Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

7:53 PM, Thursday January 7th 2021

Draw A Box : Lesson 4 Homework - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/Wg4ISrK.jpg

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This was a terrifying lesson. I'm not gonna lie. I even had a nightmare with those ugly monsters once. It wasn't a pleasant dream...

Besides that, I enjoyed this lesson and, it forced me to leave my comfort zone and feel like I'm getting better and better at this.

Feedback is appreciated. :)

5 users agree
12:05 AM, Wednesday January 20th 2021

As polar didn't give adittional steps, I'll add to his critique:

Starting with the organic forms with contour curves, you're doing a pretty good job with them. Both the shapes and the curves are confident and neat. The main thing with them is that their points are a little bit too pointy. Keep in mind that the ends should be formed by a ball, so the ends should be affected by it.

There are also some places where your ellipses shift a little bit too quick which results on making the sausages look a bit flat, so watch out for that too.

Now onto the insect drawings. You're overall making a pretty good job on those, they're solid, but there are a few things I want to comment on that are very important, both on this lesson and on lesson 5, so I want to make them clear.

-Intersections between forms are part from the constructional drawing, and not detail. I want to make sure you know this so you don't skip it on the next constructional drawing that you do. Detail is basically textures as described in lesson 2, so other than that it's all part of construction.

About the intersections between forms as well, you sometimes skip them. Some examples are the connections between the body parts of the louse, the scorpion head and body connection, the fly, bees etc. One example where this is approached well is on your first beetle connection between the body and the horn (even though you're skipping constructional steps on the horn, which I'll comment later).

-Second thing I want to point out is to try to pay more attention on the demos, don't just follow them blindly. There are some demos that are outdated for example, and being critical is specially important on those. The example I'm talking about is the scorpion demo. On this demo, uncomfortable misjudges the size of the box of the scorpion and has to make a cut to make it fit, and you do it as well. Try to be more careful with those things. And about the outdated material, text will always be more important than the videos, so if there's something written on the text that is contradicted in a video, follow the text.

-Third thing is that you have a tendency to ignore your underlying construction at times.

Basically, when you put down a form on the page, it's there. You can't ignore it. It's a real 3d mass and you need to accept that. So build into it, don't treat it as if it's a 2d guideline. Here are a few examples where you do this, hopefuly it makes it a bit more clear: First, and second

-Fourth thing is that you sometimes add forms with flat shapes instead of actual forms. When you add a form to a drawing, draw first that form, and then the connection to the other forms on the drawing with an intersection.

First example is on the wasp, you add the forms with a simple shape instead of a form. When drawing bulking sausages you should approach them like this

Another is on the beetle here

-Next is pretty similar, and it's skipping constructional steps. There are some places where you're going too complex too fast when you could have broken those down in more steps. Some examples:

First, Second, This one is simpler, similar to how leaves should be approached in lesson 3, and Third

-Another thing is that you tend to overuse contour lines. Doing just the intersections between forms is enough if you do them well, so focus on those.

-I want to comment as well that you're drawing too small. Probably because you wanted to fit more drawings into the page. I would have liked to have seen some very big drawings, and I do think that drawing this small has hindered you a bit.

-And lastly, even though most of your lines are pretty confident, in some of them, specially on contour curves, you hesitate and make them wobbly. Don't forget to apply the ghosting method always, even to contour curves.

Like I said, you're doing a pretty good job, drawings are very solid and clean, but I want to make sure you understand some of the concepts of this lesson, so I want you to do 1 more drawing, give a shot at this crab

Good luck and keep up the good work!

Next Steps:

1 more drawing, give a shot at this crab

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:55 PM, Saturday January 23rd 2021

Thank you for your critique. I'll keep working hard to fix those mistakes!

For now, here's the Coconut Crab that you asked me to do. I hope it shows that I understood most of the concepts explained on this lesson.

4:24 AM, Monday January 25th 2021

Solid overall! Just a few things:

-I'm not sure if you're drawing intersections between all forms, since the drawing gets a bit hard to read with the detail on them. But just in case you haven't done them on some places, here is an example with the connections between sausages.

-When adding additional forms, you have a tendency not to place them entirely over the objects. Here is what I mean.

-Last thing is that I'd wanted to see you draw the back legs, remember that if you can't see them you can still draw them by guessing.

Overall like I said pretty good job, solid forms, nice confident and accurate lines and pretty clean. Congratulations on finishing lesson 4 and good luck with lesson 5!

Next Steps:

Lesson 5

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 5 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
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10:12 AM, Friday January 15th 2021

I've just completed this lesson. A such it's still fresh in my mind so I can throw in some observations.

Overall, I really the mark making. Your pen strokes are very confident. The various insect legs all came out very well, solid, good slow and you can clearly make out which leg in infront of the other (by contrast my insect are just chaos). Very good idea to take a scan of the raw construction and then of the complete drawing.

I think what you may want to focus more on is observation, like getting the proportions between the different parts (head, abdomen, thorax, wings..) as well as the direction of this part. So for instance, in the first image of the wasp, the abdomen is in the picture is not rounded, it is concave. Likewise the fly's head isn't a just a sphere, it is more heart-shaped.

I can point these things out because they are the same issues I had, plus my really messed up insect legs.

Hope this helps. But on the whole it's really good stuff.

11:32 AM, Friday January 15th 2021

Thank you for looking at my submission! =)

Besides the wasp and the fly (which were done following the demo) did you not find anything worth mentioning about the 10 insects (the actual homework) that I did? Were all 10 insects "really good stuff" in your opinion?

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