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12:55 AM, Thursday November 25th 2021
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, there are a few issues that jump out at me pretty quickly:
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To start, the homework assignment asked for two pages of organic forms with contour curves, not contour ellipses.
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When it comes to sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages as mentioned in the instructions, you've definitely got some deviation and inconsistencies. On the first page, it does feel like you may well be aiming for those characteristics but missing the mark (with many of them having ends that are more stretched out, rather than remaining circular in shape). This would be okay, as these kinds of things do take practice to nail down, and what's important is that you're consciously aiming to achieve them. On your second page however, things get a bit wackier, with more of the sausages having ends of entirely different size, and variation in the sausage's width throughout its length. Ultimately, I think you may be somewhat aware of this requirement from the exercise, but may not be consciously applying it in every attempt.
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You jump back and forth between drawing through your ellipses (which generally results in ellipses that are smooth and evenly shaped) and trying to hit them in one go (which results in ellipses that are uneven and kind of wobbly at times). As discussed back in Lesson 1, throughout this course, you must draw through every ellipse you freehand two full times before lifting your pen.
All that said, there are some things you're doing well - for example, I can see that you're being quite mindful of how the contour ellipses' degrees shift from narrow to wide (or vice versa), and you're doing a good job of using the degree to properly capture the orientation of each cross-sectional slice at its position in the sausage.
Moving onto your insect constructions, your work kind of gets split into two halves. The drawings you did alongside the demonstrations are largely well done. You've shown a lot of care in following the steps, applying the various principles and so on. In doing so, you've demonstrated a great deal of patience and discipline, and the ability to really pay attention to every stage of the process.
When you get into your own insect constructions however, things definitely change. Where you followed the way in which the demos built things from the ground up, laying down one form at a time, and considering the way in which those forms interact in space, here you seem to have shifted more towards laying down the basic foundation (like the 3 masses for the head, thorax, and abdomen) then panicking and mostly drawing what you see. This skips over the critical step that makes constructional drawing such a useful exercise. When we draw from observation, we look at our reference, and then try to make the same marks/shapes/whatever on the page. We skip over understanding the way in which each form we wish to carry over exists in the world, and how it relates to the structures that already exist in what we've drawn.
There is a reason that your drawings are turning out that way, however, and it's not something I haven't seen before. It's actually not too hard to come up with a hypothesis, from my position standing here outside of the scope of your struggles. It isn't that you aren't working hard. You are - you're clearly putting effort in. What's happening - or what I suspect is the problem - is that where the demonstrations themselves are distilled (every step is given to you, and the work of processing the reference image has already been done), when you're faced with your own reference image, it becomes overwhelming.
A reference image contains so much information, and at first it can be very difficult to sort through it all. Our response is often going to be to panic, and then to just draw so we can move in some sort of direction. In turn, this has us falling back to any prior habits or experience we may have - so drawing strictly from observation as you've done here, falls in line with that.
The correct response - or at least, a better one - would be to take a step back. Whenever you feel overwhelmed, whenever you panic, take that step back and look at the problem as a whole. Look at the techniques and processes that have been introduced in the lesson thus far (which you've encountered and employed in the various demonstrations), and what we've gone through in the course as a whole, and focus on things one step at a time.
Now, the core problem you're running into is that. When you hit your own insect drawings, you stop consciously applying the concepts from the lesson. That's a pretty overarching problem, and one you will have to address. I can however point to a couple things for you to keep in mind as you try to do so:
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First and foremost, try to make this a habit: every single thing you add to your construction, at every stage, should be a complete form. That means a fully closed silhouette, rather than a single line, or a partial shape. You need to actively think of these things as though you're adding them to a sculpture. So if you compare the way in which the legs were drawn when you followed along with the louse demo to the way in which the legs were drawn in this insect. In the louse, each sausage, every segment of the leg was drawn as its own closed form. In the insect you did on your own, you drew each segment as a partial shape, having them stop where they overlapped the previous one, rather than drawing through the form and establishing both as independent, 3D forms. Here's what I mean if my explanation was unclear. You may also want to review the sausage method notes.
