Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

4:36 AM, Thursday February 24th 2022

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I really like the insects/arachnids construction. I think i really enjoyed this lesson.

Tanks for the course and the critiques.

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10:27 PM, Friday February 25th 2022

Alrighty! As a whole I think you've done pretty well, although I do have a few quick things to call out.

Firstly, you did end up doing one page of organic forms with contour ellipses and one page of contour curves, though the homework assigned two pages of contour curves - I'm not gonna have you do additional ones, as these are well done (though keep working on the alignment of your ellipses, it's slightly off at times), but be sure to pay closer attention to what the assignments actually are.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, when it comes to the core focus of this lesson - that is, building up solid, believable insect structures, one simple form at a time, you've done an excellent job. Many students at this point are still liable to jump back and forth between 2D and 3D, altering the silhouettes of their forms as quick shortcuts to refining the overall structure (something which, as demonstrated here, can easily undermine the solidity of the resulting structure), but you have fairly consistently shown a much greater respect for how the forms themselves are all solid and 3D.

In the defense of those other students, this isn't something that the lesson itself is as clear on just yet - it will be, once the overhaul of the material (which is still stuck for now at Lessons 0 and 1) reaches this point, but until then it is primarily left as something that those submitting for official critique have explained here, as well as something that is shared in some of the newer demonstrations (like the shrimp and lobster at the top of the informal demos page. Ultimately the lessons evolve over time, and certain approaches solidify more over the thousands of critiques I produce.

Either way, I am as a result very pleased to see you applying these concepts as effectively as you are. I will however still offer you the same demos/diagrams that I do for those other students, just to make sure that the understanding is conscious and clear, rather than something you're doing without realizing it.

To be fair, there are a couple instances where you've jumped back to working in 2D (for example, how you started out your ladybug with a big ole ball form, then basically ignored that ball form as you built the rest of it, leaving lines just floating there, expecting them to be ignored. There's also the abdomen of the huntsman spider on this page where it was blocked in with a looser ellipse. That happens - it's normal - but when it does, be sure to treat the outermost perimeter of the ellipse as the edge of the silhouette, even if this requires you to jump from one line to another. This way we can guarantee that all of the other lines will exist inside of the silhouette, where they can be contained, and won't have as much of an impact on the solidity of the resulting structure.

So, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo.

Taking that further, the same principle can also be applied to our leg constructions. I can see that you're doing a great job of applying the sausage method to constructing your legs, but that really is just the first step. 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, in 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).

Now! The last thing I wanted to mention is that right now you do have a pretty heavy use of line weight - to the point that it looks like oftentimes you're using an entirely different pen to add line weight. Keep in mind that all your drawing should be done with a 0.5mm fineliner. You can use a brush pen but only to fill in cast shadow shapes, which themselves should already have been outlined with the fineliner, to help produce a more purposeful, intentional design for the shadow's shape.

When it comes to line weight, try to be much more conservative in its use - instead of adding it wherever you can, ensure that it serves a purpose. The best way I've found to do that is to actually limit it only to the specific, localized areas where overlaps occur between different forms, so it can help clarify the way in which those overlaps occur, which form is in front of the other. You can see this demonstrated here with these two overlapping leaves.

Aside from that, you're doing very well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
4:46 PM, Saturday February 26th 2022

Thank you very much for this critique Mr. Uncomfortable. I really like drawing insects and arachnids so maybe that´s why did better in this Lesson.

I will practice some more the "aditive 3d forms" method as you say.

Thanks for the critique and the course.

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