Metal

Hello,

I currently use a tablet to draw. It looks clean becuse I lower the transparency on my construction and give the lines a second pass with different line weights. However, this is not something that should be done in this course.

Good evening,

Again, thank you for leaving these critiques. They are incredibly helpful.

On your first point. I had some difficulty trying to do the sausages in one motion, that's why I started practicing curves, lines, ellipses for at least 30 minutes before drawing. On your second point. you are correct. I find perspective somewhat hard and I feel like I under-perform when it comes to it. I'll keep on practicing though.

Moving onto your insect constructions, here your approach became more consistent than before. Some of the problems from the previous lesson carried over as a result.

The first thing is that the problem with starting with faint lines, then tracing over it with darker lines became much more prevalent here

This is completely my fault, I lost sight of the core focus of these lessons and submitted things I shouldn't have. I don't start out with faint lines, I simply lower the transparency after finishing the construction. This is not excusable though, not part of the exercise.

You're essentially replacing it with a purposefully thicker line which diminishes the overall effectiveness of the constructional principles as a whole.

I do find this part confusing though. During the organic intersections exercise, uncomfortable mentions that we should add line weight to emphasize what is in front of what. I guess my logic was kind of like this, in order from thicker to thinner line: Outer lines > inner lines > detail. Should I avoid doing this during the rest of these lessons? or drawing in general?

For example, once you put down a form, do not alter the silhouette. The silhouette is just a shape that represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape.

I'm also slightly confused by this. Adding new masses will inevitably alter the silhouette. If this is referring to cutting back into it and adding flat shapes like you mentioned I did with a few of my drawings, then I agree. I made a few mistakes there. I'll keep that in mind and avoid that at all costs.

I also recommend the first two informal demos, the shrimp and the lobster, as they show how you should think about wrapping these plate-like forms around the insect abdomen area.

I gave them a watch, thanks.

Moving onto the topic of legs, I noticed you seemed to employ different strategies here. While not uncommon for students to be aware about using the sausage method, but instead they decide not to adhere to them because the legs they're looking at don't actually look like a chain of sausages to them.

At one point uncomfortable says that I should always pick the form that better suits the subject. I think it was during the scorpion video. He also mentions something similar when constructing the louse's antennae. I guess I got those mixed up. So I should always use sausages for the limbs, and pick the best form for everything else?

Since I took a break I decided to do a quick recap of the lessons. I also finished the drawings you requested, this time without the transparency stuff. No texture, just plain construction, trying my best to do it like im supposed to. You can find them here:https://imgur.com/a/R5s2v5Q.

Unfortuantely, I submitted the next lesson without seeing your critiques. However, I'm gonna take your advice and I won't move on until I get that one critiqued.

Once again, thank you very much for taking your time writing these thorough critiques.

Good evening,

First of all, thank you for taking your time to look through my work and offer some critique. Also, I apologize for my late late reply, life got a little bit in the way.

To start off, I see you pointed out my leaf constructions and mentioned they were looking too stiff. Now that I'm looking back into this exercise I see what you mean. If I remember correctly my reference was a picture with multiple different leaf types, so they were arranged in a top down perspective, and I think that might have caused my error. Thankfully, I followed uncomfortable's advice and now I just look at a plethora of reference when drawing. You also mentioned that I skipped the constructional steps in one of my leaf drawings, and you are correct. I've made a couple more leaf constructions following the correct method here: https://imgur.com/a/9i6U5Su.

Regarding my plant constructions. To be honest, I had a new drawing tablet at the time and I was exploring different ways of using layers, different types of tools, software, etc. I was so amazed at what I was able to accomplish with these lessons that I completely lost sight of my true objective. I started focusing more on the end result, and the first flower that you mention is proof of that. This is definitely my fault. I actually did the construction but I forgot to show the correct layers before exporting. The correct version would be this one: https://imgur.com/a/YzFtYzh. It still has a bunch of mistakes though.

