Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals

6:30 PM, Thursday October 29th 2020

DAB Lesson 5 - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/X7XesKg

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Hello Uncomfortable!

Here is my Lesson 5 homework. Took me a long time! Please let me know if there's any trouble viewing. Also I threw in an extra llama because my cat jumped on my notebook for the second one. At least that's what I'm blaming that llama drama on.

Thank you!

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8:40 PM, Monday November 2nd 2020

As a whole I think you're doing a pretty good job. You're showing a lot of signs that you've paid a good deal of attention to how your constructions consist of simple forms that exist and relate to one another in three dimensions, and the way in which you're laying those forms out and building them upon one another shows good observational skills and strong study of your reference images.

There are just a few issues I want to address - some of them show improvement over the set, but others are more notable and require a bit more attention.

The first issue that stood out to me was that early on, you were drawing your eyesockets as simple ellipses. As you moved through, you did improve upon this, breaking them down into individual straight lines being cut into the surface of your forms. That said, there is still room for improvement. What I want you to think about when drawing your eye sockets is that these often mark the first step of taking rounded surfaces and breaking them into a series of planes. The edge of the eye socket define one edge of many different planes of the face - moving forward we can extend these out into the muzzle, for example, which itself will be separated into planes, but the eye socket is where it starts.

The second issue has to do with how you're drawing a lot of your additional masses - especially those that sit on the joints of the legs, but also in some cases with the bigger ones sitting on the torso itself. You have a tendency of drawing them as arbitrary blobs without actually considering how that form is going to wrap around the underlying structure. As shown here, when drawing the outline of your next additional mass, how you draw it is either going to make it look like a three dimensional form wrapping around the existing structure, or it's going to make it look like a flat shape that has been pasted on top. You can also see examples of this in these notes.

Related to these additional masses, one thing I want you to stop doing altogether is wrapping your structure (additional masses and all) in a final outline. You can see what I mean by looking at this donkey, specifically this leg where I've marked out little areas in red. Basically it looks like you drew a final outline around the entirety of the leg, and bridged across small areas, altering the silhouette that resulted from the 3D forms themselves. Don't do this - if you want to add some structure that fills in a gap or bridges across a space, do so with another 3D form. The silhouette should be the result of the 3D forms you've combined, not an artificially created shape you've drawn in one go on the page.

Aside from these points, your work in this lesson is coming along quite well. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so just be sure to practice the points I raised on your own.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
1:55 AM, Tuesday November 3rd 2020

Thank you very much! Especially the point concerning eyesockets-- I have been having trouble with imagining how the eyesocket fits into the skull, and I think your observation about how I'm not really breaking it down properly into a series of planes is spot on. I'll keep practicing animals on my own, and get started on the 250 cylinders!

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