Vega

Hello Boss, thanks for the feedback.

Yes, freehanding the ellipses definitely was added complexity, and I had to stave it off from interfering with the goals of the lesson.

I read about your rule of thumb of differentiating form shadows from cast shadows when looking through previous homework, and was following that rule as best I can. Figuring out whether to include the form shadows, or stick strictly with cast shadows, was something I deliberately thought about and acted on purposefully - so they were not confusions between the shadow types, they were deliberate decisions to draw in form shadows. I think I can see how some of them did not create the effect that I wanted. Shading is definitely an aspect of visual communication I'll continue to think about in my personal art too.

Thanks a bunch.

Hey DECEPE,

I don't have direct examples of insect drawings, but these are some images that Uncomfy referenced when he critiqued the wrapping forms in my L5 homework:

https://imgur.com/6WgR3yU (sphere wrapping around a cylinder - same principle as L2 form intersections)

https://imgur.com/IINKdQA (sphere wrapping around a box)

https://imgur.com/8O2RTcT (the rest are examples of leg forms)

https://imgur.com/t6oz7Tv

https://imgur.com/97hS0XF

I had a look at my own L4 homework and I think it's OK to draw leg masses like you did for the weevil at this stage. ^.^;; But having read a bunch of L5 official critique and gotten crit on my L5, wrapping masses around leg sausages is something that Uncomfy points out a lot. I've noticed that the drawing method he recommends is a call back to L2 form intersections.

Hope this helps, good luck with L5.

Hello DECEPE, feedback for Lesson 4.

Organic forms with contour curve.

Well done - The linework looks confident, and the contour curves are changing degree really well. Some of the sausages expand a bit too much in the waistline, but most of those are on Page 1; the Page 2 sausages are keeping closer with Uncomfy's prescribed sausage drawing method (ie. two spheres at each end joined by a tube of consistent diameter, ref here). Continue to practice drawing sausages of consistent diameter and spherical ends (you can do that as warmups), but otherwise, great work here!

Insect drawings.

Solid work overall. I think your insects demonstrate all the main points that Uncomfy wants us to take away from this lesson: starting with strong base forms, piling forms on top of them while respecting all the previous linework you did. I can see that you've been using all the techniques used from the previous lessons in these drawings... great work!

Some details to keep in mind for L5 (since it's just more of L4 but with endoskeletons):

• It's only on the mantidfly (page 2/4), but definitely avoid "subtractive construction", cutting into an existing form you drew. (Uncomfy's explanation.) I don't see this in the later insects, so keep on using additive construction moving forward.

• For the weevil's legs on page 5/6, you've drawn a flat sphere/circle over the sausage, and then drew over it with an outline. This is unfortunately not construction since the circle is a 2-d form and doesn't acknowledge the 3-dimensionality of the sausage form,. The proper construction would be drawing the swelling leg as an enclosed mass wrapping around the length of the leg form (like a bun around a hotdog sausage). The weevil legs happen to be the most obvious example of this; I see the same thing in the other insect legs, where the small swells of the legs are drawn as shapes/outlines instead of discrete masses on top of the leg sausages. So keep in mind that all forms must be 3-d masses, not outlines or shapes, no matter how small they are!

• It's a bit hard to see in the drawings, so I might be wrong about this point. But it appears that you're drawing some forms lightly at first while constructing, and then going over outlines with a heavier lineweight to emphasize silhouette and make the drawing look more "finished". I learned recently that Uncomfy discourages this practice: instead he suggests to maintain a consistent lineweight across all lines, and the only time to add lineweight is at an intersection of two lines/forms, to show which form is in front of the other. So perhaps try to maintain consistent lineweight throughout the construction: no "draft" lines and "finalized" lines.

• The only shadows you want to draw are cast shadows. Some of the shading is going into form shadow territory, eg. both insects on pages 4/6 and 5/6; and tiger butterfly.

Overall, you've done a great job with these insects, your drawings demonstrate that you understand the purpose of this lesson. Keep up the good work for L5.

Heya, feedback for Lesson 4. I haven't done community critiques for a while but I hope this is helpful for you.

Organic forms with contour curve.

Looking great, you have the confident line down. Contour curves follow the sausage's minor axis, and are changing in size with perspective - well done. Some sausages look a little deformed (squishy or stretchy): remember L2, these sausages meant to be two spheres connected by a tube of consistent diameter!

Insect drawings.

Ah, I remember questioning you about the lineweight in #lesson4, thanks for the reminder!

Overall, your insects look great: I can see clearly how you're building them up from primitive forms (spheres/balls, sausages), piling additional forms on top of this foundation while respecting the bottom contour, and drawing through all the linework. Even all the very small forms (eg. wrapping masses on legs) are drawn through and are following principles from L2 form intersections. Wrapping forms on top of each other becomes more important in L5 (since that lesson is about constructing with soft masses), and I think you got the idea here - so keep up that work in L5.

I don't have a lot to say because your homework is of very high quality already. If I want to be really nitpicky, I'll say that the insect with the funny antenna (third from bottom) seems a little bit less precisely constructed, especially the abdomen and the masses on top of them. But that's not a big deal. ;)

Overall, great work, I think you've thoroughly understood and shown mastery of the concepts in L4. Onwards!

