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5:11 PM, Monday August 10th 2020

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.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
5:18 PM, Monday August 10th 2020

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.

6:07 PM, Monday August 10th 2020

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.

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The Art of Brom

The Art of Brom

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