Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

12:36 AM, Thursday February 6th 2020

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First off, sorry to hear about your grandfather. It's always destabilizing and hard to lose a member of the family. You and your family were in my thoughts last month.

Second off, congrats on the site launch! Looks great! Clean, intuitive, and professional. Linking my Patreon and Reddit was a breeze. I work IT for a living, so I'll do some digging around and see if I can't break anything for you ;)

Third off, finally done lesson 4! I have a couple thoughts that I will share. I bought a drawing board for this finally (this one exactly) and I've found it to be pretty useful, if for no other reason than getting it out and setting it up gets me in the "time to work" mindset. Having the angled service helps. Before I was just hunched over my desk. I also started holding my pen differently. I moved my grip up the pen and started holding it around the part thickest part of the pen (i.e. about 3/4 inch up my Staedtler pen). This ended up being immensely helpful especially for drawing elipses. I definitely feel like my elipses are much smoother and consistent all around after discovering this method this lesson.

As for my drawings, I was feeling pretty good about this lesson. I definitely felt like I was learning something with each drawing. (my first wasp is uhhh terrible. I did a little critique of it myself that I included in my submissions. I felt like that little self critique was a useful exercise.) By far, the thing I struggled with the most was the legs. I really struggle with drawing small and consistent sausage forms. As opposed to bigger forms like ellipses and boxes, I felt like it was harder to "feel" the shape of the sausage before drawing it. And even if I could feel it, the chances of me getting it to look how I was feeling were slim. I could do it on bigger sausages, but the smaller sausages in legs really were a source of consternation for me. Thus, things like spiders were especially daunting (and why I did the tarantula last). Any tips would be great. I tried quite a few different leg methods this lesson. One thing I felt help was giving the legs a faint gesture line and then have my legs follow that path. Made it easier to plan and execute on my sausage forms.

Last lesson, your feedback was that my drawings were too cramped and this lesson I really took that to heart and gave every bug its own page. This was definitely the right call. If I had tried to cram a fly into a third of a page like I was doing with plants, it would have been a cramped mess.

Can't wait to hear feedback!

Small feedback for you re: this typing box. The box has a "spell check" redline and it's pretty aggressive. Underlining words before I finish writing them. But it's also way too faint. I can barely see the line for words I actually do have misspelled. And the typing box doesn't seem to play nice with Chrome's spellchecker. i.e. if I right click on a misspelled word for the context menu, Chrome will offer no suggestions for the misspelling. Odd.

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10:34 PM, Thursday February 6th 2020

Thanks for the kind words, and for the feedback on the website. I'll definitely look into that spell checker issue - I know I can disable the textbox's own attempt at spellchecking, but I actually enabled it hoping that it would use the default one and was sadly disappointed. I am eventually going to add the ability to toggle between this editor and a more basic default textbox, but it's unfortunate that I can't have my cake and eat it too.

Anyway, looking at your work, overall you've done a pretty solid job. You've largely demonstrated a pretty solid grasp of form and a fair amount of attention to the instructions, though I do see a few areas where I can make recommendations that will help moving forwards.

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are very well done. Your forms are simple and consistent, and the contour curves themselves are mostly drawn well. I do think that there's room to emphasize the shift in degree from one end of a sausage form to another however, as right now they do feel pretty consistent. Additionally, when it comes to the little contour ellipse that is drawn on the tips that point towards the viewer, keep in mind which tips actually meet that criteria. I've noticed a number of sausage forms where the contour curves suggest the tip is pointing away from us, but where you've drawn a little contour ellipse.

Moving onto your insect constructions, I think it's in everyone's best interest if we skip the wasp altogether. Beyond this one you demonstrate a much stronger understanding of how to approach the exercise, and I feel that one is an early outlier.

The struggles you described regarding smaller sausage forms aren't abnormnal at all. It's entirely understandable that narrower, smaller sausage forms are considerably more difficult to draw. There are a number of factors that contribute to this, but the biggest one is tha it has a tendency to allow us to lean more on drawing from our wrists and elbows, despite the fact that doing so from our shoulders is still the best choice here due to the broader range of motion it provides. Additionally, you may be drawing the sausages a little more quickly than you need to. As students get used to the whole idea of drawing "confidently", the speed they need to maintain in order to avoid letting their brain steer decreases gradually, allowing them to avoid wobbles while giving themselves a little extra control. In the future, you can try drawing those sausages a little more slowly, from your shoulder, and see if the results come out better.

Another thing I noticed was that you do have a tendency to draw a lot of contour lines. Contour lines are great tools, but it's important to remember that there are plenty of circumstances where we can add a contour line, but where it doesn't actually contribute much to the drawing. Every mark we put down has a specific job, and we need to be aware of precisely what we want out of a given line before putting it down on the page. We also need to assess whether or not the line we want to draw is going to be the best for the given task.

