Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids
12:36 AM, Thursday February 6th 2020
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.