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11:43 PM, Sunday August 29th 2021

Looking at your revisions, I don't feel you've fully grasped my original critique. There are two main issues that stand out here to me.

Firstly, the point about working additively, and ensuring that every single addition to the construction is its own separate, independent, three dimensional form being built onto the existing structure. The approach you're using here seems to primarily be a matter of continuing to extend off the silhouettes of forms you'd already constructed, then to use contour lines to try and go back in and make those elements more three dimensional after the fact - for example here where you extended the thorax of the weevil to build out to the legs. There are also smaller areas where you take shortcuts of extending your forms' silhouettes more directly, like you did here in the weevil's leg and here in the wasp's abdomen, both cutting into the underlying mass in small ways for the segmentation and extending it for the stinger.

In general, you're still allowing yourself to treat what you're doing here as drawing on a flat page, and are taking many shortcuts that can only be taken when treating it as a drawing. You need to respect every element you add to the page as being a solid mass - even that initial mass for the wasp's abdomen. If it were a solid piece of marble in the world, you wouldn't be able to cut into its silhouette, or to simply stretch out its tip. You'd have to think about how you were adding new solid forms onto it for every new addition.

As I shared in my last critique, take a look at the specific manner in which the shrimp and the lobster informal demos were handled - in fact, it would be a good idea for you to follow along with these, step by step.

The second issue that stands out to me is that in my previous critique I called out the fact that you were not employing the sausage method. Here I'm not seeing any attempt to correct the issue I raised there, so please go back and reread that section of the critique.

Next Steps:

Please submit:

  • Your draw-along for the shrimp and lobster demos

  • 2 additional pages of insect constructions

And be sure to go through the demonstrations/diagrams from my original critique again.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
5:54 PM, Tuesday January 18th 2022

Hello everyone,

Here is my revision.

Kind regards.

8:38 PM, Wednesday January 19th 2022

As a whole your work here is coming along quite well, though I do have a few things to point out:

  • In your lobster/shrimp demo drawings, there are quite a few ways that you didn't follow the demo directly. I can only imagine that for whatever reason you didn't actually do a direct draw-along (which means you weren't following the instructions). If you did intend to do a direct draw-along as instructed, then you didn't follow the demos closely enough, and need to observe each step much more carefully.

  • One of these is that, when building up masses on the arms/claws, and as a result, instead of having your additional masses press up against one another, you've left this arbitrary gap between them. Ensure that your masses press against one another. As explained here it's only as a response to direct contact with these other structures that our additional masses' silhouettes can have inward curves.

  • I also noticed that you pretty consistently neglected to draw the contour line that defines the joint between your sausage structures. You also didn't build upon them at all for your lobster, and for the shrimp, you did so entirely differently from what the demo showed.

  • Here's another approach you could use for that dragonfly's abdomen (this is from a critique I did a ways back for another student). The important difference here is that we start out with a simpler sausage structure, and then build variation on top of it, rather than jumping right into those protruding sections right off the bat.

I am concerned about how much you deviated from the demonstrations for the shimp/lobster, but ultimately that's a matter of conscious choices you made, rather than an issue of skill or understanding. Thus, assigning more revisions will not help with that. I'm simply going to remind you that following the instructions as closely as you can is going to make the difference between getting a little out of this course, and getting a lot.

So, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Before you move onto the next one, do take some time to review the feedback I've given to you thus far for Lesson 4 and make sure you continue to apply it as strictly and directly as you can.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:31 PM, Wednesday January 19th 2022
edited at 10:33 PM, Jan 19th 2022

I was worried that I would still not see what I am not doing what you ask me I should be doing, but therefore show you my current revision to maybe be confronted again with what I should improve, and maybe understand eventually.

These last months, I have made many hundreds of drawings and redrawings. I watched the instruction video many times and everytime I completed the drawing, I checked every time again whether I could do better. And everytime, also for the current revision, I felt I could indeed. And so this went on for months. Until I felt I should just post a revision and await the new critique.

Leaving emptiness between the added mass I think I did to really show that I do add mass. Call it hypercorrection, if you will. On the other hand, your demonstration of addition gave me the impression that it indeed leaves some behind (https://imgur.com/t6oz7Tv). Your comment on the addition (blue) of the abdomen of the bee (https://imgur.com/DwrHO3X). To me, that looks 3D now as it did back then, but to you the suggestion of 3D is not enough. I believe the knowing to what extent the suggestion of 3D is enough for the viewer is what I still need to grasp.

The reason for not adding contour lines in the joints I believe is that I did not see them in the other redrawings of insects of the lobster page and therefore was not integrated in my DAB process (probably deemed as being helpful but not necessary). Your instruction does indeed instruct the drawer to do so, though (https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/a20182ab.jpg).

I am adding this reply to clarify that my deviation is not a conscious choice. I believe I am really still in the unconscious incompetent phase there. Especially because I do follow your course as strictly and as directly as I can. That it in practice does not deliver adequately is very frustrating.

I think the best way to improve is to follow your last comment: making sure to continue to apply my DAB drawings as strictly and directly as I can and improve that way—even if that could mean that I will only get a little out of this course (which I do not believe to be true, for I already got a lot out of this course in my own perspective).

edited at 10:33 PM, Jan 19th 2022
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