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Furthermore - and this is easier said than done - do your best to actually treat every mass or form you add to your drawing as something solid and three dimensional. You can see this most clearly in the shrimp and lobster informal demos. Once you put a form down in the scene, it needs to be respected as though it is a solid chunk of marble. So where in this insect's head you'd laid down the ball for the head's initial mass, you perceived it as just a mark on a flat piece of paper, so you felt free to cut back across that silhouette. You wouldn't even dream of doing it if you actually viewed it as being a solid mass in a 3D world. This demo explains why cutting across the silhouette of a form (or really modifying that silhouette in any way) can really undermine the solidity of your construction, making things that should feel solid and three dimensional come off as flat. Instead, as shown here in this ant head demo, focus on starting small and building things up - adding new masses one at a time, and either defining how they intersect with the existing structure, or designing their silhouette to define how they wrap around the existing structure (as shown here).
Now, as I said before, you have clearly put in a solid effort here, and while the panic of being faced with these visually overwhelming reference images likely took that effort and invested it in a less than optimal fashion, this happens. These are things we work to overcome, more by learning how to take a step back and take stock of the situation. After all, the strategies we use when overwhelmed are as important as the concrete skills we develop through practice.
I'm going to assign some revisions below. You can submit them as a reply to this critique when you've finished them. Since in the past you have received full redos, I want to be clear that this is not a full redo. This is just a standard set of revisions, and is included with the credit you already spent on this feedback.
Next Steps:
Please submit the following:
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1 page of organic forms with contour curves
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4 pages of insect constructions. Really take your time with these - you may want to break them each across multiple sittings.
Remember, if you feel overwhelmed, take a step back. Don't rush in, always make sure that you've thought through each mark you make, applying the ghosting method as needed to each individual stroke.
3:17 PM, Monday December 20th 2021
I hope this is better.
7:13 PM, Monday December 20th 2021
While this is a significant step in the right direction, there are a number of things either from the lesson material or from my previous critique which you are still not following.
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For your organic forms with contour lines exercise, I assigned the contour curves version of this exercise, not the contour ellipses. I called this out in your original critique as well, so this is not the first time you've made this mistake.
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You neglected to include the central minor axis line for the contour lines exercise, something which has an entire step devoted to it. This suggests to me that you may have jumped straight in based on what you remembered of the instructions, rather than actually reading through them again while you completed the exercise.
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This issue is a minor one, mainly because it's not something you missed or skipped, just something you need more practice with - your contour ellipses are somewhat shaky and uneven, likely because you're prioritizing their accuracy rather than their flow. Make sure that you're using the ghosting method when executing your ellipses (which means going through the planning and preparation phases for every mark, before executing with a single confident stroke, free from hesitation), and also be sure to execute them using your whole arm from the shoulder.
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In my original critique, I stressed the importance of ensuring that every form you introduce to your drawing should be drawn with a fully closed shape for its silhouette. Towards the bottom of that previous critique, there were two main bullet points - the first of them focused entirely on this. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of forms you drew only as partial shapes on the page, giving them no real chance to be understood in 3 dimensions. It may not seem like much, but here I've highlighted many cases where forms were cut off, instead of being drawn in their entirety.
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In the second point of those two main bullet points at the bottom of the critique, I talked about the importance of avoiding modifying the silhouettes of your forms, and more importantly treating every single form you draw as though it is solid and present, like a chunk of marble floating in the world. As shown here, there are plenty of cases of you treating your forms as though they're just flat shapes on the page, redrawing and altering them freely, and breaking the illusion that they're 3D forms altogether.
