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9:14 AM, Sunday February 23rd 2025
Hello Tawny_Owl, Congratulations on finishing lesson 4. I'll be giving you feedback, pointing out mistakes you've made as well as thing you did good.
Organic forms
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The lines look good. The sausage shapes are drawn in one continuous stroke and the contour lines fit snugly against the edges of your forms.
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The contour lines have a very similar orientation. Shifting this orientation as illustrated in this diagram allows for more movement in the shapes you are drawing.
Insect construction
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You’ve done a very good job with these. You’re abiding by the principles of construction by starting with simple solid forms and building up complexity gradually, piece by piece. You’re demonstrating a good grasp of how your forms sit in 3D space and you often connect them together with specific 3D relationships that help reinforce the solidity of the construction as a whole. The proportions of your insects also look very good with no appendages being much too big of small. have just a couple of pieces of advice for you to keep in mind.
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At some points you still use chicken scratches for your linework where we want smooth confident lines. This is most obvious on the head and pincers of the hercules beetle and the back of the spiny weevil. I believe this happens because when drawing those lines you are not sure yet what that shape is going to look like. This can be helped by adding construction geometry to dictate the shapes. You could draw a branch or sausage shape for the hercules beetle pincer and cones for the spikes on the weevil.
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You make good use of texture to convey the curvature of the surfaces and in combination with the line thickness you create a clear order which parts of the insect are in the foreground and deserve attention and which are in the background. However you do use hatching on dark parts. We want to avoid this as it flattens out the surface it is used on. It is fine to use hatching on back legs to push them to the background but it is no substitute for texture.
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In your wasp moth drawing you have put the plant it's standing on beneath its feet for context which is nice to see. I would suggest to draw a bit more of the plant though. As now it looks like only the three right legs are grounded and the other half of the insect is floating. You don't need much more than an outline or simple construction geometry to achieve a lot more solidity.
I think that just about covers it, overall very good work. I'll go ahead and send you off to Lesson 5.
Next Steps:
- Continue to lesson 5
2:06 PM, Sunday February 23rd 2025
Hi, Fable!
You got me, I did get a bit lazy at one point and used less construction geometry, it clearly didn't help lmao. I'll also try to me more mindful of how I use hatching.
Thank you for the feedback!

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