Hi! Had fun with the assignment. Was also nice to learn about them more by drawing. I usually tried to see what the animal's skeleton looks like before drawing them, and I struggled with combining hybrids creatively. I also couldn’t pinpoint how bird wings attach to their shoulders in some of my drawings, but I tried.
It's been a long day of critiquing, and yours is the last one before I go collapse in bed. Your submission is both a good and bad way to end off the day - it's good because your grasp of form and construction is quite solid and suggests an easy critique that shouldn't take me too long. It's bad, however, because two thirds of the pages are upside down.
Starting with your organic intersections, here you're doing a pretty good job of conveying the volume and solidity of the forms, as well as how they slump and sag over one another. Overall you're maintaining fairly simple forms, and that helps make each of them maintain the illusion of existing in three dimensions. You're also using the cast shadows quite well to help relate each form to the ones beneath.
Moving onto your animal constructions, as I mentioned, these are mostly quite well done. You're demonstrating a really strong grasp of how these structures are made up of simple, individual forms, and how you can build them up to achieve more complex results whilst maintaining the overall solidity that comes from such basic simple elements.
The first issue that I noticed is pretty minor, especially as it manifests in your drawings, but it's still worth mentioning - you tend to have a lot of unnecessary contour lines that honestly haven't been drawn with that much care. They seem more like marks you made without really thinking about what they were meant to achieve - for example along the underside of the jackdraw on the first page, as well as on some of the additional masses on the grey parrot's neck.
These contour lines - the ones that sit along the surface of a single form - are sometimes used excessively by students when they don't really think about what they're trying to achieve with them, and instead just draw them because they're caught up in the energy of their sketch. An energetic sketch is good, but keep in mind that these are not sketches - they're purposeful, planned drawings, and every mark is the result of forethought and consideration. We weigh what our intent is for each and every mark, what task it is meant to accomplish, and only put it on the page when we're sure it is required. These kinds of contour lines also tend to suffer from diminishing returns - meaning the first may be very impactful, but the second will be less so, and the third even less. So piling them on can easily result in a lot of contour lines that serve no purpose.
Furthermore, there are different kinds of contour lines - the ones that define the connection between forms (like in the form intersections) are vastly more effective than the ones that sit on the surface of a single form. Using the former well will often eliminate any need for the latter.
Lastly, when looking at additional forms, it's the forms themselves - or rather their silhouette - that functions similarly to a contour line. That silhouette needs to establish how that additional mass actually wraps around the underlying structure, as shown here, and this will on its own make both forms feel more three dimensional - no further contour lines required.
Moving forward, just another minor point about the rooster drawing - here you've clearly added some form shading to your drawing. Keep in mind that way back in Lesson 2, we clearly mentioned that in this course we would not be engaging in any form shading. All the filled black shapes we use in our drawings will be reserved for cast shadows only. This is something that comes up a little here and there, particularly in places where your focus shifts a little more towards the presentation of your end result, rather than focusing on the construction.
It is very clear that your observational skills are quite strong, and that helps you a great deal. There are definitely cases where students have such strong observational skills that they rely upon them during this lesson, forgetting that it is in fact a course on constructional drawing as an exercise to develop one's spatial reasoning. And therefore looking at some pages like your dog drawings, I can see you slip back from some of the more mindful arrangement of clearly defined forms, and the clearly defined relationships between them, to being a touch more loose, and definitely skipping some steps. You still handle the drawings very well and establish your forms and structure very well - but the key here is that each of these drawings are exercises. Don't skip steps, don't stray from the instructions. I want to see every little constructional decision you're making, rather than having you impress me with pretty drawings. When we skip those steps, we show off what we can do now, but the focus is no longer on continually trudging forwards and growing through the exercise itself.
Now, this is actually where my critique takes a bit of a turn - as you push through, because you're not really adhering to the principles and steps of the lesson (establishing your initial ribcage/pelvis/cranial masses, and building things up steadily and intentionally, when you hit a particularly difficult subject, you end up floundering. The komodo dragon is definitely your weakest area, and because of your looser, sketchier approach, along with a further reliance on form shading in certain areas, you struggle quite a bit.
And that is also precisely why you struggle with the hybrids - because the hybrids don't let you draw so strictly from observation anymore. They force you to think about the simple forms and how they can be rotated and manipulated in space, and how they can fit together. This left you unable to fill in the blanks for yourself, because as we moved through the homework set, you followed the instructions less and less.
I want you to take a look at these informal demonstrations. Those closer to the top of the page are more recent - those further down are older, and therefore may be somewhat looser in their approach, but still have value to them. Note how every single mark I've drawn is intentional, purposeful, and planned. How every form I add to the construction is clearly defined, and how the relationships between them are as well. I don't hide anything, because I'm not trying to create a pretty drawing. I'm exploring the animal I'm studying, how all its pieces fit together like a puzzle. This is what I want to see from you.
You'll also note extensive use of the sausage method - which I highlighted in my critique of your lesson 4 work, which you don't seem to have employed here. I strongly recommend that you go back and read through my lesson 4 critique again.