Heya, feedback for Lesson 4. Been a while since I last did any community critiques, but I hope this will be useful.

Organic forms with contour curve.

Good work. Your linework looks confident and made with a single stroke. Some of the sausages look like they were made with multiple strokes, but they're cleanly done, so that's fine. Regarding the middle line that goes through the middle of the sausage, they're well drawn but a lot of them don't go through the whole sausage, they seem to stop just before the end. I advise drawing that middle line all the way through the whole sausage since this line forms the minor axis for the contour curves.

As for the contour curves, they're well drawn, and most of them hook over at the ends quite nicely, however, but not all of them have that hook. Also, it appears that some contour curves don't align so well with the minor axis formed by the midline. Any ellipses you draw inside sausages have to be aligned to the sausage's midline, and contour curves are based on ellipses. Definitely take care to align all contours and ellipses to the minor axis, especially in L5 (where you will draw more sausages and contours for animals).

On the whole, I think you got the right idea for sausages and the contours.

Insect drawings.

L4 is the first lesson where we have to put forms on top of each other to construct insects that exist in believable 3D space -- and I think you have succeeded here. I can see you're making a lot of effort to use sausages, ellipses/spheres, and boxes to construct all your insects, and piling these forms on top of each other. And the places where you put additional forms on top of those basic forms, they are also following the contours of the basic forms. (Eg. The back plates of the scorpion, wings of the praying mantis.) Well done with this!

Several areas I think you can work on:

• Some insect heads (plus scorpion body) have boxes drawn around them. It appears that you used those boxes to help you orient the shape/perspective of the head before you drew the actual head, usually a separate ellipse/form. Uncomfy advises not to do that because that's considered "subtractive construction" (see here for more info). He also says (on official critiques) that every line we make has to contribute to the final construction of the animal. Moving forward, try to use those forms/boxes as a starting point to put additional forms on top of them (ie. "additive construction"), instead of using them like an external guidance and drawing new forms inside them.

• It's a bit hard to see this since the drawings are a bit small, but when you connect multiple sausages together for the insect legs, put a contour curve where the sausage ends overlap, to show where the leg joint is. (Uncomfy's example here.)

• Your overall insect constructions are solid and simple, which is a good foundation. I think your insects could have more wrapping forms added to them - like in Uncomfy's example here. I encourage you to experiment with adding more forms to this foundation, wrapping them or piling them on top of what you already drew. You'll be doing more of this in L5.

• This is nitpicky, but the hairs/spikes on the tarantula's body look like 2D lines because they aren't completely closed (like all the other forms). I suggest closing them completely (see above linked example).

• Your first wasp drawing is a bit small but the other drawings are bigger, which is good. But it looks like you're using a thicker fineliner for these drawings? The lineweight is quite thick. If you don't have a thinner fineliner, I suggest drawing the insects bigger so they fill the whole A4 paper. That way you can add more detail like additional forms and textures and they will stay visible even if the lineweight is thick. (It's a bit hard to tell what size fineliner you're using, so if you are using 0.5mm, sorry for the mistake).

Overall -

I think you did a good job with the insects, you're drawing all the construction properly and the 3D quality is emerging in your drawings, and it looks like you understand the principles of construction in this lesson. Take care with the little details, and in L5 definitely practice how to add more forms to your structures in order to build up more detail and 3D quality. Keep up the good work!

Many thanks for the explanation. I forgot about those form intersections - good timing to revisit them for L6/L7!

Hello Boss, many thanks for the feedback.

Can I ask a follow-up question? The feedback that you gave about complex forms/sharp edges on forms (using my aardvark for the example) actually brings up a question I've been wanting to ask but didn't know how to articulate.

Those sharp edges on the wrapping forms arise because I'm following the contours of the underlying base forms when creating those wraps. The reason I made this design/construction decision: by following contours of the base form when wrapping new forms on top of them, this contributes to showing the 3-dimensionality of those wrapping forms and thus the overall animal construction. I made the choice the err on the side of including those potentially-unnecessary corners on all my forms, in order to preserve 3-dimensionality of the construction.

I've drawn base contours on my aardvark here (in blue), and those base contours end up producing the sharp corners on the wrapping forms, which you pointed out (in red).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MOdiiPwmptubmkd7IkmCeBfc7q6_TV7z/view?usp=sharing

When you demonstrated your example here with the aardvark's foreleg.... https://i.imgur.com/rvHWACP.png

...How do your forms drawn here maintain the sense of 3-dimensionality of the limb?

I suppose my question is: How do you decide when to draw a form that potentially breaks the 3-dimensionality of the construction (as with the aardvark's foreleg), and when to make more complicated forms with sharp corners in order to preserve 3-dimensionality (as with the aardvark's big back mass)? You explain some of your reasoning with this example (https://i.imgur.com/I9d5Mdr.png) but I'd to understand this decision making a bit more.

Thanks a bunch.

Hello! Feedback for 250 boxes.

