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8:47 PM, Monday March 2nd 2020
Starting with your organic intersections, these are looking pretty solid. You're doing a good job of demonstrating how the forms wrap around one another and how they interact in three dimensions, rather than just as shapes on the page. This is a concept that comes up a lot in this lesson, and it is one that you approach very well in some cases, and poorly in others.
Your work on this bird, especially around its head and neck area is extremely well done. You've established clear forms that feel solid and confident in how they intersect with one another. Admittedly along the backside and legs this isn't handled quite as well - for example, the tail exists purely as a flat, two dimensional shape extended off the silhouette of the torso with no actual information telling us how it exists in 3D space. Also, the connection between the back toes to the rest of the foot construction is similarly only established in two dimensions. Always remember to establish a contour line that defines the joint between your forms to more clearly demonstrate how they exist together in 3D space.
Moving onto your wolf demo drawing, you've employed the sausage method quite well here to establish the core structure of the animal. Same goes for how you've constructed the additional masses along the back of its spine (how it wraps around the torso form). The head construction is also quite well done.
This admittedly falls apart a fair bit in your following drawing, where I feel that your core weakness comes from jumping into drawing without spending as much time as you need to properly observe your reference image. This results in all kinds of proportional mistakes (tiny head, tiny legs). We can also see the results of this in your detail, where you're drawing fur with repetitive, auto-pilot marks that don't show any real sign of the tufts of fur being designed in any fashion. If you read the notes from the lesson on fur, you'll see how it's established as a series of separate shapes, not drawn automatically, but with each tuft being designed in a specific, intentional manner.
All of this comes back to taking the time to observe your reference closely, not relying on instinct to make the decisions for you. Here are some additional notes about this particular drawing.
Similarly to how I pointed out the additional masses along the wolf's back in those overdrawings/notes, I'm seeing the same issue in this horse where you've constructed a single monolithic mass along the entirety of its spine. This largely defeats the purpose of the additional masses, where each one represents a cluster or mass of muscles, which on the body, have a tendency to pile up on top of one another. It's this layering that creates the pinches along an animal's silhouette that causes it to appear believable. By going out of your way to smooth everything out, by using a single continuous mass where many smaller ones should be incorporated, eliminates this more natural configuration.
A much better example of this can be seen along the front shoulder of this horse, where you've clearly constructed a mass that integrates nicely into the mass along the base of its neck, and into the legs below. It becomes like a puzzle composed of three dimensional forms that all fit snugly into one another.
The same kind of technique ought to be used for your camel's hump. You've basically just taken a form and placed it along the top like a hat. The issue is that it doesn't feel grounded or integrated into the construction at all, instead giving the impression that it might fall off at any moment. Integrating it as shown here will make it more of a solid, believable part of your construction.
Before I mark this lesson as complete, there are a number of things I'd like you to work on.
Next Steps:
I'd like to see 5 additional pages of animal drawings, with no texture or detail, focusing purely on construction. This is largely because you appear to get distracted by detail quite a bit, and need to work on just how closely and carefully you study your reference when establishing the underlying structure.
Pay attention to how you employ the sausage method - you jump back and forth between applying it as instructed here and dropping steps as it suits you. Additionally, keep working on how you employ the additional masses as you build out your constructions.
3:40 AM, Saturday March 7th 2020
https://imgur.com/gallery/wkqNT75
The last drawing in the gallery is an extra. After drawing it I realized I was probably mostly drawing the volume of the wool as opposed to the lamp's body. I added it to the gallery for extra feedback
8:14 PM, Saturday March 7th 2020
A number of these are looking quite solid. Just a couple things to keep in mind:
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When adding additional forms, try to integrate them into one another, like a three dimensional puzzle. So looking at cases like the belly and hip and rump here, you've got little gaps between them. Try and think about how they're all representing muscle groups, and how they'd fit together. You're doing a good job of this with many of your heads, so apply the same principle here.
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I really love the additional mass you drew just at the base of the neck (along the spine) of this horse. It captures exactly how these masses ought to carry a sense of thickness and mass. This is missing towards the rump, where you've smoothly integrated the addition there into the profile of the rest of the torso. I've demonstrated this concept in this quick demo for another student.
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In this chicken and in a few other cases, you've put down an underlying construction, and then wrapped the whole construction (or in other cases, part of the construction) in a sort of enveloping 2D shape. This is absolutely not how you should be approaching situations where you want to add bulk or volume - you do this by adding additional forms, wrapping them around the underlying construction, and ensuring that every component has a clear relationship with its surrounding forms in 3D space. The moment you treat your drawing as a flat collection of lines and shapes, you sacrifice the illusion that what you're drawing is 3D. Here's an example of the difference in the approaches.
Anyway, all in all I think you've got a lot of big successes. I especially liked your horse, your gazelle, and the frog was an excellent example of the use of the sausage method. There is of course room for growth and improvement, but you're headed in the right direction, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.
1:53 AM, Sunday March 8th 2020
With regard to the chicken. The 2D envelope I drew represents the feathers of the chicken. I read somewhere in the notes that since fur and feathers aren't solid forms that we don't have to give them too much solidity when we add them to our drawing. Since I have seen plenty of featherless birds, I knew a lot of the chicken's volume was feathers. But I think I went a little too far with that.
Anyways, I assume the next step is the cylinder challenge, Right?
Sakura Pigma Microns
A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.
In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.