Sup boss,
Here are my revisions, hopefully theyre a little better,
References:-
2 -> https://www.amentsoc.org/insects/glossary/terms/rhinoceros-beetle
3 -> Can't find :c
So I am definitely more pleased with your results here, though there's one thing I want to draw your attention to, which I addressed back in my initial critique, which I show here. Here's what I said in my initial critique:
You can't cut back across the silhouette of a form you've drawn, because maybe it wasn't the right shape. It's there, it's solid, and if you're going to modify it at all, it needs to be in three dimensions. When dealing with organic construction (animals, plants, insects, etc.) there isn't a lot of room for cutting back into them, so you generally just need to build on top of what you've got by adding more 3D forms. That said, here are some notes about how to think about subtractive construction.
The silhouette is the 2D manifestation of a 3D form - by altering it you're not changing the form in the world. Quite literally, you can think of it as though we're trying to understand some rare animal by studying the footprint it leaves. If you alter the footprint itself, it's not changing the animal itself, it's just making the footprint less useful. You have to actually change the construction by establishing new forms and defining how those forms relate to those that already exist.
Anyway, all in all these are moving in the right direction, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
Thanks very much boss, the cutting into the forms was a lack of foresight on my part, and i had to cut into them to keep the proportions right.
On another note, would it be okay if I moved onto the cylinder challenge instead of L5? I wanted to dabble in another course whilst doing DaB before touching animals.
Yup, moving onto the cylinder challenge would be fine. As to what you said about lack of foresight, constructional drawing is all about breaking things into a series of decisions, or a series of answers. Once you've answered the question of "how big is the head going to be" by putting down the initial form, you're locked in. Maintaining the solidity of your result and the illusion that what you've drawn is three dimensional is of a higher priority than matching the reference image's proportions. If this means a creature with an oversized head, but that is otherwise still believable as something real, then that's the path you take.
Let's be real here for a second: fineliners can get pricey. It varies from brand to brand, store to store, and country to country, but good fineliners like the Staedtler Pigment Liner (my personal brand favourite) can cost an arm and a leg. I remember finding them being sold individually at a Michael's for $4-$5 each. That's highway robbery right there.
Now, we're not a big company ourselves or anything, but we have been in a position to periodically import large batches of pens that we've sourced ourselves - using the wholesale route to keep costs down, and then to split the savings between getting pens to you for cheaper, and setting some aside to one day produce our own.
These pens are each hand-tested (on a little card we include in the package) to avoid sending out any duds (another problem with pens sold in stores). We also checked out a handful of different options before settling on this supplier - mainly looking for pens that were as close to the Staedtler Pigment Liner. If I'm being honest, I think these might even perform a little better, at least for our use case in this course.
We've also tested their longevity. We've found that if we're reasonably gentle with them, we can get through all of Lesson 1, and halfway through the box challenge. We actually had ScyllaStew test them while recording realtime videos of her working through the lesson work, which you can check out here, along with a variety of reviews of other brands.
Now, I will say this - we're only really in a position to make this an attractive offer for those in the continental United States (where we can offer shipping for free). We do ship internationally, but between the shipping prices and shipping times, it's probably not the best offer you can find - though this may depend. We also straight up can't ship to the UK, thanks to some fairly new restrictions they've put into place relating to their Brexit transition. I know that's a bummer - I'm Canadian myself - but hopefully one day we can expand things more meaningfully to the rest of the world.
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