Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals

6:04 AM, Thursday April 2nd 2020

Drawabox Lesson 5 - Album on Imgur

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Post with 94 views. Drawabox Lesson 5

Finally here after 15 months. I decided not to go back and redo lesson 4 after I redid lesson 3... I sat on it for nearly 4 months doing warm-ups and trying to get a start but only managed to do the wasp demo. Simply, I just didn't wanna look at bugs again.

I think some of the things I goofed up a lot in this lesson were textures and proportions. I tried to be conscious of my 3D forms at all times but sometimes you think it's the right line, put it down and it completely flattens things... that happened a bit. I'm probably proudest of the lizard and the fish, which is odd coz I wanted to do those animals the least.

I would tell you to do your worst, but I don't wanna be destroyed.

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10:37 PM, Thursday April 2nd 2020

Starting with your organic intersections, these are pretty well done. You're doing a good job of establishing the relationships between the forms as they stack up on top of one another, building a cohesive, believable pile of three dimensional forms rather than just a stack of pasted flat shapes.

Moving onto your animal constructions, your constructional skills definitely improve over the course of the lesson and ultimately are pretty well developed. I do agree that your approach with texture isn't quite as strong, but it really does depend from case to case.

The first thing I wanted to point out is that your use of the sausage method has definitely improved a great deal from your past complaints about not being able to do it in one go. The control over your shapes is definitely improved, and you're able to create relatively simple, sturdy segments on which to base your animals' legs.

One issue I see pretty consistently throughout your constructions is how you approach the eyesockets - they tend to be drawn quite small, and float somewhat more arbitrarily on the head construction rather than being firmly integrated with the other major components. Your muzzles are often build quite well and establish a strong relationship with the cranial sphere, making both feel more three dimensional. To start, draw them much bigger, and have them butt up against the muzzle on one side, as shown here. I definitely draw eye sockets really big to achieve this, and it may or may not be accurate to the animal's actual skull (though eye sockets often are larger than you'd expect). All the same, this does allow us to achieve a much more solid relationship between the different components of the head construction, so it's still worth doing.

You can also think of the cheekbone and brow ridge as being similar components, each buttressing the eyesocket and building a sort of three dimensional puzzle, like this.

Also worth mentioning, draw your eyeballs bigger too. The eyeball is mostly covered by the eyelids so it's often larger than you'd think, and drawing it bigger will give you more room to build up the eyelids around it, instead of falling into the kind of flat, oversimplified linework we end up with when drawing really small and cramped.

While we're on that drawing, I also noticed an issue with some of the additional masses along its arms, as shown here. Always think about how your forms are going to wrap around the underlying structure. This sort of "wrap-around" curvature does add some complexity to the shape, but the key is to ensure that it convincingly runs along the surfaces beneath it. When we fail to achieve this, we can easily end up with something that looks more like a flat shape that was just pasted on top. It all comes back to thinking in terms of the organic intersections.

One thing that helps is to focus on having each additional mass accomplish a single task - the one you pointed out here as "this mass sucks" is stretching across a long span of the squirrel's body, trying to capture the impression of many distinct muscle groups. Now we don't actually know about specific muscle groups here, but by limiting what we're getting each mass to achieve, we can avoid this kind of mistake.

Now, as you continued through the lesson you definitely showed improvement on this front. The donkey demo seems to have helped, and the giraffes/llama that followed shows a much stronger understanding of how those additional masses can be used effectively.

Stepping back a bit to look at texture, I noticed that in a number of your drawings - especially when dealing with fur - you had a habit of being very "scratchy" with your marks. That is to say, you seemed to be focusing on drawing individual lines, rather than thinking in terms of your marks either adding specifically designed "shape" information (rather than line) or capturing the shadows that clumps of fur would cast on their surroundings. We see this in the squirrels, wombats, and the fat bird towards the beginning. The ibis and the wolf-demo show a different, far more effective approach however - here your lines aren't so thin and intentionally separate. Along the ibis' body, you've got a clump of feathers there that casts a much meatier shadow shape, and along the neck of the wolf, you're starting to think more about the tufts of fur individually, rather than approaching them in a more auto-pilot, repetitive fashion.

When dealing with texture, get in the habit of expecting to fill shapes in with solid black. Think about the marks you put down as being shadows, not lines, and therefore focus more on how those strokes taper and widen through their lengths, behaving more like very narrow shapes rather than as line-strokes. Also, never leave a space filled in with scratching as you did towards the center of this squirrel. All the little white specks draw the eye immediately, creating an unintentional focal point from the visual noise.

The last point I want to raise is a very minor one as it relates to your drawings. You tend to start out with fainter linework, and then as you progress you get more into darker strokes. You don't get stuck in the underdrawing/clean-up pass thing, which I'm glad to see, but you do end up with a lot of really faint gaps where the silhouette of your drawing ends up defined by marks placed earlier in the process. It comes down to you demonstrating less confidence with your earlier marks, and gradually building it up. Push yourself to draw your marks confidently the whole way through - you subconsciously may want to hide them initially, so you'll need to fight against that urge.

Oh, I actually just noticed one more thing - on your hybrid, the feathery texture you drew on its torso was very clearly sloppily done. You can do much better than half-hearted C-shapes, so be sure to put your best into every part of whatever you draw.

So! With that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're doing a pretty solid job throughout, and while there are some points to keep in mind, you're more than ready to consider this lesson done.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:56 PM, Thursday April 2nd 2020
edited at 11:09 PM, Apr 2nd 2020

You don't get stuck in the underdrawing/clean-up pass thing, which I'm glad to see, but you do end up with a lot of really faint gaps where the silhouette of your drawing ends up defined by marks placed earlier in the process. It comes down to you demonstrating less confidence with your earlier marks, and gradually building it up.

I actually think the masses I initially place down are some of the most confident lines I draw, but I suspect because I draw them far quicker, they end up significantly lighter than intended as a result of the much lighter pen pressure (and possibly partially angle). Also despite my scanner being used on colour mode, it does still seem to be fading out/doing that weird sharpening shit on my lines. For example, a photo of the fish drawing. I might just take photos in future, so my scanner doesn't flub the lines. :(

The thing regarding the eye sockets is actually something I've started encountering as a problem in my portrait studies, I'm not sure where to go with it but I'll keep on grinding for now, I guess.

giraffes/llama

No llamas

edited at 11:09 PM, Apr 2nd 2020
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