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5:00 PM, Thursday October 29th 2020

Alrighty, I did a number of redlines which you'll find here. The main issues are as follows:

  • Observation observation observation. The deer showed clear signs that you were observing more carefully, whereas this dog (especially its head) shows that you were clearly lost doing your own thing. As pointed out in the horse, taking note of the "negative shapes" between the legs can help in deciding how you want to place them in your drawing.

  • With the horse, you appear not to have noticed that it was walking away from the viewer, at an angle. You drew it walking across the field of view.

  • In some cases - like the fox - you didn't use sausage forms.

  • You pretty consistently drew your ribcages too small. I mention here that they take up 1/2 the length of the torso. It's half for the ribcage, then a quarter gap, then the last quarter is the pelvis.

While you tend to make steps forwards and backwards, it comes down to how much you're paying attention, especially to your reference, and the techniques/methodologies that we cover in the lesson. It's a lot to remember, but I'm seeing more and more as we move forwards that you are retaining increasing amounts, and as a result the overall trend is towards improvement. A lot of small steps back, mixed in with larger leaps forwards.

That's why we're seeing examples like the deer, which generally feels not only well put together, but also more realistic (due to the more extensive observation).

Now, I didn't cover all of the smaller notes I added in my redlines on top of your work, and it is admittedly a little scattered there. So I recommend that you take some time to go through them, and perhaps do so a few times - definitely more immediately before your next drawing session as well.

Moving forward, let's continue with another 5 drawings.

Next Steps:

Another 5 animal constructions.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
7:35 AM, Wednesday November 18th 2020
edited at 7:45 AM, Nov 18th 2020

Made another attempt...

https://imgur.com/a/mIXutm9

Everything here took multiple attempts. I made lots of mistakes which caused me to restart each drawing over and over.

Unfortunately everything still seems very flat and really don't resemble the subjects. I feel as though I'm not making any progress. I seem to be lacking some very basic drawing/observation skills in general.

I rewatched some of the videos on chapter 5 but, nothing was particularly helpful.

I'm still lost and confused. I don't know where to go at this point.

edited at 7:45 AM, Nov 18th 2020
6:20 PM, Wednesday November 18th 2020

Alrighty! So I have a number of concrete points to share with you that should help you better grasp where things are going wrong. That said, I still am seeing clear improvements and moves in the right direction - so taking the distance you've already gone at this point, and mixing in a solid grasp of the issues I'll point out next, should continue that trend. I know it's frustrating on your end, and it can be difficult to see your own growth at times, but keep in mind that this is where you started. You are now showing a far greater attention to your reference image, and are thinking more about how the forms in your constructions come together.

Before we get started, a quick point: I think it's best that you leave any kind of detail/texture out until we've got a fully solid grasp on construction, just to avoid it serving as a distraction. So the mane of your zebra, the fur on your fox, etc. aren't really contributing much to the exercise right now.

I'm going to break this down by touching on a number of specific points, to help structure my feedback and make it a little easier to absorb.

First, all additional masses must be drawn as complete, enclosed silhouettes that stand on their own, rather than as partial lines. Here's what I mean - don't just draw a line to create some borders of a form and rely on the edges of other forms' silhouettes to make up the rest. Every single element you add to a construction should be its own complete, solid form.

Side point to this - don't forget to define the connection between the neck and the torso, as shown here.

Second, whenever any corners or other kids of complexity are added to an additional mass, that needs to be the result of some specific form that it's pressing up against. We can think of our additional masses starting off as some incredibly simple ball of soft meat, just nice and smoothly curved. As soon as we press it against an existing structure, however, part of it will start to gain complexity in order to wrap around the solid construction. That is what causes the various corners and concave/inward curves. So whenever you add some kind of corner or inward curve to your additional form's silhouette, you need to be thinking about precisely what it's pushing up against. We can even go so far as to define that form too, and that will definitely help as you get used to it. Here's what I mean.

As a side point to the above, I did notice that you frequently treated the ribcage mass as something your additional masses should be wrapping around. I can absolutely understand how you would come to this conclusion, but it comes about primarily because you're focusing just on what you see in your drawing, rather than what you know. The ribcage is part of the torso sausage, and is fully engulfed in it. As such, with all these masses wrapping around the torso, there's no actual distinction from where the sausage transitions from the ribcage area, to the midsection, to the pelvis. So there's nothing there to wrap around.

Thirdly, keep thinking about drawing simple sausage forms when constructing your legs. This is something you've improved on a lot, but htere are still plenty of cases where you're drawing forms that are more like stretched ellipses.

Lastly, your head construction is definitely much stronger in the leopard drawing than the others, and I believe this is because you've put much more effort into building up the various elements of the face (carving the eye sockets into the cranial ball, building out the muzzle, etc.) and keeping them all fitted up against one another like a puzzle. That said, there is still room for improvement.

As shown here (I put together a quick demo looking at your drawing, though I started with a smaller cranial ball than yours - often making it too big can throw us off), the real key to head construction is how the eye sockets serve as the first point of transitioning this rounded, smooth-surfaced cranial ball into a series of flat planes.

The head (regardless of species, humans included) is a complex series of planes, but we always start out with a simple ball, and the trick is to find out where to take rounded surfaces and break them down into specific flat faces. The eyesockets serve as an excellent starting point, due to how they introduce these vertices, from which we could extend out imaginary edges (as shown with the bright red arrows).

I did notice that in your leopard head, you tended to draw a little timidly when building up the muzzle, like you were afraid to be too heavy with your lines, lest you end up with a big pile of lines. Done correctly, you will end up with a lot of overlapping lines. That's entirely fine. What matters is that each line is planned and purposefully thought through - that you're aware of exactly what job you're trying to get each line to perform. That is important for all construction. The more we try to be dainty with our linework, the more we focus on the lines as they exist as part of a sketch, rather than as defining clear, solid forms as part of a three dimensional construction.

So that gives you a number of things to think about and work on, but I think I'm only going to give you one more round of revisions to focus on these before having you move onto the next stage (though you may have to remind me of that yourself when doing your next submission). I'm quite encouraged by the progress you've shown, and while you still have a great deal of room for growth, you've gone from completely floundering to moving in a clear direction, especially in the last few rounds of revisions. I was quite happy with the last round, and I'm still pleased with this one.

One thing to keep in mind about the material in the lesson right now - especially the video demos - is that I gradually refine and find ways to update that material based on the kinds of critiques I give here. Critiquing students gives me a new way to think about explaining concepts, and also helps me solidify my own understanding of that material, and so the critiques I give can be thought as a preview of how the lesson material will eventually be updated.

In the coming months, I plan to overhaul the lesson material quite a bit, replacing basically all the videos (or as many as possible) to more accurately reflect where my instruction sits now. So for the time being, focus primarily on the information and demos I'm sharing here in these critiques.

Next Steps:

Please try another 4 animal drawings. I recommend that you go through each individual bolded section I listed in my critique above one at a time, trying to wrap your head around how you can apply those principles to your drawing, rather than trying to tackle everything all at once.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
7:53 AM, Thursday January 14th 2021

Rather than diving directly back into this one I took some time to go over previous lessons to see if it would help. It seems like I still have trouble wrapping things around the forms. I have attempted to make sure the basics are there (longer/wider rib cage, smaller pelvis, ect...) before doing anything else but, I think I may have slipped up in a few places.

https://imgur.com/a/hHcTydc

Still having trouble making them look like they're 3 dimesional. I tried to wrap the secondary forms around the main forms but, It did not seem to work out.

Let me know if I should go through another round of these again.

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