0 users agree
3:56 AM, Tuesday November 17th 2020

Alrighty! Starting with your organic intersections, these are coming along well, and you're doing a good job of thinking through how the forms would wrap around each other as gravity pushes them down. Just don't forget that the lowest sausage form should be casting a shadow onto the ground as well. Don't leave them floating arbitrarily in space. Also, try not to create one big form and a bunch of small ones on top. Keep them closer to the same size.

Moving onto your animal constructions, you're moving in the right direction overall, with one key issue to solve that should help improve your results a great deal. It comes down to your use of the additional masses.

The thing about these additional masses is that they are each an amorphous blob of soft meat. Left floating in the void with nothing else around it, it's going to maintain a very simple form - basically a ball. On its own, it has no complexity to it. If however we were to press it up against some other form, however, the side of the mass that touches this new form will start to conform to it, and in doing so, it'll become more complex. It'll start wrapping around that other structure and whatever bumps and masses it may have. In order to do this, it'll curve inwards, and corners will form in its silhouette.

These corners exist only due to the presence of other forms to press up against our mass. That also means that without such clearly defined forms, those corners cannot exist. Take a look at these notes/diagrams, where I explain these concepts, along with a few other related principles regarding how those forms can pile up on top of one another. Pay attention to how along the tops of the forms that don't touch anything, we keep things extremely simple. They don't have varying slopes, just a simple smooth curve. On the sides that press up against other structures - including other similar masses - they wrap around those structures. They don't interpenetrate them, they don't phase through them, they build up on top of them. Every piece we add both builds upon our construction, but it also brings something of itself. Using these additional masses, we can't achieve perfectly smooth surfaces - where one mass wraps around another, it creates a little "pinch" in the silhouette.

This pinch is important - a beginner may initially see them as an imperfection, but it is these little pinches that give the impression of actual complexity and musculature to the silhouette of our animals. In many of your constructions you try and smooth things out too much. Looking at this goat for instance, you transition very smoothly from one mass to another, focusing too much on the goal you're aiming to achieve, rather than the destination these tools of yours will take you.

Constructional drawing is at its core a puzzle you're solving that will reveal to you the result along the way. Here are some notes on one of your horses, pointing out a number of the things I've mentioned already. One key thing to remember is that if a mass is going to get some sort of a corner or some other kind of complexity to its silhouette, you need to be fully aware of what form it's pressing against to cause it, ideally defining that form as well. Don't just add corners arbitrarily, only thinking about the shape you want for that one form. Everything exists together, as pieces to a puzzle all fitting into one another.

It is worth mentioning that in many ways, this goat is MUCH better than most of the others. Not perfect, but in terms of keeping the side of the forms that don't touch anything simpler, it's coming along much better.

Moving forward, the next issue to think about is head construction. Overall, here, you basically just place the eye pretty loosely and arbitrarily on the structure without really grounding it against anything else. The eye - or more specifically, the eye socket is very important when it comes to head construction. A head is a complex form - rather than a simple smooth, rounded surface like the cranial ball we start out with, a head is made up of many distinct planes all fitting together. The eye socket is where we start defining those clearly distinguished planes.

Always draw the eye socket bigger than you think it's meant to be, and do so with clear, straight lines, with each of these edges implying one side of a plane. Each such line is carved into the cranial ball. Once in place, you can then buttress the muzzle up against it, along with the brow ridge across the top, and the cheekbone along the side. All these pieces fit together snugly like a puzzle, all of them grounding one another, rather than feeling like arbitrary floating elements. You can see examples of this in the tapir head demo and the moose head demo.

Lastly, when building up the complexities of the legs, focus on wrapping things around the sausage structures, and be mindful of how these forms - like all additional forms - are meant to really hold onto that structure. Looking at your second goat (which again, is better than most of your other constructions), the big lump added to the back leg there still integrates with the leg structure with a fairly straight line, that doesn't give the impression of really "gripping" it. Those around this ant's leg and this dog's leg however actually wrap around it, holding tight.

So, I've given you a handful of things to address. I'll assign a few additional pages below for you to apply these concepts.

