This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.
8:00 PM, Monday September 21st 2020
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, for the most part these are done pretty well with a few issues I want to draw to your attention:
-
Always remember to stick to the characteristics of simple sausage forms as mentioned in the instructions for this exercise. You've got a few that have ends of different sizes, and some that get more stretched out - those ends should be kept equal and circular.
-
I'm seeing you applying the degree shift across most of these, but I find that when your sausages get especially long, you seem to stop letting the contour curves actually get wider than a certain point. As one end gets farther from us, its cross-sections' degree will inevitably get wider.
Moving onto your insect constructions, there's actually a lot of good stuff here, with some key issues that I want to clear up for you. Overall your drawings feel quite 3D and believable, and show that you're starting to really grasp what it means to think in 3D space, and how these forms relate to one another within it. There is definitely a lot of room for improvement on that front, but you're headed in the right direction.
The first major issue I'm seeing is a general point - you're drawing really small, and in doing so you're absolutely shooting yourself in the foot. Drawing small severely limits our brain's ability to think through spatial problems, while also limiting our willingness to engage our whole arm while drawing. On top of this, with the pen tip being larger relative to the whole drawing, it can make things generally clumsier. All of these points coalesce to make things harder for us, and needlessly so. Draw bigger.
It's worth mentioning that this is a common mistake, but it often comes from students trying to cram more drawings in there - filling their pages with multiple insects. In your case, it seems yours were left floating in an empty page. To that point, where I tell those students that they should focus first and foremost on giving the first drawing of a given page as much room as it requires for your brain to fully work through those spatial problems at a comfortable scale, and only once the first drawing is in there, should they assess whether they have enough room for another (and if not, leaving just one drawing to a page is totally fine), it seems like I may need to remind you that if there is ample room for another drawing, you should be using it and not leaving it blank. I purposely assign numbers of pages, leaving it to the individual student to determine how much effort and time they're willing to invest into the task.
I won't dwell on it, since your work is still pretty well done, but I will mention that this led me to check when your last submission was - a precise 14 days prior to this one. I'll just reiterate that Drawabox is not a course with deadlines because I only want students to focus on completing the number of assigned pages to the best of their current ability. No specific pace to match, or speed to keep up with. Assuming you're adhering to the 50% rule introduced back in Lesson 0, the 14 day minimum wait between submissions is meant not as a deadline, but truly as a barest minimum to avoid my staff and I from getting overwhelmed.
Anyway, back to the critique. The next point I wanted to mention is that every form we add to a construction is meant to be respected as a solid, 3D form existing in the world, and we are keen on defining the relationships between these forms as being specific and clear. In many ways you adhere to this, but there are a few cases I'd like to look at where you didn't.
The most notable is this fly. For the most part it's a really solid construction, but for the abdomen you first laid in a much larger ball form, before deciding that it was far too large, and that you had to scale down. The only way you could feasibly do this was to ignore the larger one and draw a new one. Unfortunately, once that larger form was added to the drawing, it was there to stay, and the end result provided the viewer with a contradiction. The abdomen is both larger and smaller at the same time. These kinds of contradictions serve to undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief.
In this case, the correct approach would likely be to just accept that you steered in the wrong direction a little, and to hold that course. To draw the fly with a larger abdomen than your reference shows. There's nothing wrong with straying from your reference like this, and no rule that the focus is on creating a perfect copy. All your end result needs to do is maintain the viewer's suspension of disbelief, their capacity to believe that what they're looking at is more than just a series of lines on a page.
To a lesser degree, we can see similar issues on this ant, where the initial head mass was drawn, and then a new ellipse was drawn on top of it. In this case, instead of simply drawing a new ellipse on top, the solution would have been to attach an additional mass to the ball to extend it out, as shown here. This holds to the concept of construction - building things out piece by piece, defining their relationships in three dimensions rather than just in the two dimensions of the page. While this is "additive construction", there is subtractive construction as well as discussed in these notes, but it doesn't apply as effectively to organic subject matter.
The last point I wanted to mention was that I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. 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 here, here, on this ant's leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well). Just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.
With that pointed out, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. You're definitely moving in the right direction, and you will continue to improve as you move forwards. Just make sure to draw bigger and to put the rest of the page to use when there is space left over. You're already 5 months deep into this course, you owe it to yourself to push yourself to your limit throughout its entirety to gain as much as you can from the time invested.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
Staedtler Pigment Liners
These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.
Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).