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9:37 PM, Tuesday March 3rd 2020
Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, two things to keep an eye on:
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You're definitely mindful of sticking to simple sausage forms, and you're close, but you're not entirely there. Many of your ends are a little stretched instead of spherical, and you're ending up with just a little bit of pinching through the midsection, resulting in more of a bean-like appearance.
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It's always great to draw a contour ellipse on the ends of the sausage that are oriented towards the viewer, but that's not really what you're doing. You're drawing contour ellipses where those tips aren't pointed towards the viewer, and the degree of your contour ellipse doesn't actually match what the contour curves just before it suggest it should be. You need to reassess what exactly these contour ellipses represent, and what they're meant to communicate. There's no difference between these and the contour curves, in that contour curves are the visible portion of larger contour ellipses that wrap all the way around. Along the tips, when those tips are oriented towards the viewer, we end up seeing the whole of the contour ellipse.
Moving onto your insect construction, to start your brown recluse is actually a great start. You're drawing the forms in a way that they feel somewhat solid, and are employing important elements of the sausage method when constructing your legs (even though if they're not perfect). What's important here is that you've drawn the forms in a manner that tells me you're thinking about how those forms exist in three dimensions, not just as shapes on a page.
As we move onto later drawings however, like your ladybug and your praying mantis it appears more that as you draw, you're focusing on drawing shapes on the page itself, in two dimensions.
What we're doing here focuses wholly on the idea that we understand how every mark we put down is not simply a line on a page, but that it is establishing an individual form in a 3D world. That's the first step, and that means understanding each form as it sits in the world on its own, in isolation. If you look at the ladybug's shell, you'll see how you drew the abdominal section (the big part) in such a way that its outline fully stops when it hits the part of the shell around the thorax. Instead, you should be drawing through each form, drawing it in its entirety, rather than adding complexity to its silhouette as you've done here.
Similarly, looking at the sausages you've drawn for its legs, they're moving in the right direction but they definitely have unintentional complexity to them (where the ends of the outlines don't meet correctly, where they pinch through the midsection, where the tips of the sausage are more stretched rather than properly spherical, etc) and every bit of complexity undermines the illusion that this form is solid and three dimensional.
Once we're drawing forms that exist individually as solid entities and not just as shames on a flat page, then we have to think about how these forms relate to one another in 3D space. You're doing a better job of this, but there's still plenty of room for improvement. For example, it's great that you're drawing contour lines at the joints between the sausage segments in the legs, but the actual contour curves you've drawn are quite shallow (don't wrap convincingly around the rounded forms) and it doesn't seem as though you're thinking about how the contour curve implies its orientation in space relative to the viewer. How you draw the contour curve will communicate to the viewer how this shared cross-sectional slice of the two sausage forms sits in space.
Jumping forward, something that caught my eye is how in this drawing, you drew in your underlying construction, then (especially around the legs) traced back over them with a cleaner, darker stroke. While adding line weight is great, what you're doing here is tracing, and it is something I discourage my students from doing. This is because tracing causes one to focus on how the lines they're drawing flow across the page in two dimensions, rather than how they represent edges that move through all three dimensions of space. You'll notice that it always comes back to this core concept - we're creating things in 3D space, not on a flat page. It relates back to this point from lesson 2.
Overall I think you're moving in the right direction, but that the marks you're putting down don't all exhibit a clear focus on what you're drawing at that moment, and how that particular form exists in 3D space, interacting with the other forms that have already been placed there. It's largely a matter of taking more time and thinking about specifically the mark you're putting down, rather than trying to think several steps ahead.
One last thing - I think you're steadily getting better at your sausages, but something that will help is to actually slow down when drawing them. This is actually where things get difficult - you'll remember that back in lesson 1 I talk about how we need to draw with confidence. A lot of people interpret this as "draw fast", but that's not something I ever actually say. Drawing quickly is the way in which students most easily shut off their brain and achieve that confident stroke, but as you develop your skills and gain experience, you'll find that you can maintain that same confidence while being able to slow down a little. This in turn can help improve control, especially when maintaining the spherical nature of the ends of your sausages.
So! Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'm going to assign a few more pages just to ensure that you can apply what I've said here.
Next Steps:
I'd like to see just 4 more pages of insect drawings. Above all, focus on how every single mark you put down defines a form in 3D space, not just shapes on a flat page.
4:42 AM, Saturday March 14th 2020
Hey Uncomfortable! Here are my extra drawings: https://imgur.com/a/3tDosv2 and here are some disastrous attempts that I am sharing just for transparency: https://imgur.com/a/XtmOUMQ
I had a very difficult time with both the Ladybug and the Mantis. I wanted to tackle these again to see if I can achieve something more 3D with your notes in mind. In both of them, one of the things that I am still struggling to understand is how the shell in Ladybug, or the extra form in Mantis' torso would be drawn if we wanted to draw through it.
My understanding is that we should draw through the forms, however the demos don't seem to represent that? For example, looking at your ladybug drawing in the Drawabox Lesson 4: An Introduction to Drawing Insects and Arachnids video, the shell doesn't seem to be enveloping the invisible part of the abdomen. So the shell looks like it's sitting on top of the abdomen and torso rather than enveloping it fully.
When I try to draw through the forms, I get a semi-successful representation, but it sometimes turn out a little confusing especially if the form I am adding is tricky. (like the form on Mantis' torso)
Anyhow, I did my best with my current level of understanding. The results don't necessarily feel right but certainly feels like an improvement since my last submission, so hopefully your feedback will help me push through my other confusions/failures.
P.S: I thought Ladybug would be the simplest to draw and somehow it is still giving me the most trouble.
7:55 PM, Saturday March 14th 2020
You're showing a definite move in the right direction here, and your general constructional approach is considerably better, though there are is one thing you need to really focus on as you move forwards.
Above all else, spend more time observing your reference images - there are a lot of cases where what you're drawing doesn't actually reflect the nature of the reference. For example, if we look at the praying mantis' claws, the "tarse" (the slim extension that comes off their front arms) has been drawn as having a great deal of girth to it, even though in the reference it is extremely skinny. Similarly, the praying mantis' back legs were drawn as basic, thick tubes, which doesn't match the reference. Overall, your proportions aren't entirely accurate, and I suspect that this is because you're spending more time looking away from your reference than you should be, resulting in a greater reliance on your memory.
Now, your issue with the ladybug, I believe stems largely from a misunderstanding:
For example, looking at your ladybug drawing in the Drawabox Lesson 4: An Introduction to Drawing Insects and Arachnids video, the shell doesn't seem to be enveloping the invisible part of the abdomen. So the shell looks like it's sitting on top of the abdomen and torso rather than enveloping it fully.
Your assessment is accurate, because that is what the shell does. It sits on top of the abdomen and wraps around it, but does not envelop it fully. The only reason we start out with the "invisible" abdomen is because it is a simpler form, whereas the shell itself is somewhat more complex. So starting off with a basic ball and then wrapping a more complex shell along its surface allows us to achieve that greater level of complexity while maintaining the illusion of solidity for the whole form.
Overall, you're doing a good job of constructing your forms (although I think you slipped up somewhat with the wasp where your leg segments aren't simple sausage forms and as such tend to feel kind of flat), but your biggest pitfall is that the forms you're drawing don't reflect the proportions present in your reference. Looking at that same wasp, we can see even large elements - like the wings - where what you've drawn differs immensely.
Proportion and observation is difficult to be sure, but I think taking the time to invest more into observation and relying less on your memory will give you a big jump forward. There will still be smaller things that will continue to be difficult, and those will progress more slowly with practice, but the key here is that a change to your approach - drawing only a single stroke or form at a time before looking back to your reference, and being more aware of how they reflect what is present in the reference, will increase the believability of your drawings quite a bit.
I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, as what I've mentioned here will continue to come up in the next lesson, and I think you'll be able to work on them there just as well as you do so here.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
8:23 PM, Saturday March 14th 2020
Thanks again for the feedback! I definitely dropped the ball on proportions. I was way too focused on construction on these drawings, but I'll make sure to take more time for observation in the next lesson.
