7:13 PM, Thursday April 8th 2021
There are a number of ways in which your work on these animals is moving in the right direction, but I can see a number of areas where some alterations can be made to how you approach certain problems, to yield overall improvement.
Before we get to the meatier bits, there are a number of points that jumped out at me that are fairly straightforward, and I've marked them out on this page:
-
In other pages your linework is somewhat better, but it varies and there are definitely times when you're getting scratchy, or drawing without thinking as much as you should. Remember that contour curves should be drawn with one mark, not several. We only draw through full, complete, ellipses twice before lifting our pen. This is because it helps our arm get into the motion of drawing an elliptical shape, something it naturally wants to do (which helps keep our ellipses more evenly shaped). With anything else (a sausage form for instance) it'd just push that shape towards being elliptical. And of course, with simple marks like these contour curves, there would be no benefit at all because there's no continuous flow, with there being separate start/end points.
-
On your sea horse (and in a number of other places, like this seagull's head), you're cutting back into the silhouette of a form you'd already constructed. This is something I specifically talked about back in my critique of your Lesson 4 work, so I'd like you to go back and reread it a little more carefully to make sure you keep this in mind: once you've constructed a form, you should not be attempting to modify its silhouette in any way. We can only interact with the existing structure or make changes to it by introducing new, complete, fully enclosed 3D forms to it.
-
Remember that whenever you want to add any textural information - for example, the wrinkles on that shark's body - that you should be drawing intentionally designed cast shadow shapes, and specifically thinking about how those shadow shapes would be cast by the textural forms in question. The best approach to this is to first outline the shape and then fill it in, always using this two step process to ensure that you don't slip back into the temptation if just putting arbitrary marks down.
Moving forward, the first major point I wanted to address was how you're drawing your additional masses. Right now, many of them are appearing more like arbitrary blobs. Once drawn, you tend to go over them with contour lines to try and make them feel more solid and 3D, but unfortunately this doesn't work as well as we'd want here, for a couple reasons:
-
Contour lines only make an object feel solid and three dimensional in isolation. They don't help define the relationship between that form and the structure it's attached to in a believable manner, and that's what we're really after here.
-
The more complex the silhouette of a form, the harder the contour lines have to work to make it feel 3D. As soon as you start adding a lot of random complexity, like the wobbly outlines of the additional masses on this bear's back/neck, it goes beyond a contour line's ability to work with.
-
You have a tendency to pile on a lot of contour lines, but you don't really put in the time to draw each one carefully. You're going for quantity over quality, and it isn't working well.
Ultimately none of the contour lines are of any use here - instead, we have to focus entirely on how that additional mass itself is designed, because it's that silhouette that will establish the relationship between the form and the existing structure. One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette.
Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram.
This means that when you actually draw your additional masses, you can't just let your autopilot take over - you have to specifically design how that mass is meant to wrap around the other forms present in the existing structure, as shown on this iblis drawing.
On the iblis, I also pointed out a couple other things:
-
Your use of the sausage method is very inconsistent. Sometimes you use it partially, sometimes you don't use it at all. In my critique of your lesson 4 work, I talked about employing the technique specifically, with all of its attributes. Sticking to simple sausage forms for each segment, and adding a contour line at the joint between segments to help define their relationship in 3D space. I also provided examples on how to wrap additional masses on top of those structures (breaking them into smaller masses instead of wrapping the structure completely in a larger mass. I see you doing this sometimes, but I also see places where you fall back to just drawing a bigger form over the whole thing. This doesn't work particularly well because it causes the original sausage segment to just "float" loosely inside of the new form, providing no clear relationship between them. Wrapping individual, separate pieces around instead provides us clearer areas where the silhouette makes contact with the underlying structure, as shown here.
-
You have this habit of using line weight to encase your whole construction - please refrain from doing this. Line weight is a tool with a specific, limited purpose - to clarify how forms overlap in specific, localized areas. We only apply line weight to small areas, and blend it back into the original linework. What you definitely don't want to do is have line weight jump from one form's edge to another's, as this will flatten out your drawing and smooth over the kinds of pinches and features we're trying to create by building up our masses one at a time. It's like taking a muscular figure and covering it with rubber - a lot of the nuance of their original silhouette gets lost.
Now I've covered a number of points, but there's one last thing I want to draw your attention to. Right now your head construction suggests that you haven't looked over this explanation from the informal demos page. That explanation goes over how to think about the head as a series of individual components that should all be wedged together, like pieces of a 3D puzzle, and when my overhaul of the course reaches lesson 5 (currently I'm still finishing up lesson 1), that approach will be central to how I approach head construction in the future. For now, you'll have to follow what's written there.
I'm going to assign some revisions below, so you can work towards applying what I've pointed out here. As I've mentioned already a couple times, be sure to go back over the critique I gave you for your lesson 4 work as well, as there are some key points you seem to be missing here and there.
Next Steps:
Please submit 5 additional animal constructions. Take your time with each one - I recommend that in order to keep from unintentionally rushing through parts, you should work on no more than one animal construction in a given day. You can always spend more than one day on a single drawing, but you shouldn't try to do any more than that. By being forced to spend your whole sitting on a single drawing, you may find yourself more willing to take your time with every mark, and to think through what each one is meant to contribute to the drawing.