3:21 PM, Tuesday July 14th 2020
I've put down a lot of notes directly on top of your drawings, which you'll find in this album. There's a lot of different things there, but I'll outline a couple major, repeated issues that I'm seeing come up frequently:
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You tend to draw ellipses instead of sausages when constructing some of your legs. You've got them right in a few places, but overall I think you need to review what the difference is, here.
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You also need to keep getting in the habit of hooking your contour curves around, rather than letting them fly straight off the surfaces on which they're meant to sit.
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Your head constructions in the demo drawings are generally pretty good, but you very consistently forget the importance of getting those 'pieces' (eye socket, muzzle, etc.) to fit right up against one another in your own drawings.
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You always draw your ribcage mass way too small. As explained here, it should be 1/2 the length of the torso.
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It's pretty easy to forget about the big engine shoulder and hip muscles, but they're really big and will integrate with the other additional masses you add to your drawings.
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When adding additional masses, you're making some headway in thinking about how they wrap around in a few areas, but more often than not you're still stamping them as separate shapes, without considering how they're supposed to wrap around the underlying forms when you draw their silhouettes. I imagine this goes hand-in-hand with the difficulty you have in wrapping your contour curves around forms.
In general, I'm noticing that when you put marks down, you're exhibiting a lot of uncertainty - it results in sketchy behaviour in some places, and gaps between lines that really should be connecting to impose a sense of solidity to your forms. While it's totally understandable that you're not confident about what you're doing here, it's important that you fake it anyway. Decide first what the nature of the form you wish to draw is to be, then figure out the individual marks you need to put it down on the page. Then commit to each individual stroke (using the ghosting method of course), putting one mark down for each required line. Don't leave any gaps between those lines, and most of all, when you're drawing lines that are intended to sit along the surface of another form, force yourself to think about how that line is actually running along a 3D surface - not just marks on a flat page.
I didn't point this out in the redline notes, but if you take a look at this example, there's a lot of complexity and nuance once can capture through adding individual additional forms to the leg structures of the animals. Each one is added in such a way that it actually wraps around the structure that exists prior to it, and with that you slowly build up these little bits of volume.
Edit: I forgot to mention this - while the donkey proportions are all out of whack, I wouldn't call it botched. Proportions matter, but the construction of believable, solid forms that integrate and interact with one another in a realistic fashion are far more important, and in this regard you've done a decent job with this demonstration. It's entirely possible to get your proportions totally wrong, but actually nail the construction and end up with a good result that is actually believable - as though you were just faithfully capturing a horribly disfigured animal that's roaming around out there somewhere.
Next Steps:
First, I want you to draw some sausage forms and practice wrapping other masses around them, similarly to the leg example I included at the end of my critique. You can also try some larger sausages (like imaginary torsos) and work on building up additional masses on those.
Then I'd like you to do another 5 animal drawings, on your own. Focus on animals that don't have too much poofy fur, where you can see a good deal of their musculature. Horses, deer, lions, buffalo, etc.
