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10:09 PM, Thursday July 22nd 2021

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you're doing a pretty good job with these. For the most part you're sticking pretty close to the characteristics of simple susages, although some of the ends get a little unevenly formed, but most of them are well done. More importantly though, I did notice that you tend to keep the degree of your contour lines rather consistent throughout most of these. Make sure that you remember that the degree of your contour lines should be getting wider as they slide further away from the viewer, as explained in the lesson 1 ellipses video.

Continuing onto your insect constructions, I think it's best to break down your submission into two chunks - the drawings where you tried to get into detail/rendering, and those where you focused primarily on construction.

Those where you focused only on construction are for the most part coming along really well. They're solid, believable, and show a well developing grasp of three dimensional space. There is one issue, but based on how you're approaching these drawings I think it's one that will be very easily resolved. Basically, make sure that every step you take to build onto your construction is done by actually introducing a new, complete, solid, three dimensional form, and defining how it relates to the existing structure (either by defining how they intersect, or establishing how the new form wraps around what's already there).

Problems can occur when students take shortcuts, attempting to modify the silhouettes of forms they've already drawn - either by extending them or cutting into them - as shown here.

This isn't something you did that often, but I did catch it in a few places. For example, the ant's head construction, where you extended back from the original ball form, and also in the wasp construction where you actually ended up cutting back into the thorax. This ant head demo better shows how to tackle building upon the forms you've already got, one step at a time - though I think for the most part you've held to this yourself.

Now, moving onto the other set - the drawings where you added rendering and detail, I think these were a pretty sharp turn off the right path. The issue comes down to the fact that you've ended up focusing primarily on making your drawings look nice and impressive - that is to say, you've focused on decorating them. Decoration isn't really a concrete goal that we can strive for - it's somewhat more arbitrary. There's no specific point at which you've added enough.

What we're doing in this course can be broken into two distinct sections - construction and texture - and they both focus on the same concept. With construction we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand how they might manipulate this object with their hands, were it in front of them. With texture, we're communicating to the viewer what they need to know to understand what it'd feel like to run their fingers over the object's various surfaces. Both of these focus on communicating three dimensional information. Both sections have specific jobs to accomplish, and none of it has to do with making the drawing look nice.

Furthermore, remember that back in Lesson 2, it's mentioned that form shading will not play a role in the drawings you do for this course - so all the rendering/shading that you added should have been left out. Instead, focus on the use of cast shadow shapes, because that is what helps communicate to the viewer the presence of three dimensional forms and structures, the sort of things that the viewer would be able to feel with their hands.

Now, since your core construction is coming along so well, we can overlook those more detailed drawings. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, and leave you to apply what I've shared here in the next lesson.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:58 PM, Thursday July 22nd 2021

Hi Uncomfortable,

Thanks for the detailed critique. I have a question about the proper use of shading/rendering. Using this drawing of a beetle as an example, should I have only filled in the cast shadows from the shell onto the legs and the separation between head, thorax, and abdomen? Also, just to make sure I understood the main issue with my detailed drawings, was the primary issue the excessive shading, or were there more things that you would call "decoration"? Thank you for the reminder on differentiating cast shadows from form shading, I see now that most of my shading falls under the latter.

2:15 AM, Saturday July 24th 2021

Sorry, since you ended up asking a follow up question I missed this one. Always best to ask in one post - you can use the edit function if you need to add more to it.

I think I answered the second half of this question, but about the first half, yes - focus on the cast shadows, so the shell casting shadows onto the legs, and anywhere else one form might cast a shadow onto another surface based on their relationships in space. That's what cast shadows do - they define the way in which one form relates to another surface.

7:10 PM, Sunday July 25th 2021

Thank you! I'll keep this all in mind moving forward.

11:04 PM, Thursday July 22nd 2021

Oh and just another question, in the scorpion demo you add some shading onto one plane of the scorpions shells. Wouldn't this count as form shading? Or is it fine in this case because it contributes in conveying another plane of its abdomen?

3:28 PM, Friday July 23rd 2021

You are correct - it is form shading. This course is one that is constantly evolving, as I learn how to explain the material better through doing critiques. That demo, while still valuable, has certain elements that are contradicted by certain choices I've made in the last year or two.

I embarked on an effort to do a more widespread overhaul of the course material, starting from Lesson 1, to make the videos more succinct and useful, and also address these contradictions. Unfortunately my apartment flooded in May, forcing me to move out and put my equipment on storage. This put the overhaul on pause, but it will resume again in September.

For now, you can definitely trust that anything contained in the written material supercedes the videos, which are much harder to keep up to date.

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Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

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