I did all the demos but didn't post them. That is why there are no spiders or scorpions posted, because I've already did them in the demos. In the discord I was told that taxonomy isn't that important so I didn't actually look up whether a caterpillar is an insect or whatever.
Hello WereVrock, I'll be the teaching assistant handling your lesson 4 critique.
Points for doing all the demos, that is a good approach. You’re correct that we’re not too concerned about the specific species you choose to draw. In addition to insects and arachnids, we can also accept crustaceans and myriapoda, which present similar constructional challenges.
Starting with your organic forms, at a glance I was pretty concerned about how much you’ve deviated from the characteristics of simple sausages that are introduced here, but on closer inspection I think I understand what you’re doing, and why. For some of your forms it looks like you’ve made them get smaller as they get further away, rather than keeping both ends evenly sized and the width consistent along the form’s length. Objects do indeed appear to get smaller as they get further away, so your logic is sound. We generally only see this amount of diminishment on objects that are enormous (like skyscrapers) or extremely close to the viewer. As we’ll be using these organic forms as building blocks for insects and animals, it is better to stick to the simple sausage characteristics, at least when you’re doing homework for this course.
You’re doing quite well at keeping your contour curves aligned to the central flow line, and it is good to see that you’re experimenting with shifting the degree of your contour curves.
Remember to hook your contour curves around the form a bit more, as this helps to get their curvature to accelerate correctly as they reach the edge of the form.
I noticed that sometimes you’d place an ellipse on end of the sausage that the contour curves tell us is facing away from the viewer, such as the form on the lower right of this page, or omit the ellipse on the tip of a form that faces towards us, such as the form on the upper left of the same page. Remember that these ellipses are no different from the contour curves, in that they're all just contour lines running along the surface of the form. It's just that when the tip faces the viewer, we can see all the way around the surface, resulting in a full ellipse rather than just a partial curve. But where the end is pointing away from us, there would be no ellipse at all. Take a look at this breakdown of the different ways in which our contour lines can change the way in which the sausage is perceived - note how the contour curves and the ellipses are always consistent, giving the same impression of which ends are facing towards the viewer and which are facing away.
Moving on to your insect constructions on the whole you’re doing a great job. I can see that you’re starting your constructions with simple solid forms, and paying a lot of attention to how to build upon those basic structures “in 3D” by establishing clear, specific relationships between the existing forms and the new pieces you add.
I do have a few things to talk about that I think will help you get even more out of these constructional exercises in future.
Firstly, how we use the space on the page makes a big difference. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. While this isn’t an issue across the whole set, there are a significant number of pages where you’d artificially limited the amount of space you gave to the construction, by drawing it much smaller than the page allows, leaving lots of blank space unused. This stag beetle is an example. When you draw smaller than the space on the page allows, you make things more difficult than they really need to be, by limiting your brain’s capacity to think through the spatial reasoning puzzles involved with these exercises, while also making it more challenging to engage your whole arm, which might be leading to stiffer linework than what you’re truly capable of. So in future, make a conscious decision to use as much of the space available on the page as you can, and this should help you get more out of each construction.
Second, remember to draw around your ellipses two full times before lifting your pen off the page, even if you feel like you can nail them with a single circuit. We ask students to do this for every ellipse freehanded in this course, as introduced in this section of lesson 1. This leans into the arm’s natural tendency to make elliptical motions and helps to execute them smoothly.
The third point I want to talk about isn’t currently stressed in the lesson content as it stands, but will be fully integrated into the lesson once the overhaul reaches lesson 4. Until then students getting official critique get a bit of a sneak peek at what is to come. During your lesson 3 critique ThatOneMushroomGuy introduced a rule to help you to only take actions on your constructions that reinforce the 3D illusion we seek to create, and to avoid making marks that would undermine that illusion, both for the viewer, and more importantly for you as you build the construction.
The rule went something like this:
“Once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape.”
We can see examples of the various types of actions we can take on a construction using the context of a sphere in this diagram. When engaging with organic constructions in this course we’re advising students to strive to only take actions by adding in 3D,” as shown in the lower right of the diagram.
