View Full Submission View Parent Comment
3 users agree
8:54 PM, Wednesday July 20th 2022

Starting with your organic intersections, these are generally looking pretty good. The forms slump and sag over one another with a believable sense of gravity and the shadows are cast upon by a single consistent light source. There are a couple minor things to point out to help keep you on track:

  • First off, there are sections where these forms phase through one another as shown here. There's no indication that these forms are solid and take up their own space. When it comes to the organic intersections, we should be thinking of these masses as water balloons where one form displaces the other as you pile one form over the other. If you were to wedge these water balloons against one another, they wouldn't just pass through, so keep this in mind.

  • The other thing has to do with how you're not filling your cast shadows all the way in, leaving a few patches of white here and there.

Moving onto your animal constructions, there is clear attention being put into your general construction and showing an understanding of the relationships that exist between your different forms, and defining them clearly. Although, there are a few slips ups that do come up, such as the head this bunny you drew. Notice how in red I marked where you cut into the cranial mass thus undermining the solidity of your form. This is something that only came up here although there were still a few cases where you did this so try to keep those lines contained moving forward.

Continuing onto the use of additional masses, these are coming along quite nicely. You're defining the relationships of these additional masses without the need of slapping a bunch of superfluous contour lines. However, I am noticing a few partial lines or open shapes. Take a look at this rhino you drew. I've highlighted in blue a number of spots where you drew a one-off mark bridging from one 3d structure to another, enclosing the hatched area. But this hatched are exists only in two dimensions- there is no clearly defining elements that help the viewer to understand how it is meant to relate to the other 3d elements at play. Thus, it reminds us that we're drawing something flat and two dimensional and reinforces that idea to you as you construct it. Now, it's not huge deal since It's not something that came up a ton, but just calling it out to remind you of it.

Another thing that jumps out to me is the back of this otter, where you cut straight across on the additional mass and created these random corners that shouldn't be there. This reminds us that the form it's resting on isn't actually three dimensional. This is sometimes known as the "hot dog in a bun" problem. In cases such as this, you should use more of an s-curve and also look into what other forms are interacting with it.

When it comes down to it, the way the silhouette is actually designed matters a lot. It helps to think about how this mass would exist on its own in the void of empty space. Think about a ball of clay existing on its own.

Then as it presses against an existing structure the silhouette of this form gets more complex, inward curves forming where it makes contact. The silhouette is never random of course, always responding to the form that's present as shown in this diagram.

Moving onto leg construction, I can see that you are making a clear effort to stick to the sausage method as often as possible, and as a result, much of your leg construction-or at least the base structure-is coming along decently. When it comes to building up your masses, you need to think about how these masses are held together. So far, you'll add a few additional masses, but in most cases, these are very much limited to bumps that impact the silhouette, without much consideration to what's going on within the silhouette as shown here in this dog's leg demo.

I do like how you're approaching your feet. Corners are a good idea since they help imply the presence of internal planes and generally to make these structures feel more three dimensional. I do notice you going for boxier forms but I do think following the approach shown here from another student's work would help you push this even more.

When it comes down to head construction, Lesson 5 as a ton of different strategies in the informal demos section. Given how the course is developing new more effective ways to construct heads so not all approaches are created equal. As it stands, this tiger demo and this demo from the informal demos is what's generally most useful. This approach relies on a few key elements:

  • the specific pentagonal shape found in the eye sockets, which allows for a nice wedge in which to place the muzzle into as well as the flat area found in the forehead

  • this focuses heavily on everything fitting together- no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows all the different pieces to feel grounded against one another like a three dimensional puzzle

  • we also have to be mindful as to how all the marks carve along the surface of this cranial ball, working on the individual strokes instead of using an ellipse for the eye socket.

As a whole I'm not too concerned with how you're constructing your heads. It seems like you're following the head construction demos closely. Just be sure that every form you add onto the head is its own self-enclosed form too, this includes the eyelids.

Overall, while I do feel like there's a few things to keep in mind here, I also feel like these are things you can work on your own. Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge.

Next Steps:

250 cylinder challenge

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 3 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
3:03 AM, Friday July 22nd 2022

This a good, solid and helpful analysis on my work. Thanks sooo much for your time and effort Waifu!

I'm so grateful for this.

the points you mentioned will be the mantras that I will be chanting while creating solid and believable animal construction

thanks again

have a wonderful day!

cheers

5:20 AM, Friday July 22nd 2022

You're welcome and good luck!

The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

Drawabox-Tested Fineliners (Pack of 10, $17.50 USD)

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.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.