Next Steps:

Please submit 4 additional pages of animal constructions. You've been pretty patient and careful with most of these constructions, so I expect I don't have to tell you to take your time with each - but just in case, take your time :P

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:00 PM, Wednesday November 18th 2020
edited at 3:00 PM, Nov 18th 2020

https://imgur.com/a/KgsyCsk

No.1 and 2 is me kinda figuring out how additional forms work, I think I'm more confident with 3 and 4, which are no longer just profile views, a little bit harder but great exercise.

edited at 3:00 PM, Nov 18th 2020
9:13 PM, Wednesday November 18th 2020

I regret not stressing my point about "take your time" at the end there enough. Given that a little under a day and a half passed between me finishing my critique, and you submitting your revisions, you appear to have managed to get quite a few things done in a pretty limited timeframe:

  • Going through my critique, absorbing the information there, reflecting upon how you might change your approach to improve.

  • Normal warmup routines.

  • Drawing 4 separate complex animal constructions (taking the time to observe them carefully and consistently, thinking through every mark you draw, applying the ghosting method as needed, considering the relationships between all the forms you constructed, etc.)

  • Adhering to the 50% rule from Lesson 0

To put it simply, I don't feel that this is an accurate representation of the best you could have accomplished. It's not that the work is badly done overall, it's that they're don't show that much of an improvement over your last set, and overall I'm being given the impression that you jumped right into the drawings instead of taking much time to reflect and think and process. That is unfortunately not how this course should be approached.

I will point out areas that you didn't show much improvement, or where you have issues that need to be addressed, but I will do so briefly:

  • The matter I raised in my last critique about considering where our additional masses press up against other forms, and how that is what causes the complexity of inward curves and corners - you still have a tendency to add complexity that has no clear source. Take a look at this diagram. Note how when it's floating on its own, the mass is just a ball, and it only gets more complex when it is pushed against that box. If you look at the masses along the back of this elephant they've got arbitrarily wavy edges with no real explanation as to what is causing that wavy pattern. You need to be more conscious of how you're drawing the silhouettes of those forms.

  • Also on the topic of additional forms, adding a contour line to the surface of an additional mass (as you did quite a bit in your last drawing) generally isn't going to help much. Those contour lines help a form look solid on its own, but it won't help define how that form wraps around the structure beneath it. That is the main focus of these additional masses - the way their silhouette is drawn establishes how it really "grips" the structure it's attached to, and if the silhouette isn't drawn correctly, contour lines won't fix that.

  • You're pretty consistently drawing the ribcages too small. As discussed in the lesson, the ribcage of animals is generally around 1/2 the length of the torso.

  • I can see that when approaching head consturction, you've stopped drawing your eye sockets as basic ellipses and have started using straight lines. That's a step in the right direction, but you still have a ways to go. Take a look at this demo I just added to the informal demos page, and read the accompanying text.

  • When using the sausage method, I'm not seeing you defining the joint between sausages with contour lines, as shown in the middle of this diagram.

I'd like you to do 6 pages of animal constructions, and I want you to do no more than one in a given day. Take your time absorbing the information presented to you in the original critique and in this one, as well as thinking through every mark you draw and observing your reference frequently. You can invest far more time into a given drawing than you are right now. The focus is not on getting everything done quickly - it is about learning from the process. This doesn't only occur when actively drawing, it is something our brain works through even in the time between drawing sessions.

Next Steps:

Please submit 6 additional pages of animal constructions, adhering to the restrictions I mentioned at the end of my feedback. Oh, and don't forget about the 50% rule.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
2:24 PM, Wednesday November 25th 2020

https://imgur.com/a/HsTJ1aK

I included my self critiques for each drawing in the submission, I feel that that way you could know more about what problem did I realize myself and what I didn't. Following your advice, I took nearly twice as much time as before on a single drawing as a result, but the extra time gave me the opportunity to think through every mark.

Additional forms is a problem I think I solved during these 6 drawings (which I might still didn't, if my understanding of these are still pretty distorted), and head constructions are still a problem, which is normal, I think. I think I relied too much on luck for the starting masses, as big ellipses and curves are still a pretty big problem for me, although warmups helped with that quite a bit.

I'm still not sure about if this amount of growth is too little for a single lesson, but I think you'll give an answer to that in the critique. Thanks in advance.

P.S. although I skipped a day, that still could not look like 6 or 7 days have passed because timezones, that's very unlikely, but I'll mention that just in case.

View more comments in this thread
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.
Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens

Faber Castell PITT Artist Pens

Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.

Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.

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