For the ladybug question, I thought maybe a demonstration would help explain my question. When I mentioned drawing through the forms, I was talking about something like this (excuse the drawing with mouse) because of how the shell seems to cover everything but the bottom part in this reference. (warning: it's the underside of ladybug and a bit disgusting)
Not a terribly important thing, but it was something I spent quite a bit of time to figure out, so I thought I'd bring it up.
6:33 AM, Wednesday March 4th 2020
I really appreciate the detailed feedback, thank you!
In previous lessons, some of the lessons notes and your feedback didn't immediately click for me even after reading them multiple times. Of course I understood the text itself, but I couldn't carry that over to my drawings. For most of it, working on the next lessons or your follow up feedback clarified things for me, so I kept pushing to figure things out. For this one, I am hoping I can ask some follow up questions especially since the next lesson is very similar to this one but more complex. I also want to make sure I can apply all this in my next set of insects.
For the contour ellipse, I understood that it represents the completely visible part of the form. I have been adding the ellipse after the curves and these sometimes didn't make sense. I knew it didn't make sense, but I wasn't sure why. I think your feedback cleared things up for me, but I am still not 100% sure. I think most of the sausages I drew are from the side, so there shouldn't be a circle at all. I think what I need to do is maybe start by adding a contour ellipse first and then shifting the degree with the curves. The ellipse itself makes it much easier to understand how that form sits in 3D space anyway.
For the ladybug, your feedback about the legs makes sense to me. I've been struggling with those connections a bit and adding the hooks definitely helps with my understanding of it. One thing I am still not 100% sure about is, when the form intersection is not drawn cleanly, I am not sure where I should be adding the contour curve. An example of that would be where you added the note about "doesn't hook properly" and whether the issue there is the degree of the curve and that it doesn't hook or whether I am adding it in the wrong place to begin with. (start and end points being wrong)
For the shell part of the ladybug, I am afraid I didn't quite understand your feedback. This is the reference that I drew this ladybug from. In the reference, it looks like there is a space between the shell that covers the head and some of thorax and the shell that covers the thorax and abdomen. So, I first tried to add the top shell by wrapping the form around the thorax. Then I left some space for the opening (which I probably should have added some shadow to clear it up) and then drew the big shell. For the top curve of big shell, I hooked it around the thorax a bit to better reflect that it covers more than just the top of the thorax but also some of the sides. The hook is more visible on the top of the curve then the bottom. Looking at your feedback drawing, it looks like you added the small shell under the big one which I may be misinterpreting. With my explanation in mind, I was hoping you could explain what I am missing.
For the mantis, I actually struggled quite hard with its head construction and I even thought about asking in the submission, but wanted to hear your thoughts first. When we start with a circle for cranium, I am still not sure how to add a squeezed sphere (ellipse) that encapsulate the cranium without undermining the previous step. I considered adding a contour ellipse and then adding 2 half sausages that connect to it, but that felt a bit convoluted to me. For that reason, I actually started with a squeezed sphere for my Louse Flies drawing whose head feels more solid to me, but it's also not something you do in demos, so I wasn't sure if that was OK to do.
If any other part of the mantis looks to be drawn as 2D, I'd really appreciate if you can point out which one it is, so I can better study my mistake. Unfortunately I don't have the reference with me right now, but I can add it in a few days when I am back home.
About the sausages for the legs, it's mainly a poor execution on my part. I've been practicing sausages on the side, especially the small ones, but I get stressed when I am working on the homework itself and lose confidence at times. Although they are getting better with practice, I am still struggling with the ones that are thinner and longer and I am curious if it'd be OK to construct these in multiple marks instead of just one go.
Finally, the tracing - I immediately regretted when I started doing that, but then I felt committed and I at least wanted to present a consistent drawing. I am definitely aware that the main usage of line weight is to clarify which line is in front.
Hopefully it's somewhat clear that I am definitely thinking about every mark and what that represents in 3D world even if sometimes what I am thinking and what the drawing turns out doesn't exactly match. I am going over all your notes and recordings multiple times and I am doing my best to follow them even if I don't fully understand them in the hopes that it'll click after a while. Admittedly it's been slow going, so I really appreciate all your help and your patience while I figure all this out.
