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9:48 PM, Friday July 8th 2022

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, the main thing that stands out here is that you're not really consistently sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages. You do it sometimes, and overall you're not going out of your way to make these especially complicated, but there are quite a few here with ends of different sizes, or that get pinchy or wider through their midsections. This makes me suspect that you may not have remembered this aspect of the exercise, which is only really an issue if you didn't go back to review those instructions - which you always should do, especially if the exercise has been assigned as part of a lesson.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I can see that you're putting a lot of thought and effort into building up your constructions from simple to complex, and avoiding skipping steps in that manner. This is definitely good to see, although I can offer some additional advice to help you improve upon this, and to better understand how you should be engaging with each construction. A lot of it comes down to the distinction between the actions we can take in two dimensions, where we're dealing with a drawing on a page, free to put whatever lines we want down, and the actions we can take in 3D space where we're actually regarding everything we draw as a solid, three dimensional form, adding each one in such a way that it respects the solidity of the existing structure, and reinforces it.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.

For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.

So for example, we can see this in a lot of your drawings, but I've picked this one out as it has some clearer cases of cutting into your silhouettes in red, and extending out your silhouettes with one-off lines or partial shapes in blue.

Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure - forms with their own fully self-enclosed silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.

This is all part of accepting that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for the viewer to believe in that lie.

You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see some good examples of this in the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page. As I've been pushing this concept more recently, it hasn't been fully integrated into the lesson material yet (it will be when the overhaul reaches Lesson 4). Until then, those submitting for official critiques basically get a preview of what is to come.

Continuing on, I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. In your case, you were obviously trying to work with the sausage method through most of your drawings, but there were definitely some times where you'd mix them up with cylinders (sometimes doing them both at the same time - don't hedge, pick a strategy and stick with it) and lots of other cases where you'd forget to define the joint between the sausages with a contour line.

The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, in this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well). Just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram.

Before I finish up, I did want to call out one thing. You only did this in one place so I'm not particularly worried, but when you decided to tackle an insect construction with detail, you dove straight into a general attempt at decorating the drawing. This is something I've actually discussed with you in a number of my previous feedbacks (I touched on it a little in your first L3 attempt, and in more detail in the second, and further in the revisions). I think you definitely need to go back and read through that feedback to ensure that you haven't forgotten.

As a whole, I think you can definitely do a better job with this lesson material, but you're making decent progress. I am going to assign some revisions, but the biggest thing I want you to focus on is being consciously aware of exactly what mark you want to put down next, and why. I see a lot of cases where you may not be 100% confident that the next step you're taking is the right one. It's okay to use the wrong technique, or approach something in a way that is not ideal - but you HAVE to commit yourself to a course of action. Think about what you're meant to achieve with a given mark, and once you decide on the best way you can currently try tackling it, employ the ghosting method and execute it. Uncertainty is normal, but your marks should still be put down with confidence, and a clear sense of intent.

Next Steps:

Please submit the following:

  • 1 page of organic forms with contour curves.

  • A drawing done along with this lobster demonstration from the informal demos page.

  • A drawing done along with this shrimp demonstration from the informal demos page.

  • 3 additional pages of insect constructions, applying the approach from those two demos.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:18 AM, Monday July 18th 2022
6:40 PM, Monday July 18th 2022

Much better! Just a few things to keep in mind:

  • Don't forget to draw through your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen. The ellipses at the tips of your organic forms especially.

  • Also, about your organic forms with contour curves, remember that as the contour curves get closer to the viewer, the degree of those curves (their width) should be getting narrower. If you're unsure as to why that is, you can review the Lesson 1 ellipses video.

  • I can see that once you've laid down your sausage forms for your leg structures, you tend to redraw those shapes by stamping a whole new silhouette right on top of them, effectively replacing the original silhouette. This breaks the premise that I mentioned in my original critique in regards to avoiding taking actions that occur only in 2D space. The notes I provided about building leg structures tackled this more specifically as well, especially in this diagram. You may want to review that feedback.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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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?"

It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.

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