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9:16 AM, Tuesday May 25th 2021
Hello again Kap, congrats on finishing lesson 4! I'll be looking over your work.
Also I know we talked about a couple of your constructions on the discord channel so I'll try to be brief when talking about them.
Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, you generally sticked to the characteristics of simple sausages which is great. However with your contour lines, you usually drew them pretty flat and kept the degrees of them the same. Remember that just like the branches, varying the degrees of your contour curves really helps sell the illusion of depth. Also when drawing the contour curves, try to think about the volume and the shape of the form you're drawing them on.
Moving onto your constructions, you honestly did a great job here. I'll try to point out any mistakes I see without being too nitpicky though.
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You generally tried to work additively as much as possible, starting from simple forms and adding new forms on top of them in order to create your constructions. You occasionally deviated from this method though. Instead of adding forms to an underlying construction, you instead tried to draw the entire form in a single go (the front and the back legs of your grasshopper and the claws of your lobster, for example). I'm going over this again because this is an incredibly important part of lesson 5. You'll start to realize this with your animal constructions as well but I'll mention it anyways: When drawing your organic constructions, the forms you're adding to the initial construction should almost feel like piles of clay that you're adding to a 3D gesture that you've created (with sausages, spheres, whatever). This is a very powerful approach in my opinion because this way, you will start to think deeper about how each individual form wraps around each other (like on this dog leg demo, for example), which is the main part of most of these construction lessons.
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You did a really good job with your cast shadows and I'm really happy to see that after pointing it out on your lesson 3 critique, you managed to limit your use of shading only to show how each form relates to each other. Not only this helps make your constructions look more convincing, it also saves your overhead view constructions from looking 2D (like on your bee construction). However, on two constructions, I'm seeing that you colored in the little spots on the abdomen of your insects (this one and this one, to be precise). I think this was mentioned on discord as well but although they don't look too distracting here, these have the potential to flatten out the entire construction so try to avoid coloring in to show the actual color of your refs. (If you look at the comments of the tiger head demo video, you'll see that Uncomfy admits that coloring in wasn't a part of the lesson and should've been avoided)
I don't think I have anything else to add! I'm sorry if this critique was rather weak. Even though I tried to make as many pointers as possible, I didn't want to overwhelm you by going over the same mistakes we talked about on the discord server.
Also I know you completed this lesson quickly because you had a lot of free time but with your animal constructions, try to really take your time with each page and observer your references closely. This actually came up in your lobster construction as well. If you look at the scales on the tail of your construction, you'll notice that they kinda look like sausages instead of scales. This is mainly because you weren't fully paying attention to the silhouette of the tail on your reference. This is obviously not a big issue but I just though I'd give an example.
Overall, you did a great job with the lesson so I'll go ahead and mark this as complete. Good luck with lesson 5!
Next Steps:
Move on to lesson 5.
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