Khearney

https://imgur.com/a/LX8SlcQ

Here it is! I re-read all your feedbacks, practiced my sausages, practiced my organic forms, and went for another go at the moose. I did the antlers anyways, for fun. Took my time with it like you said. You're right, those last three I did all in one sitting. Which is normally not what I do! Normally only did one or two drawings an evening, so it was funny that you picked up on that.

One thing I struggle with is that I find it hard to maintain the overall perspective of the picture in mind when I am rotating the paper to draw a line or ellipses or whatever. i.e. I want to ghost some ellipses on a sausage to get the feel of the shape before I add some more form to that. But in rotating the page, I kind of lose in my mind's eye the overall effect I am going for and it becomes more "line" and less "form", if that makes sense. Any advice?

Here are my drawings! Did them last week, but was just exceptionally lazy about uploading them...

https://imgur.com/a/6wQEZUI

Yeah! I would definitely recommend it. Makes a good companion piece of Drawabox that let's you translate some skills into drawing that actually look pretty ha. I just posted an album in my sketchbook of my exercises from the book, if you are interested.

I agree with all said here and would also encourage you to really think about how the textures warp around the sausages for the dissection. Right now, your textures really flatten out the 3D form you worked so farm to achieve! I feel like you need to focus how the silhouette is impacted by the textures. You are spending a lot of time and attention to what amounts to just "coloring in" the sausage without thought of form. Remember, for our purposes, texture serves form, so make sure that it doesn't ruin it!

Hi Dennis! I'm no Uncomfortable and am still learning myself, but I thought I would give some feedback based on what I see.

To start, for the sausage forms, I think it would help you if you focused on keeping your sausages as two balls connected by tube. Right now, a lot of your sausages are really lopsided. Like on this one, the ends are really pinched and the sausages fatten out in the middle. Try making sure that they have a consistent width across them.

Also with the sausages, in the above linked picture, I feel like you need to focus more on how they actual contort in 3D space. For example, the one in the very bottom right, by marking both ends with an ellipses, that demarks to me that both ends are facing me and the middle is bending away from me. That's fine, but if that's the case, the ellipses that bookend it should be more towards the end. Especially on the right end, it feels like it's the capping ellipses is just floating in space and breaks the 3D illusion.

Looking at the insects, I feel like you're struggling with a lot of the "plates" on the bugs. For example, on the praying mantis , I "believe" the segments on the abdomen, but the plates on the thorax don't really wrap around the figure. Maybe try putting down some countor curves on these base forms to make sure that they're really solid in your mind before you add forms on top of it. You have the same kind of problem on the ant. On the abdomen, the plates flatten rather than describe the form. Like the sausages, make sure you understand how the underlying forms exist in 3D space before you add on top of them.

You do a good job with how limbs connect to each other! That's something that I really struggled with. You seem to have a good intuitive understanding of that, though.

For proportions, don't be afraid to mark out segments and spaces with small lines and dots before committing to drawing them. You're scorpion feels all wonky and out of proportion.

You do a lot of "studies" in the corners, I see. I do that too! But I would encourage you to give yourself more space. I like you use my studies to practice how things fit together in 3D space. Like how a plate would wrap around a sausage on a scorpion. Maybe try that in your studies and see if helps.

Thanks for the critique!

LOL at skipping the wasp. Yeah, I dunno, man... I really was trying on that one and it took me like over an hour. It just... was an abject failure.

Yeah, the contour-connecting curve was a method I leaned into more to connect the sausage legs for the scorpion and tarantula (last two). Once I made the connection in my head that "oh, this is just like the intersecting forms in 3D space exercise", I felt a lot more confident. In my ability to connect them. Though, I have to admit, those really small connecting curves were sometimes drawn with the wrist. I tried to stop myself whenever I caught myself! It's just so easy to default back to that for those little ellipses. It was something I struggled with on the plants as well and I'm really trying to move past.

"Confident" not meaning "fast" is a great insight. I feel that that is often my problem. I will ghost the form a few times and just feel like "OKAY HERE IT GOES!!" and then it's like I lose control of my pen and whatever happens happens from there. I need to slow it down.

I meant to ask this, but I find it hard to square my confident strokes with making sure I am not gonig more than a few seconds without looking at my reference, especially for these more complex forms on the insects. Like I want to make sure the forms I am putting on top of my previous forms (like shells and what not) are being true to life, but I also want them to be confident. So sometimes this means that I am stopping my stroke mid-way, looking at the reference and then picking it up again. Do you think that's a problem?

Thanks again for all your hard work!