. I apologize in advance if this review is short; your work is really well-done, and there's not much for me to comment on. That said I'll persevere and see if I can't find something to expand on:

Organic Intersections. So diving right in, I think your intersections look good. All of your forms are drawn through quite nicely. There's a fair bit of deviation from the original assignment as far as form goes. Originally the exercise calls for uniform sausage construction in this assignment. That said, you still respect your forms and they overlap convincingly. I think you could have been bolder with your cast shadows, at least on the first page. I did a sketch that highlights how I would've looked at the shadows. Nothing wrong with showing restraint though.

Animal Constructions. Okay, so the whole idea of this assignment is not to create a great looking piece of art, but to use organic forms in a logical way that allows us to understand the 3d nature of the animal in the space we've created on our page. In your constructions, I'm seeing exactly that. You make good use of the cranial ball, and torso balls to establish basic forms, and then build on those forms additively. As far as I can see, there's no subtractions or 2D additions that don't make sense, and this is great to see. I think my favorites might the mouflon sheep, orca, and gecko, but really there isn't much in the way of errors or incorrect markings to point out.

So there's really two things, and the latter is more of an alternative solution rather than a correction. The first thing, the only thing, I see across all your work here is that the eyelids are not created as 3D forms, but instead placed over the eye as a texture. As we consider our constructions, we want to try and add as much 3d information as we can, so just watch out for that in the future.

And the second thing is concerning the toes of your gecko. I see that you used a branch and ball approach to these, and I wanted to offer a different approach. There's a chance you considered this already, so feel free to dismiss this part. I think those toes could be done using sausage and organic form with these, and that sketch is here https://imgur.com/QGoX2Rr. That said, everything here looks great, and I'm gonna mark this as complete. Nice work!

Hi there! I saw your submission in the queue, so I figured I'd take a look. This is going to be a short review, but mostly because you did such good work here.

Organic Intersections. I see good work here, With logical cast shadows and drawn-through forms. There's a noticeable amount of care put in to ensuring that the sausages are equilateral throughout.

Animals. As I said before, there's really not much to point out here. There's plenty of fantastic care to ensure that additions are 3-dimensional and drape across the forms beneath them. Shadows are tastefully applied, and you work through some very challenging poses with linework that still manages to be understood in spite of the amount of overlapping. I'm especially fond of your pigeons, your rhinos ( I did a couple of these too!), and your tasmanian wolf. But all in all, you went above and beyond to experiment with your subjects and capture more than was required, which is great to see.

So like I said, a short review. I hope you don't find this especially careless or effortless. After a fair bit of searching, I truly didn't find any marks that felt out of place, or anything that couldn't be improved with time and practice, and I feel your understanding of the lesson exceeds the minimum comprehension by a wide margin. Suffice it to say, I'm marking this submission as complete.

Totally understandable. The impending revisions in Lesson 2 have been causing confusion for a good while now, so I try not to come down too hard on students using those out-of-scope textures. And I believe the implied texturing in the dissections is another byproduct of those revisions; it's in the blue box here.

Hi there! I saw your submission in the queue, so I figured I'd take a look:

Organic Arrows. Okay, so looking at these, the first thing that jumps out at me is that your arrows have confident lines with very little in the way of wobbling. The hatching appears to be pretty consistent too, so there's little in the way of confusion as to which way your arrows bend and twist in space.

There's a couple things to look out for. A fair number of these have some uneven transitions where they either expand or contract in unreliable ways. This is something that can be corrected with enough time and practice. Be sure to ghost through your path several times, and avoid over-thinking as you finally make your mark. The other thing I wanted to add is that your use of line weight is effective, though it can help further clarify the orientation of your bends if you apply the line weight up to point where you begin hatching. Here's an example:

Organic Forms and Contours.

Ellipses are shifting appropriately in the forms, though you want to make sure to avoid tapering the ends and strive for consistent width throughout. Some forms have contours that don’t curve far enough. It may help to ghost the ellipse a few times in order to get a better idea of how these things are supposed to curve.

Texture.

Okay, so there's a couple thoughts on these. Overall I liked your work on the analysis.

Crinkly paper has good shadow formation and follows a logical rhythm throughout the analysis window. Fur - interesting take, good effort to try and capture the myriad small bits of shadow that appear on the surface of the fur; Dry Ground - Good sensation of craggy bits and the gaps; though a bit too many shadow shapes closing the forms of dirt. I also want to add here that it reads like the light is coming from the dark side of the window. When it comes to gaps and bevels across a surface, light will leave a cast shadow that matches the edge closest to the light. The smaller sub-shadows that form around that come from the various formations on the opposite side of the gap where the light hits. Not a huge problem here, as this is simply an introduction. It may be something you want to remember when you try other textures down the line.

Dissections. Interesting variety, and there’s some really good examples. Hair is especially good, as is toilet paper and poppy seed pod.

There are a few that don’t quite make proper textures in my eye, the metal bowl and the mesh chair. Ultra smooth surfaces like metal are not really the kind we can use within the scope of the lesson (lesson 2 is getting a re-working as I understand it). The mesh chair reads as more pattern-like, though its surface is meant to be an edge. It may work better on the round side of the sausage.

There’s a few that don’t have any proper transition from the far edge to the most exposed areas of the sausage. You want to avoid closing forms as more light becomes available to the surface texture to transition to a point where you have a wide area of light with very few shadow shapes.

Intersections. All of these look really good! I'm quite pleased to see that your intersections seem rational, and I didn't see any super-obvious errors, nor did I see any intersections that I wouldn't make in my own approach. These exercises can be real eye-openers as far as realizing how objects can relate in space, but it seems like it was well within your wheelhouse.

Hi there! Nice to meet you Canoe, and congrats on your recent completion of DAB! Looking back through my submission, I have to agree 100% with your comments. And that stoat.... that blasted stoat. I know Comfy advises against grinding, and that guy was the one that really cemented the principle in my mind. In fact, a number of my errors on those things I recognized only after I considered the work done, so instead of redrawing the work, I tried a different ref and a different approach.

And I'm glad you liked my rhino! It was one of my earlier works, but easily one of my favorites, especially that second one. The old method worked well in that case, but it was confusing to apply in my work for a good while(re: that stupid mustelid). I enjoyed this lesson deeply and it's gone a long way to elevate my aptitude for spatial reasoning. I'll move on to the next challenge, and thank you so much for taking the time to review my work!