Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals
1:55 AM, Wednesday November 4th 2020
Good luck reviewing these, big thanks for doing that!
Starting with the organic intersections, they're looking pretty good. The only thing I notice is that there are a few forms that get a bit complex. Remember that these should all be the simple forms described on lesson 2. The other thing is that you aren't applying lineweight much. Adding lineweight to overlaps helps a lot so don't forget to do it.
About the animal drawings, there are a few issues I want to talk about:
The first one and one of the most important is the sausage forms. You tend to draw stretched ellipses instead of sausages constantly over all the drawings, these forms are not as gestural as the sausages, so using them ends up stiffening up all your drawings. Here's an example of the difference. If you still have doubts about it ask again and I'll do my best to explain it more.
Next thing I wanted to talk about is head constructions. Give a read at this. . If you look at your head constructions, you haven't been breaking the muzzle up in simple forms, and I can't see the footprint step neither. Give a shot at this demo to see if you understand how to approach the heads better. As a rule of thumb, try to break everything on their simplest forms always you can. This is one of the best attempts, but if you compare it with the demo you'll see that it doesn't fit as snuggly as it should. The footprint isn't complete, and it could wrap a bit better around the head. The antilope one is good too, but in that one you're building the eyesocket with an ellipse. Don't forget you should always carve it with straight lines.
The third is about the torso construction. As I've seen thorugh your drawings, it looks like you connect the ribcage and the pelvis with some weird tube thing. As in the antilope. Just like it's explained on the demos, you should connect the ribcage and pelvis with a sausage form. An example with your drawing. As explained there too, the ribcage should take around 1/2 of the size of the torso and pelvis around 1/4. Don't make them the same size.
Another thing that comes into your drawing is the use of texture. You've used it in most of your drawings and I think it's distracting you a lot. So I want you not to use any kind of texture in the next drawings you do.
A thing related to the head construction is construction in general. In every thing you draw I want you to break it back to its simplest forms. Never work with 2d shapes. In these paws of the cat for example you've just drawn an ellipse shape and draw over it the detail of the paw. At least you should divide it into 2 boxy planes. Like I said, divide everything back to its simplest forms.
You've done a lot of good stuff too, like you've drawn through all of your forms, and in general your lines are pretty confident. Some of your drawings get pretty solid too, like the deer. But these issues you're having are pretty important so I want to make sure you understand them.
So, I want to see:
-1 Page of sausage forms with contour ellipses (the ones from lesson 2 and the one's you should be using on all of these drawings)
-3 more drawings of quadrupeds on 3/4 views with no texture.
Make sure you focus on getting the sausage forms right, and that you try to break everything to simple forms, dont' work with shapes at all.
Good luck and keep up the good work!
Next Steps:
-1 Page of sausage forms with contour ellipses (the ones from lesson 2 and the one's you should be using on all of these drawings)
-3 more drawings of quadrupeds on 3/4 views with no texture.
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