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11:18 PM, Thursday November 19th 2020

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are largely coming along well, though you do need to continue improving your control over your contour ellipses and contour curves, specifically to ensure that they fit snugly within the silhouette of your sausage forms. Being sure to apply the ghosting method to each and every mark and drawing with your shoulder should help you continue to develop in this area.

Looking at your insect constructions, they are overall done fairly well, but there are a number of issues I want to point out. Before I get into them, I'd like to mention that your scanner settings appear to be ramping up the contrast on the images, causing them to come out quite harsh looking and removing any of the nuance from your linework. If your scanner has presets, make sure you scan under the "photo" settings rather than drawings or documents to capture the images more accurately.

The first thing I noticed about your constructions is that you are focusing quite a bit on how to break down your insects into small elements and building them back up. You're paying a good deal of attention to your reference, and avoiding working from memory, and your drawings definitely reflect this quite well.

One issue I noticed early on which isn't always present in your drawings, but is important enough that I wanted to mention it anyway, is that in some of these you'll draw the initial masses of your construction (the head, the thorax, etc.) as though they don't actually maintain a clear relationship with all the forms that you build up thereafter. If we look at the insect on the right side of this page, it doesn't really feel like the initial balls you drew for the head and torso are a solid, three dimensional part of the construction. This is because of the little gaps present between those masses and the other things that have been built up around them. It makes them feel as though they're floating loosely within the bodies, rather than serving as a solid base upon which the rest of the structure is built up.

When it comes to constructional drawing, the relationships between our phases of construction, and the relationships between the forms themselves, is absolutely critical. We need to capture the impression that these forms are actually tightly bound to one another, that they wrap around one another to create the segmentation, and so on. We don't want to end up in a situation where at the end of the drawing, we could ostensibly pluck those early forms out of the drawing without harming it. There should be no separation, with the whole of the construction being tightly integrated.

The drawing on the left side of that same page is definitely better in this regard. There are definitely some cases where your drawings get a little too focused on creating a pretty image, where you focus entirely on observation and don't think about how the elements you're adding all exist in 3D space. So we end up with drawings like this crab which appears to be made up of a lot of flat shapes to make a pretty good facsimile of a crab, but doesn't actually feel like a solid three dimensional object. Conversely, the lobster and cicada on this page are both very well constructed, and so they feel much more solid and believable.

Also worth noting, the centipede on this page would have benefited from actually wrapping solid forms around it, rather than just adding contour lines. Something that would have broken past the silhouette, kind of like what we see in this step of the louse demo.

Another issue I'm noticing is that there are definitely a lot of areas where your linework is kind of timid. You're definitely not afraid of drawing through your forms and really delving into complexity (like on this page's utterly disgusting horseshoe crab underbelly (it's a compliment, I assure you) but you definitely seemed more hesitant when drawing the linework for the top views along the right side. Part of this was definitely because those drawings were quite small and cramped - drawing smaller tends to impede our spatial reasoning skills and makes it much harder to engage our whole arm while drawing, resulting in more tentative, clumsier linework rather than big confident strokes. Always try to give each drawing as much room as it needs, and avoid cramping them into small areas.

When it comes to using contour lines, like in the beetle on the bottom of this page, keep in mind that contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form suffer from diminishing returns. That means that while the first one may help reinforce the solidity of the form quite a bit, the second will have far less impact, and the third even less than that. It becomes important, as with all lines, to assess precisely what you want a line to do for you before you draw it. That's what the planning phase of the ghosting method is for, to ask yourself what this line's job is, whether the way you're looking to execute it is going to be best for that purpose, and whether another line perhaps is already accomplishing the same job.

This kind of thing can also cause students to start getting sloppy with their contour lines, which is something we see in this drawing a fair bit.

Lastly, I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well). Just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.

These same principles can be used to construct other things - like beetles' horns, as shown here.

So! All in all I am still pleased with your results, but you have a number of things to work on. I will mark this lesson as complete, and leave you to continue improving in this areas through into the next lesson. Just be sure to sort out your scanner, as it definitely does take away from your drawings quite a bit. If you can't, then using a cellphone camera will probably yield better results.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
1:24 AM, Friday November 20th 2020

Thank you very much for the thorough critique. I'll do my best for the next lesson.

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Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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