Linework - I can see your linework getting more confident as the challenge progresses, it becomes straighter and stronger. Well done! Unfortunately, the hatching on the box faces doesn't have the same care as the edges, they are a bit curved and some of them undershoot the edges. I like to treat hatching as another place to practice ghosting and drawing accurate lines from edge to edge - why not do it in future? (And please don't draw fanciful designs for the box faces, since it's not part of the lesson and doesn't demonstrate your learning anyway. Just stick to hatching!)

Box construction - Well done, the edges converge better as you made progress. You drew a variety of different shapes and perspectives, that variety gives great practice for your construction methods. The back corner will always be pesky, but it's not a big deal.

Overall your boxes looks good, they improved over time, and it appears you've understood the fundamentals of confident linework and how to build a box with correct 3-d perspective. Congrats on reaching the end of the gauntlet. When you've recovered from this box overload you can draw a few of them now and again during warmups, to keep that spatial understanding and construction fresh in your skills.

Hello, it's me again. Here's feedback for Lesson 3.

Organic arrows - Your arrows have improved since L2, in particular they are growing in size a lot more with each bend. Well done :) There are still a few perspective issues here and there - eg. the two leftmost arrows, the hatching on the bends makes it appear that the smaller end is closer to the viewer while the bigger end is farther away. But overall this is not a serious issue: the hatching stays consistent across the whole arrow so the perspective is correct (even if the size is not). Not a big deal!

Leaves - Good work. There's a bit of stiffness here and there (especially the places you add lineweight) but overall I get a good sense of flow from the midline (flow line) and the edges.

I have two main critique for leaves: whenever you add edge detail to the sides of the leaves, ie. cutting in or adding bumps to the initial line......

1. don't zigzag across the initial line (see this picture from the Leaves exercise page) but use smaller, individual strokes starting and ending at the initial line. It appears that most of the leaf edges have been drawn with a single line. (Although I may be wrong since the added lineweight is quite heavy.)

2. Don't add extra lineweight to the initial line if there is no cutting in/adding bumps, just leave the initial line the way it is. Eg. Top left leaf has extra lineweight across the whole leaf, even the part that comes from the initial line.

Uncomfy gave me the same critique for my Leaves exercise, so I'll just quote him:

Remember that line weight, as mentioned previously, should be reserved only to clarify specific overlaps and should not be traced back over the entirety of existing lines. Furthermore, remember that construction isn't about using one phase of construction to replace what comes before it. Each one builds upon the last, and there will be circumstances where marks from your initial construction will continue to play an important role in the drawing's final state.

Stems - Also good work, I don't see any glaring issues. A few of the ellipses aren't quite aligned with the flow line/minor axis, but this is nitpicking. :)

Plant drawings - First, the strengths! Your linework clearly gets more confident with each drawing and looks great in the last few pages. You're applying a lot of construction steps everywhere, such as flow lines for petals and leaves, and contour curves for succulents. Overall the plants get more 3-D and solid looking over the lesson. Well done!

The feedback for improvement:

1. When in doubt - use flow lines, even for the cylindrical/oval structures like succulents/cactus and mushrooms. The most wobbly drawings were the ones where there were no flow lines to guide the movement of the structure, eg. the big mushroom in the middle of the Mushroom page, big rabbit-ear cactus on the Cactus page (both the big body and the smaller ears). I personally discovered that when I had to draw big ellipses or barrel shaped structures, an initial minor axis or flow line helped me to orient the shape better and reduce wobble.

I think Uncomfy doesn't use flow lines for his Mushroom and Cactus demos so I understand why you didn't draw them, but I also think that it's very hard to draw the bigger structures without that line - so best to draw one instead of leaving it out. I think you started using flow lines more in the later pages which is good.

2. For many leaves, especially the last two pages - same critique as the Leaves exercise.

3. Texturing/shadows on the last 3 pages (Pitcher plant onwards) - They look fine to me, but some detailing looks a bit like form shadows (eg. pear, venus flytrap). If in doubt, look for cast shadows and draw those, ignore form shadows. For textures, remember L2 Texture Analysis and try to see how the texture is casting small shadows, then draw them with this two-step method. For example, I think the texture on the Pitcher plants looks like an outline of shape/colour instead of a cast shadow. Textures and shadows are definitely tricky to do, but you still gave it a go, and it's clear to me you were experimenting with different techniques -- which is great.

4. Last 2 pages look very pretty but it's getting a little bit hard to see your initial construction behind the textures/shadows. So this is a reminder that you don't want to draw faint "practice lines" at first then replace with more confident lines. As Uncomfy says in the quote above, some of the initial construction lines are going to be used all the way into the final drawing. So draw all your construction with the same confident lines from start to finish. I'm sure you're already doing that, but just a reminder for future!

Congrats on finishing Lesson 3. It's clear to me that you were experimenting with a lot of different methods and applying all the skills you learned in L1-L2 to the plants. That mental process isn't easy but I'm glad you gave it a try anyway, and you definitely improved from start to finish. That's something to be proud of!

Hey there, thanks for that! Great work - nice variety of boxes, box edges are all converging really well, the lineweight is clean and tidy, and all the extension lines are extended in the correct direction. Thanks a bunch for updating with your recent work. All the best for the later lessons!