Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids
3:01 AM, Thursday February 6th 2020
Here's my 10 pages of insects - thanks for the critique!
So while overall you are showing growth and improvement, I'm seeing a number of issues that I want to address.
Firstly, in your organic forms with contour curves, you didn't include the central minor axis lines around which the contour curves need to be aligned. While you did a decent job of aligning them, it is imperative that you follow the instructions to the letter at all times, and avoid skipping steps. Another thing I noticed is an issue with the actual degree of your contour curves - you seem to be letting them get wider as they get closer to the viewer. Instead, the contour curves should be narrower closer to the viewer, getting wider as they move further away. So for example if we look at the one on the bottom right of this page, you'll see how the tip that is pointed towards us (the right one, where we can see the full contour ellipse) is where you've got your contour curves at their widest. Instead, they should be getting wider as they move towards the opposite end.
Next, one of the biggest things that's holding you back is actually a very simple problem: you're drawing really small. In doing this, you're severely restricting your brain's ability to think through the spatial problems at the core of constructional drawing, and you're also putting yourself in a position where it's much more difficult to engage the whole of your arm to achieve smooth, confident linework. It's really important that you draw bigger, and there's nothing wrong with having a single drawing take up an entire page if you feel it requires it.
Another issue I'm seeing is that if we look at drawings like the dogbane leaf beetle, you're not drawing through your forms. That is, wherever one form is overlapped by another, you allow its lines to stop. The reason drawing through our forms is so important is that it allows us to understand how the forms relate to one another in 3D space. Ultimately each drawing is not about creating a pretty, detailed result, but rather to help develop our understanding of 3D space. When one form passes between another and the viewer, that backmost form does not cease to exist - and so we need to understand all the forms at play in order to best grasp how they interact with one another to create complex objects.
It's worth mentioning that you do draw through your forms in other places - it's just quite inconsistent, and you miss a lot of places where it would be very helpful to do so.
On that same drawing, you demonstrate a tendency to pile on a lot of contour lines on your drawings. It's not uncommon to have students draw these contour lines simply because they feel they're supposed to, but at the end of the day you need to know why you're putting down any given line. Think about what you want that line to accomplish, what job you need it to do. Once you're able to determine that, you can ask yourself whether or not this line is the best choice to accomplish that task, and whether that task is something that is actually necessary.
Contour lines tend to have diminishing returns - that is to say, your first may help quite a bit, but your second will help much less, and eventually they won't contribute anything. There are also different kinds of contour lines - you've got the ones that sit along the surface of a single form, which are nice enough, but can be quite limited in their effectiveness. Then you've got those that define the relationship between two forms. These accomplish the same task as the first kind, but further than that, they create a recursive connection between two forms where if one of those forms is interpreted by the viewer as being 3D, so to will the other form, and in turn it will make the first form feel 3D, and on and on. This relationship turns into a very strong reinforcement to the illusion of solidity for the object as a whole.
As such, it's best to focus on where you can put contour lines down, and how you can use them, that will be most effective. When you do put a contour line down, it's critical that you do so carefully, thinking about how that line runs along the surface of the form. Drawing small as you do, it's not surprising that many of your contour lines end up being quite shallow, not quite giving the impression of well rounded forms. If you look at the wasp on that same page, its abdomen has plenty of contour linees that don't give the proper impression of a form that is rounded. Now, we both know that you can draw contour lines properly, but the circumstances here (along with perhaps not investing as much time into drawing these) resulted in poor execution.
Now I've covered a lot of different points here, so I'm going to leave you with just one more. The sausage method which I demonstrate for constructing legs that feel solid while conveying a strong sense of gesture and flow, is critical - and it's a tool that you seem to have decided not to use in most of your drawings. Sometimes you've applied it partially, other times you've left it aside altogether. This may be because you felt that the legs you were looking at did not appear to match a chain of sausages. Regardless of how the legs are configured, this technique is what you should be using. You can always come back after the fact and append further masses to them as shown here, in order to add bulk wherever it is needed - but you should look at this sausage method as constructing an armature, or a base structure, on top of which you will build whatever else is required.
The sausage method has very strict requirements:
All the segments must be simple sausages, that are essentially two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width
You must overlap the segments a good deal, having them interpenetrate.
The intersection between them must be clearly defined by a contour line. This is one of those especially effective ones, and no other contour lines are required along its length.
One last thing I do want to mention is that the blackfly on this page is the closest to being done correctly. The legs still aren't using the sausage method but as a whole, and the torso's got some arbitrary contour lines where there's many smaller forms you could have developed there (pay closer attention to how the bodies are segmented), but it demonstrates a much better overall grasp of 3D space and construction.
Next Steps:
I'd like to see 5 more insect drawings. Give them each a page of their own, and focus purely on construction - no texture or detail whatsoever. Before tackling these, I think you should review the lesson as a whole, along with all the demonstrations included with it.
Here are my extra drawings. Hopefully they hit thw mark
Nice work! I have just one thing to mention:
In the ladybug's body and the weevil's head, you've essentially drawn initial ball forms, and then drawn on top of them with entirely different forms that ignore the initial ones' existence. Construction is all about placing forms within a 3D world - not simply putting marks down on a flat page. Because we're just drawing lines, we have a lot of freedom to put down whatever marks we wish. In order to actually sell the illusion that the objects we're drawing are 3D and real, we have to impose further restrictions to ensure that we don't contradict the illusion we're trying to create.
The most important way to approach that is to actually treat the things we draw as being solid forms. In drawing the initial ball form of the weevil's head, you placed a sphere inside the world. The only way to change that form (without undermining the illusion) would be to interact with it as a 3D form. What you did instead was to interact with it as a 2D shape on the page.
Construction consists of two methodologies - additive construction, which is where we place a form in the world, and then place another such that it somehow connects or wraps around the previous one. This is the technique I push students to rely upon most of the time, and wherever possible, as it does a great job of furthering our understanding of how the forms we draw are three dimensional, and how they all relate to one another in 3D space. Working this way gradually builds up our own belief in the illusion we're creating.
The other approach is subtractive construction, which is what you tried to do here but did not do correctly. To properly approach subtractive construction, we have to treat our pen as thoug hit is a scalpel running along the surface of the given 3D form, just like when we draw contour lines. We're cutting the form into two separate sections - both of them defined clearly in three dimensions. Once defined, we can choose to denote the forms as positive space (a solid form within the world) or as negative space (empty, a void). This allows us to remove parts of a form we've drawn while continuing to respect the idea that it is solid and three dimensional.
This subtractive approach is obviously much more difficult, and it's a lot easier for students to do it incorrectly. Continuing to work additively helps one to develop the skills and general view of the forms they draw that will ultimately allow for greater success with subtractive drawing - so again, whenever possible, work additively.
Other than that, your work here is very well done. So keep what I've said above in mind as you continue onto the next lesson, and apply those principles there.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 5.
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