Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

8:16 PM, Monday July 19th 2021

Dropbox - Lesson 4 - Simplify your life

Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jcz7zz7snwulvc6/AADlekNboBBE3eExxaqKz0PWa?dl=0

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Hi! Here are my drawings.

Organic forms and insects without detail:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/iy8pqghl6tkl18o/AABmIBcb7939M8Uf0rjUB67ja?dl=0

Insects with detail:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yvd142vdu1uob97/AABsFxkOJ6c0pNSOWHKOPb_Da?dl=0

Thanks for checking my exercises!

-Redog

1 users agree
3:39 AM, Wednesday July 21st 2021

Hi, not sure if you meant to submit this for official critique or not (this is currently submitted for community feedback).

If you want to submit this for community feedback, feel free to reply to this saying so and I can take a look.

If this was meant for official critique, I do believe you have to resubmit this as a new submission, making sure to enable the "submit for official critique" toggle.

12:09 PM, Saturday July 24th 2021
edited at 12:15 PM, Jul 24th 2021

Hi Moryph. I actually wanted to submit it for official critique but currently do not have sufficient credit points to submit it. Therefore, it would be nice to to get some feedback in the meantime whether or not I'm on the right track or maybe should redo some of the drawings.

edited at 12:15 PM, Jul 24th 2021
3:13 PM, Saturday July 24th 2021
edited at 3:15 PM, Jul 24th 2021

Sure, in that case I can give you some feedback. Just remember that you will need to submit this for official critique in order to continue receiving official critiques for later lessons.

Starting with your organic forms, most of them are pretty good at being simple sausage forms. Of the ones that aren't, the biggest issues I'm seeing are ends that aren't the same size, and ends that are a bit too pointed to hold spheres. Remember that a sausage form is two spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. You are missing the center line on one of the forms on the second page, but overall the center line is present, so it's likely you just forgot in this one case.

Over to the contour curves, aside from a bit of stiffness in the contour curves, it overall looks ok. You are varying the degree of the contour curves, which is great. Regarding the contour ellipse at the ends, the main issue here is that you don't seem to be drawing through the ellipses on most of them. Some of them are drawn through so it looks like you know that all ellipses should be drawn through.

Regarding the insect constructions, I'm going to skip the ones where you followed along with the demo (since overall they look pretty good), except to point out that the small shadows on the scorpion and black widow are technically details/texture.

Over to your insect constructions with texture, I see quite a bit of improvement in your understanding of how the forms exist in 3d space and how they interact with each other. I am going to point towards specific constructions to point out a few issues that I see (I'm going to use the page number to refer to insect constructions):

  • Starting with the page 1 insect, the segmentation along the back underside seems a bit flat relative to the form. Remember that segmentation tends to wrap around a form, therefore acting like a natural contour line. Since you already reinforced the form itself with a contour line, you should use that contour line to guide how you apply the segmentation. The other thing to note is that the form you added at the end of the insect is not fully enclosed, and therefore appears flat, like a shape. Always think in 3d space when adding forms, and draw complete forms even when you can't see them, like here, where the top part is covered by the shell. You do a better job at both of these things in later constructions, just thought I'd point it out here.

  • On the page 4 insect (the housefly), you drew the ellipses representing the connection of leg to body, but then didn't really use that when drawing the legs themselves. Remember that building upon previous steps of construction, not merely using them as guidelines, is an important principle of construction.

  • On the page 5 insect, you've drawn hatching on the legs for one side of the insect. Remember that hatching is used to flatten the forms that it's placed on. Due to the 3/4 angle of the insect here, those legs should definitely still be 3d, and therefore flattening them with hatching is not the correct approach.

  • On the page 6 insect, the legs don't really realistically connect to the thorax. The connection may not be the widest part of the leg, but it should definitely be wider than depicted. Drawing ellipses to represent the connections before hand may help here.

I did also have a few things I wanted to point out that I see across multiple constructions:

  • In a few cases, you constructed a simple form, and then ended up cutting into it in later construction steps. Unfortunately, while you can do this for leaves, since they are flat, cutting into forms, unless done carefully, will cause the form to appear flat as well. This is most prominent on the cricket on page 3, where the head mass was cut into in order to create the actual head inside of it. For this lesson, it is best to start with a smaller ball form and build forms on top of it to create this head.

  • I see you are trying to follow the sausage method for constructing insect legs, especially in the later constructions, but when building upon the sausages to achieve the final leg, you want to add on one form at once, instead of just constructing the final shape around the sausage. Avoid forms that wrap all the way around, since it doesn't really connect the form to the underlying sausage.

  • Regarding detail, I'm seeing a great deal of detail used for decoration, especially the hatching lines, and the blocks of form shadow. Remember that shadow should be used for two things only: cast shadow to represent how two forms interact, and small cast shadows to capture texture.

Hopefully these pointers will help. I'm going to request revisions because I don't believe the system registers this as a critique until I provide next steps (and being on the official critique track marking this lesson as complete is not helpful either), but it's up to you whether or not you want to redo some of these taking into account this feedback. (There is no need to reply to this critique with any revisions, feel free to send it directly for official critique instead).

Good luck!

Next Steps:

Read the above feedback, and submit this lesson for official critique.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
edited at 3:15 PM, Jul 24th 2021
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