8:45 PM, Friday July 10th 2020
Your work throughout this lesson is, in a lot of ways, demonstrative of a good grasp of how the forms you've constructed exist in 3D space, and how they fit together to create more complex objects. As a whole, you're showing that you certainly know how to draw animals. There are however a great many places where your adherence to the principles of Drawabox, and the focus on actually treating these drawings as exercises (rather than just opportunities to draw nice things). You're pretty inconsistent in terms of how much you're willing to actually build out your forms - sometimes you do it really well, going through each and every steps, sometimes your lines are sketchy and more instinctual rather than planned and purposeful, and other times you toss construction out the window entirely.
This is actually not an entirely uncommon issue - animals are fun to draw, and hitting this lesson sometimes triggers a switch that causes people to suddenly focus more on that rather than actually adhering to the lesson itself. I'm going to point out what you did right, and where you dropped the ball, and then we're going to have you draw a few more to ensure that you do continue to stick to the instructions through the rest of the course.
Starting with these birds, some of the pieces are definitely in place, but there are a number of issues I'd like to call out:
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You tend to put down a lot of contour lines that aren't necessarily drawn with that much care (they don't really wrap around the form all that well and tend to be a bit shallow in some cases, and are generally just half-drawn). This often results in you putting down way more than you would otherwise need to.
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You're not entirely consistent in terms of drawing through your ellipses.
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You jump back and forth between building up this construction through the addition of 3D forms and the addition of 2D elements - for example, when you draw the wings, you're often just bridging the spaces between what appear to be individual feather shapes. Instead, it's best to build the whole wing as a solid 3D mass, and then pile feathers on top of it as shown here.
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In general, you're not really taking the time to actually make each form feel three dimensional. You are definitely capable of doing so, that just doesn't appear to be your goal here, and as 3D form, solidity, spatial relationships and all that are at the very core of this course, it should be at the core of what you mean to achieve with these drawings.
Skipping ahead, a lot of your drawings really are quite nice, and you are demonstrating that you understand how many of the components of the birds' bodies actually exist in 3D space, but you've gotten caught up in creating nice drawings, not in actually doing the lesson as it is laid out in the instructions.
Moving on from the birds, you some some progress when you start redrawing the demonstrations. This wolf's legs are definitely more corgi-like, but the construction feels a lot more solid, and elements fit together much better than they have in the past. You're also employing the sausage method for your legs more consistently. My only complaint here is one line that you've drawn bridging across the mass along the wolf's shoulder, and the wolf's hips. I've circled it for you here. The issue is that in order to constantly reinforce the illusion that what we're creating here is something three dimensional, we need to ensure that every component we add onto our construction is itself, a complete 3D form. When we add elements as simple lines, or flat 2D shapes, especially when bridging across existing forms, it may seem like something that is entirely fine, but it can serve to undermine the illusion we're trying to create. I demonstrate this on the bottom of this diagram.
Now, as you continue working through the various demonstrations, you show your willingness to actually adhere to construction, to draw your lines a little more purposefully, and to focus on the idea of building everything out from individual forms - but there are a few areas that still show some issues. For example, if we look at the tapir head, while at its surface you've followed all the steps outlined in the demonstration, something about it feels less solid than the original demo you're following. The reason is because it feels more like a loose arrangement of lines - with plenty of little gaps between them where they ought to actually meet and touch.
The understanding of your own that you're actually adding solid, three dimensional forms to your construction is something I really cannot stress enough. You're not just putting marks down on a page, and when you do that, it comes across to the viewer. They may not be able to tell you why it feels off, but they'll have a sense of it in the back of their heads. You need to respect the idea that every form is being added as something real. It's just not lines on a flat page, and you need to believe it.
Continuing on to the last few drawings, once you stopped reproducing the demos, you went back into the previous habits of half-construction (or in the case of the komodo dragon, no construction at all). There are some cases where some construction is present, but it's just faint (your scanner settings are definitely ramping up the contrast, so be sure not to use "drawing" presets, "photo" presets will do a much better job of capturing all the nuance in your drawings). All the same, you should not be going out of y our way to hide or reduce the presence of your construction lines - they are what's important, not the detail.
So, as I mentioned at the beginning, I'm going to assign additional pages for you to demonstrate the use of the techniques covered in this lesson and throughout this course up to this point. I get that you're enthusiastic and probably had a lot of fun with this - that's great - but I really cannot emphasize enough the fact that this course is about working through specific exercises, not just drawing nice pictures.
Next Steps:
Please submit 6 more pages of animal drawings.
