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8:14 PM, Saturday March 7th 2020

A number of these are looking quite solid. Just a couple things to keep in mind:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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?

2:48 AM, Sunday March 8th 2020

Could you point me to where you read that? I do sometimes change my view on things as my own understanding of the material develops, but based on how I've approached this stuff for some time now, feathers are absolutely still solid masses and should be drawn as I explained in my critique. Nothing should be drawn as flat shapes.

7:21 AM, Sunday March 8th 2020

"I've also added a mass to represent what is mostly fur along the side of the head. I'm not too keen on making this appear solid - it definitely has volume, and probably has some muscle there, but because most of it is likely fur I'm still leaving it a little lighter and free of additional contour lines."

This was at the end of the wolf demo. I guess I miss interpreted this resulting in what I did with the chicken and lamp.

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