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8:43 AM, Friday January 3rd 2025
Hello Cyberkitty, I’ll be critiquing your submission today. If you have any questions, feel free to ask below. With that said, I’ll go ahead and review your submission.
Forms drawn look consistent, and the usage of contour lines appropriately describes the 3D aspect. But the structure of a few forms gives away the illusion that they could balance on top of each other. The bottom sausage on both pages curls upwards and almost looks “frozen” to support the masses above. If we think of these forms as water balloons, it's much easier to judge how the masses will behave against one another. I drew over one of your pages over here to demonstrate that behaviour. Cast shadows generally project well onto forms below. In future warm-ups try pushing the light source further in the top left or right of the page for more of a challenge.
Animal Constructions
Line quality is fairly consistent between all constructions and it’s nice to see you’re being attentive with your ellipses to ensure they all are drawn through at least 2-3 times.
Cranium/Ribcage/Pelvis
The sausage connecting the ribcage and pelvis is conveyed accurately. This relationship is important to establish the gesture of the torso but also to create a strong solidarity for additional forms we choose to add later. There’s a few inconsistencies with the ribcage missing the ellipse connection to the cranium. I’m seeing a few instances where you do include them like on the deer, leopard and horse constructions but then returning back to a floating cranium for the other constructions. Uncomfy covers that portion here in the wolf demo, ultimately it breaks down the illusion of the entire construction if we don’t define where forms start and end. I’ve drawn over your deer and bird constructions to demonstrate.
Leg Construction
There’s some deviation from the sausage method with a variation of procedures used to construct both hooved and non-hooved legs. Most notably on one of your deer constructions where an ellipse is used as a joint to connect the thigh and lower leg. Or on the wolf constructions that tend to resemble long cylinders. Remember the aim for the sausages is to be as simple as possible. Elodin seems to have mentioned the usage of simple sausages in your Lesson 4 critique so it’s mostly a matter of transferring that into your Lesson 5 constructions. Step 3 of the donkey informal demo is a good place to see how we should capture the rhythm of the animal leg with a chain of sausages.
While we’re here, I’ll include the boxy method of drawing paws introduced here. You may have seen this from the puma demo informal demo, in short we use the silhouette of a box to represent the paw instead of ellipses or organic forms. In this example here, I’ve taken your leopard to implement both methods. Try to use these methods in your constructions going forward.
Head Construction
Looks okay for the most part, I think you’ve done well to create the footprint for the eye socket and muzzle but get stuck somewhere along the way and ultimately fall back to partial forms. Treat the additional forms such as the brow ridge and cheeks as puzzle pieces and arrange planes around the cranium to fit them accordingly. The moose and tapir head demo’s present a good strategy in tackling building forms.
Additional Forms
In a few of these constructions you slip into drawing flat 2D forms or will have drawn forms that are incomplete with no defined association with the form it sits on top of. DIO offers good insight into the difference between 2D and 3D application in this example here . This sort of habit is similar to the floating head issue mentioned earlier. I took your deer construction to highlight those partial forms in blue and then how you want to approach those 3D forms in red. Just to emphasize, make sure every individual form is fully drawn through and wraps around the underlying forms to convey their solidarity.
Texture/Fur
Not much to say here, I can tell you’re being deliberate with your strokes for the most part.
Alright then I think I covered all the major points with your submission. But before I send you off to the cylinder challenge, I would like to see the items listed below to make sure you've understood the general feedback:
1 page of any hooved quadruped
- For the leg construction, start off with simple sausages and use additional forms to build up the accompanying masses.
Next Steps:
- 1 page of any hooved quadruped
12:58 PM, Monday January 6th 2025
Hello, senj!
Thank you for the critique! I tried to pay attention to everything you said but it feels like the sausage method didn't work for me here https://imgur.com/a/tG0zafs. I think my kinda branches method gave better result in terms of making deers' legs straight and stiff which is close to the reference. Or I'm just not used to draw legs based on sausages?
8:44 PM, Monday January 6th 2025
Hey Cyberkitty,
I appreciate the effort to stick to the critique recommendations. The sausage forms are clear, just missing those contour lines at the joints. The additional forms are also on the right track with conveying their spatial relationship as they press against each other.
I can see why you might have conflicting feelings about the method itself since it doesn't completely reflect how rigid the legs are. We favor the sausage in order to capture the gesture of the leg while retaining similar volume to the branches. The branch method tends to make it much more difficult to rein the curves and overall flattens the leg construction. Although we're stuck with using sausages, we can still alter them to fit our scenario.
I'm not sure if you've done the Puma informal demo, but it presents a similar situation in which the reference does show a "stiff" leg. Since we can vary the amount of bend, DIO solves this with individual sausages that are subtle in curvature but still convey that the leg itself is straight. Sort of like a balloon tube, we can choose as much or as little to bend the sausage. Getting this method down takes some practice to get comfortable with; like you mentioned, it's possible you might not be used to it yet.
Our goal with these animal constructions is not to create a 1:1 copy of the animal reference. References act as a source of information to pull certain features and apply them under the methods we've learned. As long as you're attempting to adhere to the lesson instructions as much as possible, it's totally fine if the end result isn't 100% anatomically accurate.
All in all, I think you understand the Lesson 5 concepts well, so I’ll go ahead and send you off to the 250 Cylinder Challenge. Keep up the good work.
Next Steps:
Remember to take these exercises into your warm-ups (10–15 minutes), and you can move on towards the 250 Cylinder Challenge. Good Luck
10:10 AM, Tuesday January 7th 2025
Thank you!!!
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