I can see you’ve made a concerted effort to follow the above rule, and you don’t appear to be cutting back inside the silhouette of forms you have already drawn, which is great. You’re generally doing a good job of building your construction by adding new 3D forms to the existing structure. Forms with their own complete silhouettes - and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in your 3D scene. You can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.
This is all part of understanding that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for both you and the viewer to believe in that lie.
So, while you’re doing pretty well at building your constructions in 3D, I did see a few places where you’d extended “in 2D,” by adding a bit of complexity with a single line or partial shape, not quite providing enough information for us to understand how they actually connect to the existing structure in 3D space. I’ve marked a few examples of this in blue on your caterpillar construction. While adding edge detail with single lines like this worked fine for leaves in the previous lesson, this is because leaves are paper thin, so in effect they are already flat and extending them in 2D will not flatten them further.
When working with solid forms (such as those legs) we want to add new forms wherever you want to alter something. You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see some good examples of this in the lobster and shrimp demos on the informal demos page.
The last thing I wanted to talk about is leg construction. It looks like you were working with the sausage method to varying degrees throughout the set. I thought you did a good job of sticking to the specifics of the method with this mantis where you kept your sausage forms simple, applied a contour curve at the joints, and used additional forms to build the complexity of the spikes.
It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy.
The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown in these examples here, here, and in this ant leg demo and also here on this dog leg demo as this method should be used throughout lesson 5 too.
All right, I think that covers it. You’re on the right track and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Please keep the points discussed here in mind as you tackle the next lesson, they will continue to apply to animal constructions.
Next Steps:
Move onto lesson 5.
Thanks for the critique.
"there are a significant number of pages where you’d artificially limited the amount of space you gave to the construction, by drawing it much smaller than the page allows, leaving lots of blank space unused."
I am having problems with getting the size right. Giving nature of the exercises that I am not supposed to do any preliminary drawings, erasing or retrying, my best guess of getting the first circle the right size is usually wrong. Is there any technique that I can use to get the size more correct?
Hello WereVrock,
It definitely can be challenging to figure out how large to draw those initial ellipses for your major masses, and it does get easier with practice- as long as you’re mindful about what you’re doing.
I appreciate that the above might come across as a dismissive answer, so I can talk a little bit about how to take some of the guesswork out of placing those first ellipses. This is something we don’t talk about in the lesson instructions, as it involves some 2D thinking, and the course is all about getting students to think in 3D.
So, before we put any marks on the page we need to decide where to draw the first ellipse, and how big it is going to be. I’ll use your stag beetle as a reference for this example. I generally find it easiest to start with the largest mass, but you can follow this logic to draw whichever of the major forms you’d like.
Let’s say we’re going to start with the abdomen. It is the lowest and furthest left of the 3 major masses, so we’ll want to place it towards the lower left of the page. We do need to leave space for the legs though, and to decide how much space we need, we can make a simple comparison between the size of the abdomen and the length of the legs. This is something to estimate by observing the reference, however I have physically marked the comparisons on the page here to help you understand what to look for when doing this kind of analysis. We can use a similar logic to decide how much room to leave above and to the right, to fit the head on the page as shown here. We can then use these comparisons to make a more informed choice about the size and placement of the first ellipse, as shown here rather than purely guessing.
Of course our goal isn’t to replicate the reference at all costs, and it is normal to make mistakes. Hopefully the above explanation gives you an idea of what to think about when trying figure out how to place your first ellipses. If despite your best efforts you wind up in a situation where a part of the construction won’t fit on the page (for example a foot or a tail) you can “cap off” the form with an ellipse to keep the construction contained on the page, much like we used ellipses to contain the ends of the branches in lesson 3.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I will keep this in mind
Right from when students hit the 50% rule early on in Lesson 0, they ask the same question - "What am I supposed to draw?"
It's not magic. We're made to think that when someone just whips off interesting things to draw, that they're gifted in a way that we are not. The problem isn't that we don't have ideas - it's that the ideas we have are so vague, they feel like nothing at all. In this course, we're going to look at how we can explore, pursue, and develop those fuzzy notions into something more concrete.
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