8:11 PM, Friday February 25th 2022
I've put plenty of time into putting notes right on your work, so I'm not going to get into much detail in text:
I left the horse alone because it's the strongest of the bunch, although I did notice its eye socket was probably drawn without looking at the informal head construction demo, and deviates from it quite a bit. Its eyeball is also tiny, and needs to be much bigger.
Your cougar head actually wasn't fully facing forward (it's turning slightly more to our right) - this is usually the case, you rarely get angles that are facing full-forward or fully to the side, but when they do occur, they still apply the same principles of construction because these processes require us to understand how the forms we're building up exist in all three dimensions - not just from a single angle of view.
That said, I would strongly encourage you to pay attention to whether it's actually fully forward - if there's even a slight angling, it helps to emphasize it.
As a whole there are definitely areas where you're improving - I'm seeing a lot more cases where you're purposefully designing the silhouettes of your additional masses. There are however two main issues:
-
Your observation's not... great. I mean, there are a lot of things in your reference that you overlook entirely (the huge arc of the cougar's back, the fact that the top of the camel's head is almost a straight line, with only a very small bump at the brow/forehead area, or the fact that the camel's front leg is angling backwards, where you drew it coming forwards).
-
There are a ton of places where you're still just not applying what you do know - for example, in tackling the camel's mouth, you fell straight back to just drawing what you see in two dimensions, cutting across the silhouette of that existing structure.
I am glad that you noted down the time spent on each drawing. If I'm doing my math correctly, you spent:
-
7 + 26 = 33 minutes on the cougar construction
-
19 + 17 = 36 minutes on the camel construction
-
28 minutes on the horse construction
This is way too little, especially considering that you need time to both observe your reference continuously, and to identify the purpose of each individual mark you want to make, and execute it to the best of your current ability. I'd like to see you spending several times that on each construction. For the same of comparison, I've spent over an hour already on this critique, and I haven't even had to construct a single animal in full - and have loads of experience that helps me work more quickly than you, along with the efficiency digital tools afford me.
You are seriously underestimating how long this should be taking you. To be completely honest, while you are definitely making progress and gradually addressing the issues I'm calling out, you're very much offloading the bulk of the work onto me. I call out a list of issues, you give yourself the time to make progress with one or two at most, then come back around to have me call out similar points again. Rather than putting your all into this, you're depending on me to do a lot of the thinking.
That's not how this course works, and I would not have invested this much time already if we were not friends. The way this course works is simple:
-
You do your absolute best, giving yourself as much time as you require to read, follow, and apply the instructions to the best of your ability. This means, above all else, investing a ton of time to avoid all the mistakes or slip-ups you can on your own.
-
You will still have made mistakes, or have misunderstandings - that's normal. So you submit your work for critique, and I break down all the areas where you can stand to improve, or where you're not quite grasping something.
-
You go back in and repeat the process with the new information - go back over the existing lesson material, go back over my feedback, and so on, and invest as much time as you reasonably can to apply it all to the best of your ability.
-
You submit it again - hopefully you show clear signs of growth on all the addressed fronts, but if you don't, that's okay. You did your best, you put lots of time into it, and we give it another go.
There are students who get full redos who have done their absolute best and held to everything - this happens when either I've over-extended myself in the rounds of feedback I've provided, or where it really is best for them to get a chunk of attempts, and a chance to go over everything anew, to give themselves a chance to review the material and get further with it on their own before seeking feedback again.
Giving me a grand total of 1.5 hours of work, however, when the feedback itself takes nearly as long, is severely imbalanced, and is not how this course is meant to work. I'm going to give you one more set of more limited revisions to demonstrate the absolute best of your effort, your time, and your energy, and if I still find it lacking, I'm going to send you for a full redo.
Next Steps:
Please submit another 3 animal constructions. I don't want to give you a specific amount of time to spend, so instead I'm going to ask for a minimum of 3 days to be spent on each individual drawing - meaning, when you write your start/end times, there should be sessions from 3 distinct dates at minimum.
Build up your constructions gradually, spend as much time as you need to execute each mark to the best of your ability. Yes, skinny sausages are hard, but they're a crap ton harder when you're only giving yourself a grand total of 30 seconds to make each one.
