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9:14 AM, Wednesday October 25th 2023

Hi Yoush, great to have you back on board!

If you haven't been doing regular warmups during the 9 month break, I think the best course of action here would be to review lesson 0, which contains a lot of important info that can easily be forgotten, then ease back into things by spending a week or so reintroducing exercises from the lessons you have already completed as warmups. During this time it is okay for your warmups to take longer than the standard 10-15 minutes, as I expect you'll need some extra time to reread the instructions.

It is understandable that you'd feel a bit nervous about jumping back in, so as well as going over your lesson 4 and 5 feedback, you may find it helpful to draw along with some of the demos. In particular the thinking about head construction and donkey construction are relevant and useful.

Best of luck.

11:34 PM, Saturday January 13th 2024

Here are my Lesson 5 revisions!

Thank you.

https://imgur.com/a/OSFX9Sf

12:30 PM, Sunday January 14th 2024

Hello Yoush, thank you for replying with your revisions.

On the whole things are improving, and I will be marking this as complete. I've got 4 pieces of advice for you that I'd like you to take into account when practising these constructional exercises in future.

Leg Construction.

You're working towards sausage forms here (rather than the ellipses you were using previously) which is good. There is a tendency for your sausage forms to swell through their midsection, becoming bloated, for example in the front legs of the red panda. Try to stick to the properties of simple sausages even when the legs are quite short.

Remember to add the contour curve for the intersection at the joints as highlighted in red on this copy of the sausage method diagram. These little lines might seem insignificant, but they convey a lot of information about how your sausages are orientated in space and how they fit together.

Building constructions up "in 3D" using complete forms.

I can see you're thinking through how to build up your constructions in 3D, and you're making decent progress. Sometimes you do still hop back into taking actions that only exist in the flat 2D space of the page, such as these lines on your camel. Keep pushing yourself to only take actions in 3D space when engaging in these constructions, by building up with complete forms, with their own fully enclosed silhouettes, as shown here.

Building in stages, without attempting to add too much complexity in one step.

keep in mind that the more complex a form is, the more difficult it is for the viewer to understand how it is supposed to exist in 3D space, and the more likely it is to feel flat. If we take a look at the camel construction, the hump and the feet are examples of areas where you'd tried to achieve too much with a single form.

For these constructions always start with simple forms that feel solid and 3D. Then we add complexity gradually in stages, building onto the solid forms we have already established, as shown here.

In addition to building the foot up in stages, I'd also broken the large mass of the hump into pieces, so each individual piece can stay as a simple outward curve where it is exposed to fresh air and there is nothing present in the construction to press against it, as illustrated in this diagram.

When we do add complexity to our additional masses, we want it to occur in response to wrapping around or pressing against the structures that are already present in the construction. Take a look at how I've pulled the silhouette of the red mass down around the side of the body, moving an arbitrary inward curve to a position where it would be caused by pressing up against the the top of the shoulder mass.

Contour lines.

I'm also seeing a tendency to add extra contour lines to some of your additional masses, potentially the result of you realising that your additional masses feel flat, and trying to make them feel more three dimensional. Unfortunately those contour lines help a form feel more three dimensional on its own, in isolation - but does not solve the problem at hand, which is the lack of relationship being defined between the mass and the structure to which it is attaching. Furthermore, using contour lines like this can trick our brains into thinking we're solving, or at least improving the situation - which in turn leads us to invest less time into the silhouette design of the additional masses, exacerbating the issue. So, I would actively avoid using additional contour lines on your masses in the future (though you may have noticed Uncomfortable use them in the intro video for this lesson, something that will be corrected once the overhaul of the demo material reaches this far into the course - you can think of these critiques as a sort of sneak-peak that official critique students get in the meantime).

All right, as I said earlier, I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. The 250 Cylinder Challenge is next, best of luck.

Next Steps:

250 Cylinder Challenge

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
1:57 PM, Sunday January 14th 2024

Thank you once again for the detailed feedback! I'll try to keep these in mind as I go forward and as I review animal constructions for warmups.

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The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"

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