With contour lines, there are a couple different types. There are the ones we've been familiar with since lesson 2, where they sit along the surface of a single form, helping to describe how that surface flows through space. Then there's the contour lines that define the relationship/connection between two forms. This latter type works exactly like the first one, but has an additional bonus - in defining that relationship between forms, it creates a recursive link between them where if one of them feels three dimensional, so to will the other - and in turn, so too will the first, and on and on. This creates a very strong illusion that the forms in question are 3D - far moreso than a single contour line sitting along the surface of a single form. As such, it's a good idea to focus on drawing these kinds of contour lines wherever you can, instead of the first type.

I noticed a number of places - specifically along your legs where the sausage segments connect - where opportunities to add these kinds of contour lines were skipped. Remember that the sausage method - which builds an armature for our legs that captures both the illusion of solidity and a flowing sense of fluidity and gesture - is made up of a specific series of approaches explained here. You've applied it well in a number of cases, but there are also several where your sausages aren't entirely meeting that 'simple sausage' criteria, places where you don't get quite enough overlap between the forms, and places where you haven't reinforced the joint with a contour curve (choosing instead to place contour lines along the length of the segment). Remember that if the leg requires bulk be added in various places, you can always come back and do that later, as demonstrated here.

There's one last thing I want to mention. In a few places, I've seen you put down a form (usually during the early lay-in phase of our base construction), then later on redrawn that form with specific changes. These changes are more to the shape of the form on the page, and don't bear relationships in 3D space. We can see one such case in this drawing, where the thorax was drawn in as a simple ball before being followed up with a new shape that cut back into that ball's silhouette.

In constructional drawing, every form we draw is one that we have placed within the world. It is a solid form that cannot be ignored and drawn over on the page - we need to respect its solidity and its presence and abide by all the restrictions that come with that in order to ensure that we can sell the illusion that our object is real, three dimensional and solid without contradicting ourselves or undermining the viewer's suspension of disbelief.

Construction comes in two flavours - additive and subtractive. Additive is where you put down a form, and then draw another form on top of it, clearly establishing how the second form relates to the first in 3D space. This is what we usually use, and I encourage its use because through the act of doing it, it helps further develop our understanding of how these forms relate to one another.

Subtractive on the other hand is often misunderstood. Many students will try to cut back into their forms as you've done here - cutting back into the shape of it on the page, separating it into 2D sections, some that remain and others that ultimately have to be ignored. Instead, subtractive construction is all about separating the given form into sections in 3D space. That is, we cut it into pieces by drawing lines along that form's surface - contour lines where our pen works more like a scalpel, cutting into it. Once these sub-forms are defined, we can choose to say that one defines three dimensional space that is positive, and the other defines space that is negative (meaning cut away). The key is that all of this occurs in 3D space, and the result is that the resulting forms and the object that comes out of it still feels real, rather than having reminders and contradictions that suggest the object is just made up of lines on a page.

If ever you find yourself redrawing a form, then you know you're going down the wrong path, so in general, try and avoid that.

I've given you a number of things to keep in mind here, but all in all I do see a lot of good signs. As such, I am comfortable in marking this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
11:31 PM, Thursday February 6th 2020

Thanks for the critique!

LOL at skipping the wasp. Yeah, I dunno, man... I really was trying on that one and it took me like over an hour. It just... was an abject failure.

Yeah, the contour-connecting curve was a method I leaned into more to connect the sausage legs for the scorpion and tarantula (last two). Once I made the connection in my head that "oh, this is just like the intersecting forms in 3D space exercise", I felt a lot more confident. In my ability to connect them. Though, I have to admit, those really small connecting curves were sometimes drawn with the wrist. I tried to stop myself whenever I caught myself! It's just so easy to default back to that for those little ellipses. It was something I struggled with on the plants as well and I'm really trying to move past.

"Confident" not meaning "fast" is a great insight. I feel that that is often my problem. I will ghost the form a few times and just feel like "OKAY HERE IT GOES!!" and then it's like I lose control of my pen and whatever happens happens from there. I need to slow it down.

I meant to ask this, but I find it hard to square my confident strokes with making sure I am not gonig more than a few seconds without looking at my reference, especially for these more complex forms on the insects. Like I want to make sure the forms I am putting on top of my previous forms (like shells and what not) are being true to life, but I also want them to be confident. So sometimes this means that I am stopping my stroke mid-way, looking at the reference and then picking it up again. Do you think that's a problem?

Thanks again for all your hard work!

7:45 PM, Friday February 7th 2020

Nooonono. It's more about setting your eyes on a very limited set of marks (usually defining a specific form), doing what you need to put them down properly (applying all the processes of the ghosting method). Now, you might lose track of what you're doing, in which case look back at your reference to refresh your memory and start over (maybe focusing on a smaller subset of marks).

Don't stop a stroke halfway through because of some arbitrary timer you set for yourself.

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