Hi Keisari42, I will do what I can to give you some pointers on this lesson
First of all, thank you for actually submitting the reference pictures along with you drawings, it makes it so much easier to critique.
Despite what you said, I actually think your sausages are pretty good! A couple of you tubes end up getting smaller or bigger on one end. Try to think of them as two equally sized balls with a tube connecting them.
For the wasp demo, the basic construction looks good. You did not draw the ribbing and segments on the abdomen and the legs though. I would recommend fully finishing all the tutorial videos like this, because even if it takes a long time to add all those armor plates and little bits of construction, it will be good practice.
You did a very good job here! The insect drawings are very clean. There is not much for me to critique here. The few things that might help you out is to remember to draw the intersections of forms. I I can see that you did this in at least one of your exercises in the legs, but if you had them overlap even more it might be even better. Adding the form intersections, especially in the legs, will make the entire image look more connected and solid. Kind of like this
https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/7f789bfa.jpg I
Every here and there it looks like you get carried away with detail. Remember to draw the shadow shapes and not the outlines of the texture.
There is the occasional spot where it looks like you lost confidence and tried to redraw a form, and it gets messy. Don’t do this. Even if you mess up badly, stick to the line you drew.
That’s it! Move on to lesson 5!
Next Steps:
Go to next lesson!
Thank you so much for your critique! Can't wait to get into Lesson 5. Cheers!
Hello Keisari, congrats on finishing Lesson 4! I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and today I'll be offering you some critique, I hope my advice aids you in your Drawabox journey.
Organic Forms
Let's start off with your organic forms, you're doing well by maintaining the simple sausage characteristics.
There's something that needs to be mentioned, while it isn't quite a mistake, it can still hinder your improvement:
Not experimenting with all types of sausage rotations. While you're drawing two, there's at least three most important ones, and you should practice all of them. Here's a diagram that shows the different sausage rotations possible.
Insect Construction Section
First things first, it's great to see that you're clearly enthusiastic about the lesson material, but please try to submit only the amount of pages requested on the homework section of the exercise.
Moving on you should also try not to add any notes to your work, especially notes which don't break down your mistakes and how to fix them but instead only insult yourself or your work, this isn't very productive and the intent of these exercises is for you to learn, and part of learning includes making mistakes.
Something that's present throughout your homework pages is the fact that you're starting your constructions with fainter lines - such as the wasp imitating moth, the gray's leaf insect and the mole cricket. This leads to one of the main issues present in this lesson ( which is unfortunately not really stressed on the lesson material yet ) and that's jumping between actions that we perform in 2D space (where we're taking advantage of just drawing lines on a page, and the freedom that gives us), and actually ensuring that everything we draw itself exists as a fully enclosed form, being added to the existing structure, and being designed itself in such a way that it respects and even reinforces the illusion that what it's attaching to is also 3D.
Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.
For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form here.
While this is something that you do generally respect, there are some cases such as in this insect's leg and for this part of the mole cricket which happens accidentally because of looser ellipses. This can be handled pretty easily though by simply treating your ellipse's outermost perimeter as the edge of the form's silhouette, as this keeps any stray marks contained within the form itself.
Moving onto the legs of your insects it's good to see that you're generally following it and adding it to your work, but to keep elaborating on silhouettes and how we shouldn't alter them many of your insects leg's weren't drawn with additional masses, and instead were completely enclosed by new shapes as you extend off from your insect's main leg form, instead of respecting the initial form and constructing on top of it and adding intersection lines as explained back in Lesson 2, it's important to remember that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I believe you understood the purpose of these exercises and executed them well for the most part, once you address some of the issues present in your work it will go from great to incredible so keep practicing.
Next Steps:
Don't forget to keep practicing these exercises during your warm ups.
Move on to Lesson 5.
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.
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