Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals
3:39 PM, Wednesday August 30th 2023
Some of the photos appear lighter than they are in real life, so a lot of the marks that you see would be darker if you were to see them in-person.
Hi Pikscarots! I'll take care of checking your homework.
It will be more practical to go in parts:
Organic Intersections: over all, these look good. Although on the first page, the sausage that is more on top looks a bit static, even as if it had been cut out from behind.
On the second page, in the middle there is a sausage that seems to deflate where it intersects the larger one. Take a look at these photos 1 - 2.
Birds: The first bird looks good. The main masses (pelvis, rib cage, head,) are well positioned, and the shapes placed on top of these seem to follow the contour of the base.
I will suggest you not to fill the eye with black. In this drawing, this has flattened the shape of the eye, it looks like there is only a hole.
(Oh, and you built the hind leg with a deformed sausage, remember these should be consistent in thickness).
The second bird shows good use of techniques. The planes forming the head look solid and fit well. The use of tubes with ellipses for the long neck is well done.
I will only mention about the back, it looks a bit poor. It's as if a piece was cut off at the end. I'm not saying it's not really like that, but adding some hair at the end would give it a little more life.
Other Animals:
I'll start by talking about the first wolf because there are a lot of things that can be corrected here. It looks as if it was made of pipes; a big part of this is due to not having modified the silhouette, and another part is due to not having designed its parts better.
I'll leave this image where I work more on that problem.
I like how in the other animals you used perspective in various ways. Not many people do that in these lessons. In your case it looks awesome and I will ask you to keep it up.
The only problem I notice in all the other drawings is the poor design of their legs. Refer to this image.
Conclusion:
You seem to have understood and applied the most important part of the lesson, move on when you feel ready.
Good luck, and keep working with what I mentioned!
Thank you for critiquing my work. I really appreciate that you've provided some images to go along with your comments, especially for the legs as I had struggled a lot with them. Good day!
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.
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