Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals
3:45 AM, Wednesday July 14th 2021
Thanks for your feedback!
Thanks for your feedback!
Hey Wifu4Lifu! im gonna go over your submission.
Starting out by your organic intersections, it seems like you are doing a great job here! Individually your sausages look solid and you are also changing the degrees of their contours, on the general side, you are convincingly wrapping the sausages around each other in a way that convey a sense of gravity. The only thing that is just there to be as good as your sausages are your cast shadows, remember that they follow the form that they are being cast on, it seems like you are conscious about this but a little resilient to letting them go from their original forms, here I drew on top of your work to show you how they should be casting, as I said, it is a very small step that you need to go to get this right!
Moving on to your constructions, it looks like you are doing a very good job on them! You are working additively, respecting your original forms and building on top of them to capture the more complex forms of some animals. As always though, there are some things (though very few) that I can draw you attention to so you can take them into account moving forward!
Okay first of all, in this cammel head you are slightly cutting into your original craneal form, I was looking in other constructions and it seems to be the only part that happened. Remember to never cut back into or extend your silhouettes since it will undermine the solidity of your constructions. I made a point about this on your lesson 4 critique and I was impressed of how well you absorved it for this lesson since, as I already said, you are being really carefull with the solidity of your construcions and the forms you add. I just pointed out this really nitpicky case to remind you about this and have an opportunity to say that you have really improved on this area!
Talking about the solidity of your forms, Im seeing that you are not really taking full advantage of contour curves to reinforce the illusion we are trying to create here, while it is a very common issue for students to use too many to the point that they become redundant, I think that you could be applying some here and there that will really help to sit some forms on space. The main place you will be looking for applying some contours are forms that are really big, these tend to take a lot of space in a construction so its better if we add one contour on the middle, just to remind the viewer as they are looking at it that it is a 3d solid form, here I drew over one of your constructions, adding contours in big forms that I think need some reinforcement. Another place which will helpful is on more flat forms which can be forgotten as 3d, in the case of your constructions, you could be adding a lot of them to the ears of your animals, this will help them not fall flat in contrast with the other 3d forms and shapes that you have, here I drew over some of your constructions and added some contours to the ears and other flat forms! Remember that you still need to be careful with these, as a rule of thumb I personally stick to just one contour for form, and only if its big enough, though there is cases that I think that they need two, these have to be really big- Where a form needs a contour curve or not, is something you need to observe as objectively as possible, here we are working on a thin line between total clutter and clear communication and reinforcement of form.
Now that the topic of clear communication came out, there is something I want to talk about, line weight- this is not an aesthetic choice from this course, is a tool we have at our disposal so when we are done with the construction, we can bring the construction forward from all the clutter. Now, it looks like you are applying line weight on some of your forms, but you are doing it all along their silhouettes, the key thing to understand about line weight is that it is a localized tool, meaning that it is used to clarify how forms relate to each other in 3d, in the specific areas that those 3d forms meet. Here is a demo that if I remind correctly, I did for your lesson 3, the same principles can be applied here! Now, this will be specially important on future lessons because they will get waay more cluttered than this constructions.
On a same note, it sometimes look like you are drawing with a really faint line for the base forms, and then using more force on the forms that build on top of that, now this may be caused because you are not going and applying line weight later to clarufy, so you want to keep it as clean as you can. However, this is not a good idea, remember that the main characteristic of this kind of additive construction is that we build on top of our forms, meaning that we need to respect them and believe them as solid as the others, this is hard when their line quality is as faint as they can be.
Now, you have improved a lot since you previous lesson and you did an awesome job on this one, So im gonna go ahead and mark this as completed! Keep up the great work.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move on to the 250 cylinder challenge.
Thank you so much for taking the time! My only question about the camel head is that when you draw an ellipse. We are told to go over them twice. Does that mean we always take the outermost pass of that ellipse as final?
About the line weight. The reason why some of the lines are more faint than others is because of the speed of my arm trajectory. I'm not consistent with it so sometimes it might come off as putting pressure. And i even use my wrist on some of the smaller forms, such as those on the face. Trying to do just enough so the lines don't wobble is a real challenge that's for sure.
Hey, after seeing your response and watching the cammel head closer, you are right, I misjudged it as if you were cutting into your forms instead of being one of the two passes of the ellipse, so i apologize for that. And to clarify just in case, you can use whichever stroke of the two strokes that you find most useful!
Regarding line weight, yeah its pretty tough balancing all this things, though in lesson 6 and above you will be able to use a ruler so it will be easier to focus on making things more clear.
Good luck!
By the way, the link to your first point about the sausage cast shadows. Do you still have a copy? Its not showing up for me. It's fine if you don't have it anymore.
Some of you may remember James Gurney's breathtaking work in the Dinotopia series. This is easily my favourite book on the topic of colour and light, and comes highly recommended by any artist worth their salt. While it speaks from the perspective of a traditional painter, the information in this book is invaluable for work in any medium.
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