Check Out NMA    Learn More About our Partnership
Close and Enjoy Drawabox Ad-free
View Full Submission View Parent Comment
1:21 PM, Friday June 4th 2021

Hello Boss, many thanks for the feedback.

Can I ask a follow-up question? The feedback that you gave about complex forms/sharp edges on forms (using my aardvark for the example) actually brings up a question I've been wanting to ask but didn't know how to articulate.

Those sharp edges on the wrapping forms arise because I'm following the contours of the underlying base forms when creating those wraps. The reason I made this design/construction decision: by following contours of the base form when wrapping new forms on top of them, this contributes to showing the 3-dimensionality of those wrapping forms and thus the overall animal construction. I made the choice the err on the side of including those potentially-unnecessary corners on all my forms, in order to preserve 3-dimensionality of the construction.

I've drawn base contours on my aardvark here (in blue), and those base contours end up producing the sharp corners on the wrapping forms, which you pointed out (in red).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MOdiiPwmptubmkd7IkmCeBfc7q6_TV7z/view?usp=sharing

When you demonstrated your example here with the aardvark's foreleg.... https://i.imgur.com/rvHWACP.png

...How do your forms drawn here maintain the sense of 3-dimensionality of the limb?

I suppose my question is: How do you decide when to draw a form that potentially breaks the 3-dimensionality of the construction (as with the aardvark's foreleg), and when to make more complicated forms with sharp corners in order to preserve 3-dimensionality (as with the aardvark's big back mass)? You explain some of your reasoning with this example (https://i.imgur.com/I9d5Mdr.png) but I'd to understand this decision making a bit more.

Thanks a bunch.

5:36 PM, Friday June 4th 2021

So there's a few things to clarify here. Firstly, let's look at what it looks like when a cylinder (like the sausage form) intersects with a sphere (similar to one of the additional masses): https://i.imgur.com/6WgR3yU.png

The key thing to note is that there aren't any sharp corners - like the masses I drew on your aardvark, it achieves a smooth transition, basically taking two C curves (one from the sphere and one from the cylinder) and adding them together to end up with a sort of S. It's not quite as simple as that, but those are the core mechanics of it. The only place where we end up with such sharp turns are either when the underlying form has an edge/corner of its own (like when intersecting a sphere and a box), or if you're artificially introducing some other reason for there to be a sharp corner.

Having that sharp corner in there isn't wrong, but the issue is that it implies the presence of some other structure that is causing it, but that element is at no point defined in your drawing. Any and all complexity (like corners) should be the result of specific forms that are present, and you need to yourself understand how they exist in space.

The other alternative would be if your additional mass itself had its own corner (like if you were wrapping a hotdog bun around a sausage, where the bun itself eventually ends), but our additional masses are just amorphous blobs of meat, which exist in a vacuum as a simple ball until something else presses against it.

To answer your question at the end, I don't. As shown in the intersection between the sphere and the cylinder, that is the correct intersection, and therefore it doesn't break the illusion that the construction itself is 3D. There is no such decision being made, and the 3D illusion is paramount - so if you did want to create more of a hotdog effect (with your sharp corner), you'd simply have to also define the form that is causing it to occur. It wouldn't be a great idea, however, because these sorts of additional forms are mimicking the behaviour of muscles, which also don't have those kinds of sharp corners, and instead all press up against one another in more of a "twisting", organic fashion.

3:31 AM, Saturday June 5th 2021

Many thanks for the explanation. I forgot about those form intersections - good timing to revisit them for L6/L7!

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.
The Art of Brom

The Art of Brom

Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.

The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.

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