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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.