At its surface, your submission looks superb, and I expected it to be quite solid - and while you clearly have a strong skillset, you deviated from the purpose of this lesson more and more as you worked through it, and you did not end up demonstrating a confident grasp of what this lesson is meant to capture. So, I'm going to assign some additional revisions for you to work through in order to better demonstrate your understanding of this material. I'll list them below.
Next Steps:
Please submit 4 additional animal constructions, followed by 1 page of hybrids.
Thanks for the critique. I realize now at some point I was definitely relying on observation to bypass understanding the underlying "sausage" of the limbs and body. On the lack of sausage forms, I was looking through the lesson notes again and I must have confused the instructions with the procedures in older demos that didn't have them, like in the oryx and elephant construction.
I tried again, focusing on including all the simple forms and eliminating contour lines: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-7Bp7W6t7srOUYKSqr5z92zr9R77EfV3?usp=sharing
Using simpler forms definitely made constructing hybrids easier.
Also, sorry for the upside-down images earlier. For some reason my phone didn't save the edits when I uploaded the set to Google Drive, though it usually works out fine in imgur.
While this is definitely a step in the right direction, you are still a ways off from taking the concepts in the lesson all the way. This isn't too shocking though - I mean you gave yourself a quarter of a day to both process the critique I'd given you, reflect on the lesson material that you had glazed over, and then completing the assigned work. Generally speaking whenever any student comes back with the assigned revisions in under a day, it's a bit of a red flag.
Take a look at this. On it I've noted a bunch of issues, some of which were addressed in my original critique:
You're not using the sausage method correctly. Make sure you're sticking to simple sausage forms (two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width), and define the relationship between the sausage forms with a contour line drawn right at the joint between them.
Definitely need to continue to think more about how your additional forms wrap around the underlying structure, and stop relying on contour lines added after the fact to compensate. The silhouette defines the relationship between this new form and the ones beneath it - making that form feel more three dimensional in isolation is what those contour lines do, and that will not help solve what a more poorly drawn silhouette fails to accomplish.
Since we are working on a flat, two dimensional drawing, there are a lot of marks we can make on the page - no physical thing will stop us, but many of these lines will undermine the illusion that what we're drawing is 3D. And therefore there are a number of rules we need to adhere to in order to avoid those kinds of contradictions. One of these is understanding that once you draw a form on the page (for example, a sausage form), what is drawn is actually a representation of that form. What is there is a two dimensional shape defining the silhouette of that form. You have a tendency of trying to adjust the silhouette of your forms - either by cutting back into them or extending them. Silhouettes are similar to the footprint an animal leaves behind in mud. It can tell us a lot about the animal itself - what kind of animal it was, how big it was, how fast it was moving - but changing the footprint itself does not change the nature of the animal. In the same way, changing a silhouette does not change the nature of the 3D form that exists in the world you're drawing. It is a one-way relationship. In order to make those changes, you need interact with your construction in three dimensions. That means using additional forms, where each one that is added is clearly defined as a complete form of its own, and where its definition with the existing structure is also clearly defined. There is also a way to correctly employ "subtractional construction", but as explained here this is better left for geometric construction. Long story short: use proper additive construction, don't just mess with the silhouette of your forms as a shortcut.
You're using a lot of timid, non-committal lines in general, but we can see this noticeably in the head construction. The demonstrations I pointed you to in the informal demos page (for example, the tapir head demo and the moose head demo) show a distinct difference in how you draw your linework, and how I do. When you decide you're going to add a line to your drawing, draw it with full confidence.
I'm going to assign the same work again, but with two additional requirements:
I do not want you to do more than one drawing in a single day. Spread it out, and take your time with each and every drawing, thinking about what you want to achieve with each individual stroke. You are definitely moving too quickly, and not allowing yourself to process the information in my critiques, in the lesson, or in your own drawing. It's not an uncommon issue - as I've mentioned before your skills are definitely there, you're just being a little too impatient to actually use them fully, and you may be a little too used to just whipping things off fast.
I do not want you to use any contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form. The ones that define the relationship between different forms (like the contour line at the joint of the sausage method) are still fine to use, and I encourage you to do so. This will force you to make your construction feel solid without this important tool, relying entirely on thinking about how your forms' silhouettes define those relationships between one another.
Next Steps:
Please complete 4 more pages of animal constructions, and 1 page of hybrids, adhering to the two restrictions listed at the end of my follow-up critique.
Hi, it took a while, but here's the revised work. https://imgur.com/a/PKjb3kc Thank you too for the drawing notes and previous critiques.
I did the tamandua first and something clicked after that. I feel like I learned a lot in this set of revisions, but is it in the right direction?
This is a remarkable little pen. Technically speaking, any brush pen of reasonable quality will do, but I'm especially fond of this one. It's incredibly difficult to draw with (especially at first) due to how much your stroke varies based on how much pressure you apply, and how you use it - but at the same time despite this frustration, it's also incredibly fun.
Moreover, due to the challenge of its use, it teaches you a lot about the nuances of one's stroke. These are the kinds of skills that one can carry over to standard felt tip pens, as well as to digital media. Really great for doodling and just enjoying yourself.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
