1:39 PM, Saturday December 2nd 2023
Hello TurtleBelowski, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 5 critique.
Starting with your organic intersections, these are working well. You're wrapping your forms over one another and capturing how they slump and sag with a sense of gravity, and you clearly understand how these forms sit in 3D space in relation to one another.
You're doing well with projecting your shadows boldly, so that they cast onto the forms below, and I can see that you're using a consistent light source for each pile.
Things to keep in mind when practising this exercise in your warm ups:
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Try to keep these forms simple (like for the organic forms exercise) as this helps them to feel solid and 3D. I've noted some complexity to one of your forms here.
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Keep pushing for that smooth confident execution for your lines, there are occasional signs of hesitation, which may be contributing to the complexity of your forms and undermining their solidity.
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Resist the temptation to redraw things to make corrections. This also applies to your animal constructions, and the course as a whole. I discussed the reasons for this in your lesson 4 feedback, so please give that another read, and feel free to ask questions if something about that is confusing to you.
Moving on to your animal constructions, this critique's going to fall into two main categories. Firstly, there are a number of points from my previous feedback that you have not fully addressed here, so I'll call them out again, and then I've got some advice on how you're approaching new techniques for this lesson.
We talked about giving constructions as much space and time as required, and how this is necessary to do the work to the best of your current ability. I'm happy to see that you're generally drawing a bit bigger, though there are still cases like this squid and this armadillo which occupy less than half the space on the page. These constructions could have been drawn larger, or you could have made better use of the space on the page by drawing two constructions, if you feel that these were given as much space as they require. When it comes to time, there is evidence that some of these constructions are a little rushed, such as this second elephant which features mistakes that were not present in your first elephant construction, and in your own words on Discord, your hybrid was rushed. Giving yourself as much time as is required to complete each construction, draw each form, ghost every line, is part of your (very limited) set of responsibilities as a student. If this idea seems unfamiliar to you, I urge you to re-watch this video which explains how to get the most out of Drawabox.
A significant portion of your lesson 4 feedback consisted of explaining the difference between taking actions on your constructions in 2D and 3D. You were provided with several diagrams and examples showing how to build constructions using complete 3D forms. I can see that you've made some effort to take actions in 3D by drawing complete forms to build on your constructions, though you are quite frequently taking actions in 2D by extending your constructions with one-off lines and partial shapes. Here are some examples on one of your armadillos. It is not an issue on every construction, your springboks are quite solid, but it certainly persists in your later constructions, such as these examples on this elephant.
I also discussed the benefits of the sausage method of construction, and provided some advice to help you apply it more correctly. It looks like this information is being applied intermittently, and to varying degrees across the set. There are some pages where it looks like you've tried your best to stick to simple sausage forms and others where it doesn't look like this was a priority for you. There are some constructions where you've remembered to include contour curves for intersections at the joints but they are absent more often than they are present.
Additionally, in my previous feedback I highlighted how we can combine the sausage method with the use of additional masses to build up those structures further. You do this somewhat, but fairly minimally, and you'll often also focus on adding individual, independent masses to capture specific bumps in the silhouette of the leg. Instead, there's a lot of value in actually thinking through the entire network of forms that can be built up around these structures, as shown here in the ant leg I shared with you before, as well as here in another student's work. Defining not just the masses at the silhouette but those that exist internally within it as well can help us to think about how these forms all fit together. This in turn helps us make the structure feel more solid and grounded as a whole.
To the above issues, I strongly recommend that you go back over the feedback you received from Lesson 4, as this is a good sign that you perhaps did not give yourself enough of an opportunity to apply and absorb the feedback I'd provided there, and that perhaps your approach for assimilating that information needs adjustment. That is to say, perhaps you need to go back over past feedback more frequently or perhaps you need to take notes so you can have summaries of the major issues open beside you as you work through the next lesson, or whatever other strategy works for you.
Okay, moving on to new information for this lesson.
