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9:24 PM, Sunday December 10th 2023

Hello Koolestani,

I also drew the parts of legs that hid behind the body of these creatures. Any tip about the same?

Uncomfortable discusses this in the lesson intro video from around the 21 minute mark.

I corrected it in the green metallic beetle because earlier they were also just shapes extending off of existing base form.

You are quite right, I made a mistake here, and for that I apologise. I've conferred with Uncomfortable, he recommends applying things a little differently.

"In terms of what we see here the more "complete" form of the carapace that Dio had added here isn't correct. It basically renders the original mass moot, because it replaces it in its entirety. We don't want to completely replace things if we can help it (really the only situation where we do is when merging the rib cage and pelvis into a sausage in lesson 5, where the rib cage/pelvis serve to establish the ends of the final form, so they still serve a purpose. In this case, starting with a sphere doesn't help us in that kind of manner, it just gets completely replaced.

Instead, when we build up every individual bit of complexity with their own additional masses, considering how they attach to the existing structure rather than replacing it (as Uncomfortable shows here), we're given a lot more subtlety and nuance in terms of how it impacts the object's silhouette, making the whole thing more solid. This also means that we can't just "smooth" things out to achieve a perfect result - every step we take to solve a problem (to get to our desired result) will never take is directly there - it takes us in that direction, but in so doing gives us more (smaller) problems to solve along the way.

This largely comes back to the fact that the drawings we do throughout this course are exercises. None of this is a "how to get from A to B to C to your completed pretty drawing". These are exercises that force our brains into solving 3D spatial puzzles, to navigating the relationships between the forms at play, and to rewire our understanding of how they relate to one another in that 3D space despite being drawn on a flat page."

As I stated before, this is something you will continue to practice into lesson 5, as designed by the lesson structure. As such, its not really permitted for a student to decide to submit revisions if they were not assigned.

2:14 PM, Wednesday December 13th 2023

I take it that the three large paragraphs enclosed within the double quotes is the feedback from Uncomfortable.

His revisions do look better but they deviate from the reference a bit. The silhoutte of the green metallic beetle is still quite true to the reference but the crab's silhoutte is quite altered by those divets.

As such, its not really permitted for a student to decide to submit revisions if they were not assigned.

I was just trying to eliminate any doubts I had left because I got different feedback for the same error, so I was a bit confused by that and felt I should clear it up.

As was suggested in the earlier comments.

If anything said to you here, or previously, is unclear or confusing you are welcome to ask questions.

There are many potential reasons this could be happening, but at the end of the day, it is your responsibility to ensure that you can implement the feedback you've received, or that if you do not understand something, that you ask questions (either here, or over on our Discord chat server, where fellow students are often happy to help).

Thanks.

5:56 PM, Wednesday December 13th 2023

Keep in mind that these are exercises - the focus is not on reproducing the reference perfectly, but rather using it as a source of information upon which to base the 3D spatial puzzle of constructing the object. In performing these constructional exercises, we are training our brains to understand the three dimensional relationships between the forms, as they exist in 3D space, despite being drawn on a flat page.

As to our restrictions on TAs being responsible for assigning revisions rather than students requesting them, it is necessary due to this program functioning on very limited resources to provide feedback at a subsidized rate. As explained in Lesson 0, what a student pays to receive feedback is less than what we pay the TAs who provide the feedback, so we can ensure students with limited budgets are able to access it, while also ensuring our staff is paid fairly for their work and expertise. In order to be sustainable, we rely on a combination of prioritizing efficiency and putting the onus on the student (in this case you were OK'd to continue moving onto Lesson 5 where these concepts and your understanding of them would continue to solidify before receiving your next round of feedback), as well as the majority of students who allow some credits to expire in order to allow those who cannot to still have access to reliable critiques.

I understand this is not a normal operating strategy for a business, so this may not be something you are accustomed to, but it does mean we have to be fairly strict with how much additional time we allow our students to solicit from our staff.

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