7:39 PM, Wednesday March 4th 2020
For the organic forms with contour curves, I agree - starting with the ellipse and then basing the contour curves around that will likely help.
For your ladybug's legs, the positioning was fine, but it was the degree of the contour line and the fact that it didn't wrap around properly that was throwing it off. Also, on the far left one, the joint closest to the body, I don't think that contour line was slightly slanted, causing it not to align to the flow of those sausages forms.
With the ladybug's body construction, one thing I should have addressed was that the masses you drew initially - the much smaller ones that ended up being engulfed by the shell - didn't actually reflect what you saw in your reference. Don't try to imagine things that aren't there - there will be situations where you have to look very closely to find signs of things that may not be entirely obvious, but the marks you put down should correspond to features that are actually present. So in this case, your initial abdomen mass should have been the size at which you drew the abdominal section of its shell.
The way it was drawn, there's no real relationship between those initial masses and the rest of your construction, so we can see the drawing as though you had not drawn those initial forms at all. As a result, the complexity of that later abdominal-shell form you drew is not being supported by any underlying form.
Here's how it should have been approached. Notice how it's considerably fewer steps, focusing only on the forms we can see within the drawing itself. I didn't worry about anything other than basic ball forms until that 4th step, where I didn't do much more than emphasize how the shell along the abdomen wraps around the shell of the thorax.
When we start with a circle for cranium, I am still not sure how to add a squeezed sphere (ellipse) that encapsulate the cranium without undermining the previous step.
I'm unsure of why you're approaching it in terms of encapsulating the cranium - when constructing our objects, we append new forms to the ones we've already established, rather than enveloping one within the other. Here's how I would approach it. As you can see there, I start out with a sphere, add the large balls for the eyes, and then bridge the gaps with further forms.
If any other part of the mantis looks to be drawn as 2D, I'd really appreciate if you can point out which one it is, so I can better study my mistake.
It comes down to the entire core structure - the head, the thorax, the abdomen, etc. looking very flat. This is largely because you're constructing them with these long ellipses. When I say ellipses, I mean specifically that they are 2D shapes, rather than balls or sausage forms, which imply that you've sold the illusion that they're 3D. There may appear to be no difference between a circle and a sphere for instance, but there are small things we can do to convince ourselves that we're drawing solid, 3D forms, such as adding a contour ellipse or a contour line along its surface. This in turn will influence how we interact with the forms as we add more into the construction.
Additionally, as explained in the sausage method, stretched ellipses tend to appear very stiff and lack fluidity, which further breaks the illusion you're trying to create. It's better to work with sausages for this purpose, as they can more convincingly give the impression that they're moving through 3D space.
I am still struggling with the ones that are thinner and longer and I am curious if it'd be OK to construct these in multiple marks instead of just one go.
Every approach will have its own challenges. If the way you draw them using multiple segments give the impression that they are just loosely related lines on a page rather than a continuous, believable, solid form in 3D space, then that is the problem you will have to contend with. You can choose to tackle them as you like, but I will be focused on your results and whether or not they read in a believable fashion. Keep in mind the suggestion I added at the end of my critique however, where I recommended trying to slow down (whilst maintaining a confident stroke) to regain control as you round the ends.
I hope that helps.
3:51 AM, Thursday March 5th 2020
These notes and extra drawings are incredibly helpful! I already feel like I understand what's wrong with my drawings a lot better and I am sure once I study them on paper and put them into action, it'll only get better. Thank you so much!
The only minor thing I want to mention is that, the reason I went with a bigger thorax for the ladybug was the position of bottom legs. I could have definitely extended the legs under the shell to their position in the reference, so your approach works for me, but I thought it was still worth mentioning.
I think I am thinking a bit too much about how things actually are rather than what is the best way to construct a reference. Until now, I would not construct the head of the mantis the way you outlined because that kind of approach didn't feel realistic to me. (anatomically) However, looking at your drawing, it's a great 3D representation and it doesn't matter how anatomically correct it is. (of course my assumption of this being anatomically incorrect might be false as well, but that's not the main point)
Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to write/draw all this out.
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