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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
1:05 AM, Thursday January 20th 2022

At the end of the day, we can only strive to do our best. These lessons are dense, and admittedly at times a bit contradictory due to how it has developed over the years (something I'm trying very hard to fix by overhauling it from start to finish to update it with fresh demos, but of course this will take time). As long as you are putting the effort in to follow everything as closely as you can, you're on the right track.

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