Hello - here is my submission for lesson 4. My actual submission consists of first 12 pages (as required). I included more because I had a lot of time between submissions and made some more drawings (these are not even all I made - this lesson was amazing! :)).
Congratulations on new page, It looks great :).
Thanks! It was a bit rough of a start initially, but I think things have largely stabilized. Lots of bugs to fix, still, but they're not too big in scope and impact.
So! Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, these are quite well done. You're sticking to simple sausage forms, which is great to see - no pinching through the midsections or arbitrary swelling. You're also doing a good job of wrapping those contour curves around, just make sure you keep working on getting them to fit snugly between the edges of the forms, so as to better convey the impression that they wrap around the sausage form's surface.
Overall you're doing a pretty good job with the insect constructions themselves. For the most part you're conveying a very strong understanding of how these forms exist within 3D space, rather than just as a collection of lines on the page. There are a few things I want to point out however. Some are relatively minor, while others are significantly more important.
Starting off with something light, you tend to use a lot of contour lines, and the majority of them are not really contributing much. Students often do this, feeling that they should add contour lines, but not really thinking about what they're trying to get out of them. A contour line's job is to help communicate that an object is three dimensional - but if that form already reads as being 3D, then it serves no real purpose.
Contuing from the previous point, not all contour lines are equal. Those that sit along a single form can certainly help, but they are not nearly as effective as the contour lines that define the connection/intersection/relationship between two forms. These are so much more impactful because not only do they function precisely as a regular contour line does, but they also build a recursive connection between those two forms, establishing the relationship that if one reads as being solid and 3D, then so too must the other one be three dimensional. We emphasize these heavily in the sausage form, as shown in the middle of the linked diagram. Focusing on these contour lines rather than placing the less effective ones all over the place will make a far better use of the line you choose to put down.
You seem to be somewhat inconsistent in how fully you apply the sausage method. I can definitely see major elements of it, but I can also see that in drawings like the scorpion that you're not sticking to simple sausage forms here, instead allowing them to swell and pinch wherever necessary. Instead, you should still be constructing everything with basic sausages, and then coming back later to append further masses to them, on the bottom of this diagram. This will continue to be an important technique to achieve an underlying armature which captures the fluidity and solidity of the leg structure before building up the additional bulk that is required.
One thing I'm seeing a lot of is the tendency to put marks down that ultimately get ignored as part of the final drawing. We can see this on this beetle's thorax (where you started out with a much broader, looser ellipse that ends up sticking out underneath), as well as in this one. Every single mark we put down establishes a solid, existing form within a 3D world. We cannot treat this as something that can be ignored or modified as though it is simply a series of lines on a page - doing so undermines the illusion we're trying to create. Similarly, this means you should not be approaching the drawing as though you're doing any sort of a rough sketch, followed by a clean-up pass (as you did in the second beetle I linked there). Not only does this result in final linework that is stiff, it also lacks the kind of respect and acknowledgement of the three dimensional nature of our construction.
I feel that when it comes to texture, a lot of your experimentation tends to mix up the idea of "texture" with just any sort of rendering that'll make the drawing look pretty. As such, you end up incorporating a fair bit of shading-for-shading's-own-sake. I highly recommend you go back to lesson 2's texture section, which has recently been updated with new lesson content and videos. Give it a read/watch and it should clarify how texture should be treated.
So! All in all, your construction is still largely coming along quite well. I'm happy to mark this lesson as complete, but be sure to keep the points I've mentioned here in mind as you continue to move forwards.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 5.
Thanks very much - that's very constructive feedback. Sure I'll take look back to textures and focus on not ignoring base construction along with using correct sausage forms and all your other remarks.
I've got a question about this beetle https://i.imgur.com/TAQlYR1.jpg
Here is reference which I used https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/contentlab.studiod/getty/8dcae47246ce402e90914572698bfef0.jpg
I've found it extreemly helpful to put a sphere on the paper inside which i put the construction of the beetle - that's from where that unused line comes. I treated it like putting the elipse in lesson 2 for the radius of petals of the flower, which wasn't technically a construction element. Should I avoid drawing these kind of guides?
So the majority of construction we use as we get used to constructional drawing as a whole is called "additive construction". That is, it's where we place a form within the world, and then build upon it, respecting where that form sits, its surface, how our new forms wrap around it, etc. Approaching things in this manner helps to build our grasp of space and construction as a whole, and reinforces our spatial reasoning skills.
Then there's subtractive construction - this is considerably more challenging, because students will frequently start out approaching it as you tackled that beetle. You put down a shape, and then chose to use a subset of that space, focusing on how it exists on the page itself. This last point is important - note how you've effectively redrawn the entire thing in your subsequent pass. If however, you look at how we tackle edge detail in leaves from the previous lesson or even how we build out more complex multi-armed leaves (similar to the radius of the petals you were referring to, in all of these we are not finding a new position in space or on the page for where these things sit - we use the scaffolding put down in the previous phase. When redrawing the whole of the shape for this beetle's abdomen, you're giving a new answer to a question that already has one, resulting in two contradictory answers being present, which ultimately undermines the viewer's supension of disbelief.
Subtractive construction specifically relies on putting "cut" lines along the surface of the form itself in order to divide a given form into multiple parts. Once the piece that is cut away is clearly defined as it exists in 3D space, we can choose to say "this is negative space", or a piece that has been removed. It will still maintain its solidity. But if we merely redraw the shape that we want to keep as it exists on the page, we break the illusion as a whole. Always think of subtractive construction as though your pen is a scalpel, cutting along the surface of that form and splitting it into sections.
Now with this beetle's shell, I still wouldn't have approached it quite in this manner. It absolutely is an option, but I feel that working strictly additively is usually a better approach. There are cases where subtractive construction is really your only approach, but these are far less common.
For this reason, I push students to focus on building forms up on top of one another wherever possible, rather than cutting things away.
I didn't expect so detailed answer, thanks very much! Everything is clean now - I'll focus on additive construction only for future lessons of this course.
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
