Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

2:21 PM, Friday April 9th 2021

Lesson 4 - Album on Imgur

Imgur: http://imgur.com/gallery/EZVqbNq

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i would love to have my work critiqued.

here are some of my personal critiques ;

  • I found it so hard to draw those mini sausages (legs) from shoulder . And due to my own impatience and not ghosting them properly they ended up wobbly plus unconvincing. i also drew some with some wrists that i am guilty for.

  • In the beetle drawing , i found it so confusing since its leg was emerging from abdomen. ( in the reference picture.) Can you please suggest me on what i should in such situations ?

  • The proportion of head thorax and abdomen is soo unbalanced in the mosquito . Can i get other critiques on why it looks soo off ?

Thankyou

-tryingtodrawabox

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2:47 PM, Tuesday May 18th 2021
edited at 2:51 PM, May 18th 2021

Hello there, congrats on finishing the lesson! I'll be looking over your work.

Starting with your sausages, it seems that you were trying to stick to the characteristics of a simple sausage but you're not fully there yet. Remember that your sausages should be two equal spheres connected by a tube of consistent width . You occasionally had some issues with placing your ellipses/contours inside the sausage. Try to ghost through each line until you're comfortable with where that line sits on the paper. You did a good job with varying the degrees of your ellipses to create a better illusion of depth though.

Moving onto your constructions, I'll try to point out any mistakes I see to help you moving forward but you honestly did an amazing job here, congrats!

  • First thing that I'd like to point out is your use of shading. Even though you usually did a good job with using cast shadows to show how forms relate to each other (on the abdomen of your ant construction, for example) you occasionally strayed away from this and instead used form shading/hatching on your forms (like in the legs of your spider construction). Keep in mind that we're only allowed to use cast shadows since our main goal is to show how each form relates to each other, not to create a pretty picture. You can revisit this part of lesson 2 to get a better explanation.

  • This isn't as big of a deal but there were a couple of cases where you went slightly overboard with line weight. (on the thorax of your ant, the abdomen of your beetle and the thorax of your mosquito, for example) The main use of line weight is to show the relation between forms in very limited areas (like shown here). When you only use line weight to only show how forms overlap each other, it really helps make the image more readable. When you start using it more loosely though, line weight only really helps reinforce the silhouette. Try to think about how the line weight you're about the place helps show the relation between the forms and when placing the line weight, only draw through the parts where it's necessary (following the method presented here) instead of drawing through the entire line.

  • I'm seeing that you think the mosquito construction looks rather off. I haven't seen your ref so I can't give an exact answer but the abdomen of your construction looks like it's connected to the thorax through the middle of it, although on the pictures I've seen online, it looks like it's supposed to be connecting through to the top of the thorax instead. Also the abdomen looks like it's supposed to be made out of four planes instead of a normal sausage. But honestly, your construction looks pretty good!

  • In the beetle construction, it can be a bit confusing since the legs are supposed to emerge from the thorax but in some cases, thorax actually reaches into the abdomen! You can take a look at a part of this video (10.23-12.42) for a better explanation.

I don't think I have anything else to add! If you have any questions however, I'd be happy to hear them! You did a great job overall so I'm going to mark this as complete, good luck ahead!

Next Steps:

move on to lesson 5

This community member feels the lesson should be marked as complete, and 2 others agree. The student has earned their completion badge for this lesson and should feel confident in moving onto the next lesson.
edited at 2:51 PM, May 18th 2021
7:51 AM, Saturday May 29th 2021

Oh my god ,

Thankyou, so much for your time and critique ,

I'm sorry that i replied after 10 days ( i don't come to the website very often , I only come here once in a while to clear doubts about certain things )

I don't really have much question , And yes I looked into things you said i had some problem with , Thankyou so much . I'll try my best to not repeat them . And i'll be careful with my hatching lines and line weight too . Thankyou for that insect drawing video , I'll be getting more knowledge from it now :))

And Today i guess I'll be completing my lesson 5 . I would really appreciate if you look into it too , maybe after a day or two?

Sincerely,

Tryingtodrawabox

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