The first key area to discuss is head construction. If I recall correctly, I have previously pointed you in the direction of the informal head demo over Discord, citing it as the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning.
There are a few key points to this approach:
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The specific shape of the eye sockets - the specific pentagonal shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.
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This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together - no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.
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We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball - working in individual strokes like this (rather than, say, drawing the eye socket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.
I can see that you've been carving out pentagonal eye sockets on the majority of your head constructions, though you seem to be experiencing some difficulty fitting the pieces of your head constructions together like a 3D puzzle. This highlights some specific issues and here I've made some corrections to your armadillo to construct the muzzle in 3D and fit it against the edge of the eye socket.
Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but as shown in in this banana-headed rhino it can be adapted for a wide array of animals.
The next point I wanted to discuss is additional masses, and how to design them so they attach to your construction in a way that feels convincing and reinforces the 3D illusion. One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette.
Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram.
So, I've applied this logic to a few masses on your springbok. I've pulled the masses down from on top of the spine (or upwards, with the one under the belly) to wrap them around the sides of the body. I've also enlarged the shoulder mass (with the blue ellipse) to represent some of the bulky muscles in this area that help the animal to walk. We can then use the shoulder as a structure to press the additional masses up against and wrap them around. The more interlocked they are, the more spatial relationships we define between the masses, the more solid and grounded everything appears. I noticed on this elephant that you appear to be wrapping the mass on top of the back around the rib cage and pelvis masses. I appreciate the 3D thinking that went into this, and you're not far off, but if we think about the structures that are present here, the rib cage and pelvis are already fully engulfed by the torso sausage, so they do not protrude and cannot be used to introduce complexity to additional masses. The shoulder and thigh masses do protrude from the torso sausage, so they are better suited for this purpose.
Here I've shown how we might use additional masses to flesh out your armadillo, instead of the large 2D extension you had employed. The green masses are attached to the neck and torso, the red ones to the legs.
Let's take a moment to look at feet. There are some constructions, such as the elephants, where they've been tacked on to the bottom of the legs as flat partial shapes. In other cases, such as the armadillos, you've done a much better job of constructing them from 3D forms, although I think you may still benefit from studying these notes on foot construction. These notes demonstrate how we can leverage 'boxy' forms - that is, those with clearly defined corners that help imply the distinction between separate planes without having to specifically draw those internal edges - and then build upon it with yet more boxy forms for each of the toes.
One last little note before I wrap this up. Remember to draw around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen off the page. You do this sometimes, but not consistently, often stopping at one and a half turns around the ellipse. As discussed in this section this is something we ask students to do for every ellipse drawn freehand in this course.
Now, I have called out a number of areas to work on and will be assigning some revisions. This is not a punishment. This does not mean that you are bad, or your drawings are bad. It is just the case that there are enough points that needed clarifying that it is necessary for you to complete some extra pages to demonstrate your understanding of these points before moving forward.
As I've mentioned earlier, some of these issues are intermittent. I can't say for sure, but very often when issues come and go in this manner it is due to not being fully aware of each individual action we take with these constructions. This often occurs when we allow ourselves to rely on our instincts to draw, but the thing is, for these constructional exercises to be fully effective, we have to consciously think through each line we draw (using the planning stage of the ghosting method) and by being aware of the actions we take at each step we actually train our instincts, so that they will be stronger when we want to rely on them for drawings outside of the specific exercises in this course.
Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions. In addition, when tackling these pages I'd like you to adhere to the following restrictions:
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Don't work on more than one construction in a day. You can and should absolutely spread a single construction across multiple sittings or days if that's what you need to do the work to the best of your current ability (taking as much time as you need to construct each form, draw each shape, and execute each mark), but if you happen to just put the finishing touches on one construction, don't start the next one until the following day. This is to encourage you to push yourself to the limits of how much you're able to put into a single construction, and avoid rushing ahead into the next.
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Write down beside each construction the dates of the sessions you spent on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time you spent in that session.
Next Steps:
Please complete 4 pages of animal constructions.