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I also noticed that you weren't adhering to the sausage method, which was something I asked you to review in my previous critique. Every leg segment should start off as a form following the characteristics of simple sausages (two circular ends of equal size, connected by a tube of consistent width), at least to the best of your ability. Right now you appear to be quite hesitant in how you draw those segments, resulting in more irregularity and unevenness to the shapes. Use the ghosting method, draw them with confidence, and engage your whole arm from the shoulder for this. Once the sausage forms are drawn, you also need to be defining the joint/intersection between them with a contour line, as shown in the middle of the sausage method diagram.
Now, these issues are significant, primarily because they are things I called out. I get the feeling that between the initial issue being much more focused on observational issues and your tendency to get overwhelmed. These are things you have definitely made progress in addressing, so good work there - it's just that there's a lot more at play here which you didn't give enough attention.
I do understand that my feedback is dense and touches on a lot of things, and so it's easy for things to be missed or forgotten. That simply means that it is up to you to read through the feedback multiple times, to take notes to summarize it to yourself, and to make sure that the feedback is fresh in your mind when you sit to tackle the assigned revisions.
Before I call this finished, I want to talk about a couple more things I noticed in your work.
This one wasn't discussed before (it only came up once so I wasn't too concerned about it), but your use of filled areas of solid black as well as your use of line weight is a little arbitrary, and I think I can provide a bit of advice on how to make better use of it. Remember first and foremost that the "detail" phase of a drawing isn't an opportunity just to focus on adding arbitrary decoration to our drawings - decoration being anything that'll make our drawings look more visually pleasing. Unfortunately, decoration is too arbitrary to be useful here, as there's no clear way to define when we've added "enough" decoration. What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice. To this point, here's a few good rules of thumb to stick to:
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First, as explained back in Lesson 2, leave all form shading out of your drawings for this course.
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Second, reserve your filled black shapes for cast shadows only - this means that every single black shape you add should be drawn while thinking about how this is meant to define the relationship between the specific form casting the shadow, and the surface receiving it. It's really easy to just focus on drawing what you see - this requires you to actually understand the textural forms in question before you actually put down a mark. This also means that along with form shading, you'll also be ignoring any local colour/surface colour - so for example, you may notice that the eyes of some of your insects are black, and may think to fill them in to capture this, but that would be classified as "surface" or "local" colour (the colour of an object in the absence of any lighting information), and so it should be ignored. You haven't been trying to capture any local colour in your drawings, which I'm glad to see - I just wanted to make sure I mentioned it as well.
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Third, this is actually something you already appear to be doing, but either way, always make those shadow shape marks in a two step process, first outlining the intended shape (and designing it purposefully), and then filling it in.
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Fourth - instead of using line weight arbitrarily, specifically reserve its use to help clarify how different forms overlap one another. We can do this by focusing the line weight only where those overlaps occur, allowing our additional line weight to blend seamlessly into existing linework, rather than trying to replace large chunks of it. As you can see in this example of two overlapping leaves. Note how it's only applied in specific places.
The last point I wanted to call out is that when you tackle the heads of your insects, you often start out with a variety of shapes. I strongly recommend you start with a simple sphere, represented by an actual circle (rather than an ellipse). Here's the ant head demo I provided in my previous critique, which demonstrates this approach. Start small and simple, and build up gradually. You'll also see this approach in the shrimp and lobster demonstrations from the informal demos page.
Here's what you're going to do next:
I've spent a fair bit of time on this revision, and between it and the original critique, I feel we've gone beyond what would be fairly covered by your initial 2 credits. I do not however want you to fully redo the lesson - this thought crossed my mind due to the skipped instructions, but at least for the time being I'm going to hold off on that.
Instead, I'm going to assign the same revisions as before, which include:
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1 page of organic forms with contour curves
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4 pages of insect constructions
I want you to submit these as a fresh submission. This will require you to check off all the assignments (in order to be able to submit it for official critique) - you have my permission to do so. Also, you should mention in your submission comment that these are revisions, and that I instructed you to submit them as a full submission so the additional 2 credits would be charged.
You are doing better, but the specific issues we've come across here are primarily a matter of paying attention and following the instructions, rather than your actual level of skill.
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Staedtler Pigment Liners
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).