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10:05 PM, Monday March 2nd 2020

So the first thing that stood out to me when looking through your homework is that, while I can't be absolutely certain of it, it looks to me like these pictures are very tight crops of relatively small drawings. This is actually something I mentioned in my last critique: between the scale of the paper texture and the thickness of the lines, it throws off the sense of scale of the whole drawing. Without being able to accurately judge the scale at which you're drawing, it becomes somewhat difficult to correct issues where you may be drawing too small, or applying too much pressure with your pen. To help with this, please make sure you take pictures of full pages, rather than tight crops.

Now, I do get the impression that your drawings are small not just from the line thickness and paper texture, but also from the way in which you're drawing. There are elements of it that feel somewhat stiff, which is a common side-effect of drawing small, as it makes it easy to slip back into drawing from one's wrist. It also limits our brain's capacity to think through spatial problems, resulting in drawings that are often oversimplified and flatter than they ought to be.

Starting with your organic intersections, there's plenty of good here in how you're establishing the relationships between forms as they slump and sag against one another, but there are areas where certain forms feel as though their relationship with the rest of the pile is somewhat flattened out, as though the form's been drawn as a flat shape pasted on top of the page, only to resolve how it interacts with the rest in three dimensions after the fact. I see this from the top-right form of this page, where the silhouette of that sausage itself does not actually interact with the forms onto which it has been placed. It exists in three dimensions, being only slightly integrated through the form that wraps around it along the top left. Even its shadow doesn't dip into crevasses, instead sticking to the form itself. Always make sure you're thinking about how a form exists in three dimensions as you draw it.

Skipping down to your animal constructions, this one came out fairly well. The head construction is especially solid, where the beak clearly wraps around the cranial mass. This construction isn't perfect however - there are a number of issues as shown here where you're still working in terms of a lot of flat, two dimensional shapes instead of thinking entirely in terms of 3D form. There is additional information on how to approach the additional masses around the leg-joints in this demonstration. And of course, don't forget about using the sausage method to create the underlying structure and armature of all of your legs. I can see you doing this to varying degrees in other drawings, but you generally don't adhere entirely to the strict requirements of the method (using simple sausages, for example).

Honestly, the biggest issue overall just comes down to patience, and the care with which you actually study your reference images. I can see areas where you're employing a lot of different concepts quite well - head construction, parts of the sausage method, the use of additional masses such that they wrap properly around existing form, etc. But at the same time, not taking the time to properly study your reference carefully and relying too much on what you remember seeing a minute ago rather than what you're looking at right this second results in configurations of forms that don't reflect your reference properly. There are also similar issues when we get into detail where you tend to rely more on patterns and repeated, auto-pilot marks (like looking at the fur along the underbelly of this cat, where it's essentially just a series of spikes rather than purposely and intentionally designed tufts of fur).

Also, while on the topic of that cat, I noticed just how many contour lines you placed along its tail. Contour lines suffer from diminishing returns, where every subsequent one will contribute less and less than the one preceding it. Adding so many doesn't really accomplish anything, and ends up being a waste of linework - it's important to always think about exactly what we want to achieve with the mark we're about to put down. What is its job, and how is it going to accomplish that task - furthermore, is there another line that may accomplish that task better. To that point, contour lines are not all equal - those that sit along the surface of a single form are limited in their effectiveness, compared to those that define the relationship in space between two 3D forms, like the ones we add at the joints between the sausages in our leg constructions.

While you have a lot of signs that you're progressing and employing concepts from the lesson well, they're spread out in such a way that I'd like to see a few more drawings before marking this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

I'd like to see 5 more pages of animal drawings, each with no detail or texture whatsoever. I feel that you have a tendency to get distracted by it, and that you have it in you to pay more attention to the construction when it's removed from the equation.

Make sure you're taking photos of the whole page so I can get a better sense of scale, and ensure that each drawing takes up as much room on the page as is required.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
8:03 PM, Thursday March 12th 2020

https://imgur.com/a/7IRlLfk 5 more animals thank you

10:04 PM, Thursday March 12th 2020

So overall you're doing much better now. Your linework doesn't feel clumsy in the way it did before, and your lines are more purposeful. There is still plenty of room for growth, but you're moving in the right direction and even over these five drawings you've shown a good deal of improvement.

Here are some major points that you need to work on:

  • You get better at this over the set, but remember the difference between just extending the silhouette of a form as it exists on the page vs. adding more 3D masses on top of an existing structure. Additionally, when you deal with smaller additional masses, you sometimes don't think as much about how it's going to wrap around the underlying structure, and just end up pasting it on top (like the base of the flamingo's neck). You always need to understand how these forms are actually connecting to one another.

  • Something you're forgetting very consistently is to reinforce the joint between the sausages with a contour line when using the sausage method. This is demonstrated in the center of this page, and it is critically important, as defining the spatial relationships between forms helps sell the illusion that everything is 3D.

  • You also have a tendency to draw your cranial balls a bit too big, or the remaining forms (like the muzzle) too small relative to the cranium. Try and start with smaller craniums, or get used to making the muzzle larger.

  • When drawing eyeballs, those also probably need to be bigger than you think you'll need, because a fair amount of it is hidden under the eyelid. Use a larger ball and then make more of a point of wrapping the eyelid around the eyeball (something that is definitely harder to do when the head ends up being small already, but that's hard to avoid).

  • The thing about adding additional masses is that they each tend to represent a muscle group, and the great thing about them is how they interact with one another as they start to pile up. As we figure out how a mass is going to wrap around an existing structure, we end up with all of these little "pinches" where the silhouette of the overall construction kind of hits a sharp turn. If you look along the back of the bear, you'll see a pinch right where the torso sausage transitions into the top edge of its rump-mass (right along where I wrote the words "of each other" in my red notes). That kind of a pinch gives the impression of how what we're looking at is 3D, even if we were just looking at its silhouette, and it was filled in with a flat colour. The problem arises when we try to fuse all our masses into one or two big ones, rather than drawing smaller masses that interlock like a 3D puzzle. Not only do we end up with one big, complex form (and being complex it ends up feeling flatter), we also lose all of the pinches along the silhouette,a nd the construction as a whole stops feeling as three dimensional. Always try and think as though you're building a puzzle of interlocking parts along the body when using these additional masses.

I think you're pretty close, but before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like just one more animal. As yours have mostly been from the side, I want you to draw this mountain lion. Take your time, and don't be afraid to do some exploratory drawings first, as this one is quite difficult (it's one a bunch of us had tried on the drawabox discord server some years ago, and aptly named "drama puma").

In fact, instead of just doing it once, I'd like to see you try your hand at this cougar 3 times - and you're only allowed to make one attempt per day, so you have time to process what you learn from each attempt.

Next Steps:

Draw the cougar I linked at the end of the critique 3 times, no more than one drawing per day. You may also do other exploratory drawing to get a better understanding of how it sits in space, its proportions, etc. Your focus should still above all be on the construction of the animal, so if you add any texture/detail it should not detract from its underlying construction.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
12:33 AM, Friday March 20th 2020
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