Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals

2:48 PM, Wednesday January 22nd 2025

Lesson 5 - Google Drive

Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/188G0wHH3RctZh6ZNZB0Wq9xEVj_XrwcA

Took my sweet time with this lesson. I think my spatial reasoning improved a lot. Thank you to whoever takes the time to review my homework :)

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7:05 PM, Wednesday January 22nd 2025

Hello Gran, or Dr. Soup, whichever you prefer, my name is Canoe and I'd be happy to take a look at your lesson 5 submission.

Starting off with your organic intersections, your placement of your forms shows a good understanding of how those forms exist in 3d space. They have believable mass to them and they "flop" (for lack of a better word, they're very droopy) nicely over each other. Additionally, your use of cast shadows and how they wrap around each sausage form handily reinforces the illusion and, uhh, 'droopiness' of each of your sausages.

Moving on to the meat of the lesson (pun intended), your constructions similarly show a good understanding of 3d space. The solidity of your forms does fall apart for me somewhat for the two birds. This is mostly due to the fact that you've gone over your lines for them multiple times in a way that feels incoherent, at least for the outlines. If your intention was to add line weight to the silhouette, then that's understandable. I bring this up because so much of the focus of Drawabox is on executing our marks confidently, in a single stroke. This is really only something I've noticed on the seagull and the shiba inu; everything else follows this principle I mentioned, more or less.

These are tiny issues though, and you would be perfetly justified in accusing me of nitpicking which, admittedly, I am doing to a certain extent. Regardless, these comments on line quality and scribbling and offset by everything you've done right in this lesson. You've done an excellent job of adding additional mass to your forms in order to give each of your animals believable weight. This is especially apparent in your goat constructions. One extra trick you can use to make your constructions more believable is to always 'cap off' your forms. What I mean by this is that your forms should always be enclosed by something like an ellipse, plane, etc. For example, your bottom giraffe's and top mongoose's necks go off into nothing and the undermines the solidity of the construction somewhat. The same can be said with the goat head. Capping them off with an ellipse is a small, but worthwhile step to preserve the illusion of your forms' solidity, in my opinion.

Overall, your use of 3d forms in your constructions as well at your excellent use of cast shadows to differentiate between forms (this worked particlarly well with the shoebill!) gives me full confidence that you've understood the concepts of the lesson. And on that note, I'll be marking lesson 5 as complete. Time, once again, to pack up your pickaxe and descend into the mines. Not the box-quarry, mind you, but the cylindrical tunnels below...

Next Steps:

Move on to the 250 cylinder challenge.

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete. In order for the student to receive their completion badge, this critique will need 2 agreements from other members of the community.
11:00 AM, Thursday January 23rd 2025

Hello Canoe, thank you so much to reviewing my homework!! I'll keep it in mind to be more mindful of the lines I used to add lineweight, and about closing my non-full body constructions with some form like an ellipse.

Thanks again!

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