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3:36 PM, Monday March 21st 2022

Hi Uncomfortable, thank you for the long and helpful feedback!

I followed the informal demo of the lobster drawing, hoping to get a better grasp of defining correct connections between the (ideally) three-dimensional elements my insect constructions should consist of.

In some of my first attempts i used the head-thorax-abdomen base as some sort of scale defining circles rather than solid forms and also started out with way too complicated, flat, shapes for the leg or mandible constructions. So this time i tried to not repeat my misunderstanding of that concept and work additively, avoiding cutting into already existing silhouettes.

However some additional shapes (on some of the legs, or the cone shaped part behind the abdomen of the ant-like insect construction) turned out to be quite flat. I feel like my imagination and ghosting of a specific sausage-like form, additional mass, or contour curve and the actual result, the lines i put down, still differ a lot sometimes, resulting in me making the same mistakes.

I kept the texture very minimal to not fall into the habit of decorating my drawings, as you called it out correctly. I still have the habit of putting an unnecessary amount of something like fur somewhere, where i messed up the initial construction to "cover it up" (i hope this is understandable, english is not my native language).

Anyways here are my revisions: https://imgur.com/a/wykgWx0

Please let me know if there are some more additional changes needed.

Thank you for your time! :)

7:05 PM, Monday March 21st 2022

Overall you're making good progress here, though there are a handful of things I want to call out:

  • Firstly, don't forget to draw through all of your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen. This will specifically help us to achieve smooth, even elliptical shapes. So for example, this is something you neglected to do for the abdomens of your ant and beetle. With the beetle in particular you might be thinking that your intent was not to create an ellipse (or rather a 3D ball form) - but that should have been your intent, given that it's the closest simple form we can use to establish that structure, and going forward we'd then build upon it to push the result in the direction of our reference image.

  • In regards to how you approached building up masses along the length of your ant's legs - specifically the ones where you engulfed the entire sausage with a new structure, take another look at this diagram. Also, in regards to the ones where you did build upon it with multiple masses, note the "twist" in the diagram - this helps us to avoid the "hotdog in a bun" effect of just running masses in parallel along the length of the sausage. As for the reason we break them up into separate pieces at all, it's that their silhouettes are able to make more contact with the sausage structure, thus defining a stronger relationship with it - whereas engulfing the whole thing results in minimal contact at the ends, and nothing else along the length.

  • Ease up on the contour lines - don't pile them on as a matter of fact, but rather consider what it is you're intending to achieve with each mark, and whether it's strictly necessary. Also, pay more attention to how those contour lines are behaving when they hit the edge of the silhouette of the form they're being added to - you tend to avoid curving them enough, and as a result they appear to be quite shallow, as we can see here. We should be accelerating the curvature of the contour line so hit hooks back around along the other side.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You can continue to work on addressing these points into the next one.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:58 PM, Monday March 21st 2022

Thank you for the quick reply!

I will try to keep an eye in lesson 5 on drawing through my ellipses, creating over all less and more effective contour lines and avoiding the "hotdog in a bun effect", when it comes to adding additional masses.

Wish you a nice, battery recharging, break. :)

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