9:09 PM, Friday October 29th 2021
Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along pretty well, though I do have a few quick observations to share:
-
Firstly, don't be afraid to kick in some subtle touches of line weight where the forms overlap one another, to help clarify those overlaps. Even the lightest touch of line weight will help add a lot of dimension to the pile.
-
Secondly, you're making progress with this, but keep thinking about how the surface that receives a cast shadow deforms through space. If it's rounded/curving like the sausages are, consider how those shadows will get pulled along.
-
Avoid places where you've got a form being held up in the air without anything to support it. Make sure that as you design the silhouette of a given sausage, it's abiding by the rules of gravity.
Moving onto your animal constructions, as a whole you are doing pretty well. You're clearly thinking hard about how the things you're drawing exist in 3D space, how your forms fit together to create more solid, believable results, and so on. There are however a few areas where I feel I can suggest some tweaks to your approach to keep you moving in the right direction, and getting the most out of these exercises.
The first thing I noticed was simply that you tend to rely really heavily on contour lines, erring on the side of piling them on even when they aren't necessarily going to contribute much more to the construction and the illusion that what we're drawing is 3D. It's easy to get caught up in the idea that "more is always better", but this isn't actually true. These kinds of contour lines (there are two types, the ones introduced in the organic forms with contour lines, and those introduced in the form intersections, with the ones we're discussing here being the former) tend to suffer from diminishing returns, where the first may have a more significant impact, but the next will have less effect, and those that follow even less.
We make sure that we apply the first step of the ghosting method - that is, the planning phase - assessing exactly what we meant to achieve with a given stroke, how that stroke can be drawn to best achieve its purpose, and whether another mark may already be accomplishing that specific task. It's pretty easy to forget to do this and to rush ahead into simply making the marks, resulting in a lot of linework that isn't necessarily being put to its best use, or that isn't necessary to begin with.
There's also another downside to this, aside from simply piling on more lines than are strictly needed. When drawing our additional masses, where the actual design of each additional mass is what helps us establish the relationship between this new form and the existing structure, it's easy for students to feel that they can try to "correct" a poorly drawn mass by adding contour lines to it. Unfortunately, that's not how it works - those contour lines that sit only on the mass itself don't define the relationship between the mass and the structure. We'd need to actually be defining intersections in order to achieve that with a contour line, but the masses themselves are meant to "wrap" around the existing structure rather than intersect with it.
Despite this, if we feel like we might have a tool that can at least in part "correct" our mistakes, we can find ourselves avoiding the main solution (which is to take more time and think through the design of the mass's silhouette further), and instead continuing to rush through that step and trying to fix it later.
On the topic of additional masses, it's worth mentioning that I don't really feel that you have a strong tendency to pile contour lines onto your additional masses as described above - so you're good in that regard. Still, it's a risk that is worth knowing about. Also, there are some things I'd like to call out in regards to your use of additional masses that should help them come out even better. Here are some notes on one of your camel drawings:
-
The mass you used to add the hump to the camel's body is way too complicated, trying to achieve way too many things all at once. Each additional mass should be given a fairly limited scope of responsibility, and it is generally better to break things into individual pieces in order to ensure that each one's silhouette can be kept simple. This is one of those cases where you definitely drew a silhouette that was way too complex and wouldn't feel solid on its own, then tried to rectify it with contour lines.
-
One thing I notice in a lot of your additional masses is the use of seemingly arbitrary sharp corners - a form of complexity - that aren't being caused by the presence of, or contact with, another form. One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette. Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram. This allows us to keep those forms as simple as possible, and to ensure that whatever complexity is added to its silhouette is always in response to the structure it's wrapping around. This will ensure that your forms feel more three dimensional and solid. As a whole, the specific design of these silhouettes will take a lot of effort and time - so don't feel like these things need to be drawn quickly, or even all in one go. It's entirely normal to draw parts of a mass's silhouette with individual strokes, especially when you need to incorporate complexity in different areas.
-
When building up masses on the legs, remember the diagrams I shared with you in my last critique - specifically this one and this one, which shows how every piece we add is its own complete, enclosed, 3D form, and how we're fitting them together piece by piece. Also, since I caught you adding contour lines along the length of your sausages instead of focusing them specifically at the joints between sausage segments (like in this drawing for instance), do be sure to review the specific requirements for the sausage method.
The last thing I wanted to call out was how you're approaching your head construction. Right now it doesn't look like you had a chance to look through this explanation from the informal demos page. As it stands right now, this is the most useful explanation we've got for how to tackle head construction, and once I'm able to overhaul the video content for this lesson, that's the approach we'll be applying across the board. Note specifically how it relies on specifically shaping the eye sockets into pentagons, allowing for a space between them in which the muzzle can be wedged, and a flat surface across the top where the brow ridge and forehead can rest. This allows everything to fit together like pieces of a puzzle, so each component reinforces the illusion that they're all part of a 3D structure.
Be sure to read through that explanation, and apply it to the best of your ability to your animal constructions.
As I have pointed out a number of things for you to work on, I'm going to assign some revisions below, so you can demonstrate your understanding.
Next Steps:
Please submit an additional 4 pages of animal constructions.
Take your time with each one - I highly recommend doing no more than one of these animal constructions on a given day, and if you feel you need to break a single drawing across multiple sittings or days, you should feel free to do so. Sometimes students have the misconception that they should be rushing through and finishing a drawing within whatever amount of time they have that day, but it's the task at hand that should determine how long it ought to take. That way we can be sure to invest as much time as is needed into ever aspect of a drawing - from time spent observing our reference and coming back to it frequently, to the design of each individual form we construct, and the execution of each and every mark.