Another issue is that you're not drawing each and every form in its entirety on some of these, opting instead to draw them insofar as they're visible. Most notably on this cactus you drew. As you can see from this cactus demo.

Again, my mistake, I did draw through it (mostly) but I uploaded the wrong version. Here's the "correct" one: https://imgur.com/a/2SWB5Sp.

On this last page, you started out your constructions very faintly, and then once you're more confident in what you're drawing, you go back in with darker lines.

It's not that I started them faintly, I simply increased the transparency once I finished my construction and did a second pass with a clean outline/texturing. I'm not looking for excuses here, I completely understand that this is not part of the exercise and the wrong thing to do in these lessons. As I said before, I missed the point of the exercises. I turned in drawings with extra things that shouldn't have been there.

Speaking of which, there's an arbitrary gap between the flow lines and the petal structure itself on the daisy demo you drew.

Yeah, It was kinda hard to get those curves correctly.

Thank you so much for your thorough critique.

Great progress!

I am using a different medium than you, so my critique might no be the best.

Your improvement throughout the lesson is noticeable. What I can see immediately is that some of your drawings are more organized in terms of construction than others. But that is normal and part of the learning process, just remember to add only what you need to, and try not to go overboard.

As uncomfortable said, be gentle with the line weight. If you add more line weight than necessary it becomes less effective and results in a noisy drawing. e.g. Your last plant drawing has considerable amount of line thickness overall, which forced you to make even thicker lines in some of the leaves to push them forward. This is why adding more line weight to it didn't help.

Since you are using a traditional medium, you should go easy on the line weight at first. This would be the best approach since you can always add more thickness if you need it later. However, if you try to do it the other way around, you wont be able reduce the thickness, and you will be forced to add even more line weight, just as I pointed out before.

Other than that, some of your branches look like they were chicken scratched. I assume this happened because you tried to make the branch in sections, which is fine. However, it is essential that you plan ahead before putting down the line. Use the ghosting method so that you are more likely to hit the mark than not.

Finally, a personal opinion. You mentioned the following "For the last plant I tried putting a black background in the middle like Uncomfortable did". It's fine to draw along and sometimes copy the technique of others through observation. However, you should take time to identify your weakest areas and reinforce them with additional practice and material, so that you truly understand what is going on, and what you are doing.

My point is, if you are having trouble casting shadows or anything else that might not be covered in these lessons, try to find other sources. This is exactly what I did with perspective since it was bugging me even after 250 box challenge. I'm still a beginner, but I ended up with a much better understanding of it after learning not just from uncomfortable, but from other sources like Marshall Vandruff as well. As long as you get to understand what you are doing, and you get your questions answered, why not?

That might have been a hot take, or not.

Anyways, you seem to be making lots of progress, keep it up!

Thanks a lot for the feedback,

I do use a digital medium. I will sometimes get the lines I want on the first try, and sometimes I wont and just undo them. I dont really erase lines except when im using them for textures, or shadows/thick lines to get the thickness that I'm looking for..

However, I do feel like using an eraser in any way is wrong since that would be more like a destructive approach to drawing. I need to fix that.

I have to say, when I "finish" a construction, I tend to lower the transparency of the lines so I can work on pushing some more important lines forward. I saw some videos in the lessons in which this was done, I don't know if this is the correct method, but I really enjoy working through it and getting the end result

Also, you are right, I will definitely work on improving how I wrap my textures around. I will practice more with the texture challenge.

As for the intersections, thanks for pointing that out, I also felt like something was off. I will look at the examples again and practice it more.

Thank you, any constructive criticism is always helpful.

This was definitely helpful. Funny thing is, when I finished the challenge, I looked at my xbox and instantly saw the 3 corner lines I start with when drawing a box. Then I started looking around it from different angles and it made me realize a bunch of things I was doing wrong. Reference DEFINITELY helped in this situation, thank you for reinforcing this! I think I'm going to practice drawing my xbox from a few angles.