Koigic

My bad, I should have specified it was the first horse drawing that did not have the pelvis ellipse: https://imgur.com/qZItjBQ

Your second horse construction is correct as far as I can tell, except for the line at the stomach area, you should have added it as a form instead: https://imgur.com/rBNaVAp

Another thing I forgot to point out is that you didn't draw the sausages for the limbs, but instead a series of lines joined with a contour curve in some of your drawings. I don't think that is a major mistake and you didn't do that when you were following the informal demos, so I think you just need to remember to draw them going forward.

Since this is the last lesson (I believe?) for organic construction, I think you should make sure you understand the proper constructional steps, which was why I felt it would be a good idea to follow a few informal demos, even though I think you actually realised your own mistake after the second horse.

Anyways, good job on completing lesson 5! I think you can move on to the 250 cylinder challenge.

I'm in the same boat as you, and oh my, there is a real difficulty spike going from the minor axis checking method to the box checking method.

However, I think you should push on with doing it freehand. If you find that the minor axis being wrong is throwing you off, try focusing on the box you have constructed as a reference instead. Part of the reason you draw the box is to check if your minor axis is aligning to the correct vanishing point as well. If you just use a ruler to construct it, you basically throw that out of the things you could learn.

That being said, if your corner lines are off, I don't know if it is a good idea to continue to construct the minor axis line off of something you know is already wrong, or try to guess the correct position based on the box as a whole instead of the two points. Personally I do the latter, because I think that allows me to learn to gauge my minor axis off more than just two points, but I could be wrong about that.

Hi! Good job on completing Lesson 5. Here's my critique:

I noticed that your drawings look a little flat. I think it's because you aren't properly building up or straight up ignoring your constructed forms when drawing the animal.

I will use your 6th drawing of a cat as an example, as I think it is the most obvious one.

If you look at Lesson 5: Major Masses, you can see the that the torso in the dog demonstration is constructed from connecting the Ribcage and pelvic ellipses together into a sausage.

In your Cat drawing however, you constructed a torso with the same method, but then proceeded to ignore the entire construction when you drew the rear of the animal. You did the same thing with your horse drawings as well.

If your original construction was too small, you should have added more forms onto the original pelvis until it is the size you wanted, or just drew a larger ellipse to represent the pelvis instead and ignored the smaller one. Point is, you don't want to just draw the form of the animal without any construction to guide you as the forms are there to make you think in 3D. Without it, it is very easy to slip back into thinking in 2D and thus the lines you draw will end up looking flat.

Hi, good work on completing Lesson 2. Here are some things I noticed:

Organic Arrows:

I might be wrong, but it looks like your way of constructing the arrows is to draw both sides of the arrow first then draw in the connecting points, which is why one side of your arrow looks smooth while the other is jittery and un-confident.

This is a difficult way of constructing arrows. The first line that determines direction and length of the arrow would be easy, but the second one would be difficult because you would have to manage the foreshortening and rotation of the arrow all at the same time while still trying to keep your lines smooth confident.

Instead, you can try this: Draw the first line as usual, but draw in the connecting lines first before the second side line. This method allows you to determine the foreshortening and rotation of the arrow before you draw the line, allowing you to just focus on constructing the second line with confidence.

Organic Forms with Contour Lines:

Some of your curves look smooth while some are rather jittery. I suspect you are either trying to draw all the curves without rotating the page or you are not spending enough time ghosting them.

Then again, having gone through the pain of struggling with this exercise myself, it could just be that you don't have enough mileage to know how to draw an ellipse with confidence yet. I would recommend doing one ellipse exercise from Lesson 1 as warmup before you start drawing, so that over time you can get more mileage. Ellipses are very important as they are the backbone in many of the following lessons, so don't sleep on them.

Texture Analysis:

Good job here.

Dissections:

Good work with breaking the silhouette. Detail wise, I think you could have simplified it a bit more, especially with the fly wings and Tree mushrooms. But overall I think you understood the point of the exercise so good job.

Form Intersections:

I can see that your lines started out rather wobbly but it seemed you gained more confidence as you progressed. The only shape that still looks wobbly are the spheres, but that's a similar problem to the ellipses. You'll get better as you practice it more. Overall I think you were able to make the different forms look like they belong in the same 3D space, so good job there.

Organic Intersections:

Hmm, I think you felt inclined to fill the page, that's why you continued to add more forms even when the page got overwhelming and didn't know how to make them interact with each other anymore.

You are drawing through your forms, which is good, but you are adding too many contour lines. Here's a tip: Draw the silhouette, and add just enough contour lines until that you are convinced it is a 3D shape. Don't add contour lines for the sake of adding contour lines.

Also from the way some of your forms are interacting with each other, it looks like you don't know how to draw the silhouette such that it would look like one form is slumping over another form. This might be a bit disgusting, but I would suggest googling a picture of a pile of worms and then outlining them digitally. You don't have to use photoshop for this, even ms paint with a mouse would work. You are just doing this to get an understanding of how these softbody forms would interact with each other.

Lastly, you can also try adding a bit of line weight to clarify the bounds of the sausage. Because your line weight is relatively similar, it's very hard to tell what is what. Also, don't feel pressured to fill the entire page. Adding in forms for the sake of filling the page is just going to make the page more confusing without teaching you anything.

To be honest, I hate this exercise as well because of how easy it is to mess it up, but I think you could do with a liiittle bit more practice on drawing organic soft bodies.

Alright I'll try that. Thanks for the tips!

Alright thanks. I tend to default to detailing as a crutch to hide bad construction, so that was a helpful reminder.

Thanks for the reply!

For the sausage, would you recommend drawing a faint rough line to indicate the direction of the leg segment before drawing the leg sausage? Or would it be better to just start practicing drawing the whole sausage at once?

For the line weight, do you have any tips on how to better control pen pressure? I'm still working on that since I can't seem to add just a subtle amount of line weight, it always ends up rather thick and bold.

So in a sense the feathers should be drawn similar to the leaves method?

Thanks for the reply! Yeah the problem is that I am unsure of how to approach the task of simplifying the wing, aka which part to simplify and what to simplify them into.

Thanks for the recommendations though, will check them out when I have time.

Thanks for the reply! I think you missed it but I did provide the reference image in the imgur album as well.

Anyways, please correct me if I am wrong, but your approach would be to simplify the wing into two regions, the outer feathers and the inner fluff in 2 lines which would serve to capture the gestural flow of the wing. Then add the feathers in one by one in the order of how they overlap to create the silhouette and show how the wing is layered.

That makes sense, but I am still confused on where exactly to put the line that outlines the wing feathers. Do I draw them at the very edge of the wings such that all the feathers end exactly at that line or do I draw them slightly inwards such that each feather would extend outside of the wing outline?

I think the first way would best capture the gestural flow of the wing, but it seems like it would be drawing subtractively since the final wing would be smaller than the outline, while the second one leaves the feather silhouette dangling without any construction to guide it.