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11:07 AM, Monday August 28th 2023

Hello SamChan, no problem! Thank you for replying with your revisions.

Thank you for sharing your warmups. These exercises are looking good, your lines are smooth and confident, and it is good to see that you're not shying away from some of the more challenging exercises, such as the form intersections. Everything is perfectly fine but I'll give a couple of quick pointers before moving on to your constructions.

  • Your boxes are looking great, but there is more prominent undershooting/overshooting of the lines in your planes exercise. Not a huge deal, but does suggest you may have taken more care over some exercises than others.

  • On this page the arrow on the left flows through space more convincingly than the one in the middle. This is because for the middle arrow you'd avoided overlapping your edges on the bend closest to the viewer.

  • Your organic forms show improvement over the 2 sessions that you'd included them, which is really promising. You still appear to be shifting the degree of your contour curves in a random fashion. I'd like you to take another look at this diagram which shows the 4 most likely arrangements of contour curves. Of course it is not impossible for the degrees to shift in the way you've drawn them, as it does also depend on how the form itself is bending.

Moving on to your insect constructions- wow! The improvement here is astonishing, I can see that you've taken the time to process the advice provided and these constructions are looking really solid and three dimensional, well done!

It is great to see that you've resisted the temptation to redraw things to make corrections, and have made huge progress on taking actions in 3D by drawing complete 3D forms wherever you want to build on your constructions. You've done a good job of drawing through your forms and including the parts you can't see. This is great, as figuring out how the entire form exists in 3D space will help you to develop your spatial reasoning skills, as well as build solid constructions. You're also making effective use of the sausage method for constructing your legs.

In general, try to avoid entirely engulfing an existing structure in the new element you add, as seen with this beetle leg. This can limit how much actual contact the new mass's silhouette has with the existing structure, and therefore defines a weaker relationship with it. Instead, we can break apart the new mass into separate pieces, defining each one's relationship individually, and ultimately yielding a stronger, more solid result.

On the same section, the smaller spiky protrusions were added in the same way we might add edge detail to a leaf. This tactic only really works for forms that are already flat, so as shown in these notes we want to build new forms whenever we want to alter a form we've already constructed.

For tackling insect wings, I find that adapting the leaves exercise from lesson 3 works pretty well. This technique lends itself quite nicely to capturing paper-thin structures that exist in 3D space. The approach shown here for implying the veins of the leaf, by drawing the shadows they cast rather than the veins themselves, also works for the veins on insect wings.

So! You've done a great job here and I think you're ready for challenges of the next lesson. Please refer to the diagrams and demos shared in your critique as you work through the next lesson, they should help you to tackle your animal constructions. Best of luck!

Next Steps:

Lesson 5

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
12:08 PM, Thursday August 31st 2023

Hooray! I'm so happy! Thanks Dio!

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