Hello Danomech, thank you for responding with your revisions.

The assigned pages are all showing clear improvements in every area discussed in my critique, excellent work. You’re on the right track now and there’s not that much to criticise, at least not that I feel would actually be of benefit to you.

Rather than nitpick at things I can see that you’re aware of and working on, I’ll offer two pieces of additional advice that I hope will help you to continue to get as much as possible out of these exercises when practising them in future.

Firstly, you’re doing a good job of using the sausage method of leg construction, and you’re off to a great start with building additional forms onto your leg armatures to develop a more characteristic representation of the leg in question. There is a way we can push this method even further. A lot of these additions focus primarily on forms that actually impact the silhouette of the overall leg, but there's value in exploring the forms that exist "internally" within that silhouette - like the missing puzzle piece that helps to further ground and define the ones that create the bumps along the silhouette's edge. Here is an example of what I mean, on another student's work. Uncomfortable has blocked out masses along the leg there, and included the one fitting in between them all, even though it doesn't influence the silhouette. This way of thinking - about the inside of your structures, and fleshing out information that isn't just noticeable from one angle, but really exploring the construction in its entirety, will help you yet further push the value of these constructional exercises as puzzles.

Secondly, on this dog the underside of the torso seems slightly confusing to me. I can’t quite tell if the initial torso sausage was pinched inwards here, or if you attempted to cut across it after it was in place. Looking at the corresponding reference I see that this breed has a very small, pinched “waist” so I do understand the decisions you made in your construction. It is possible to construct this type of dog without pinching or cutting the torso sausage, but it requires making the pelvis mass a bit smaller than we normally would. Here is a visual example with a similar breed of dog, I hope it helps.

I appreciate your diligence doing the extra pages of head and feet constructions, it certainly is admirable, and you’re clearly making every effort to understand and apply the techniques as has been asked of you. I do want to quickly point you back to this section of lesson 0 which discusses how to get the most out of Drawabox. Your job as a student is to complete only the work that is assigned, as it is assigned. I’m not aiming to chastise you for your efforts, but making you aware that the feedback I have provided today is based only on the work that was assigned in my critique, as that is the way in which this course was designed to be completed and assessed. To do more always comes back to the student trying to min-max their training, and to try and find the secret unmentioned paths to getting more.

As for your questions, remember that these constructions, like everything we do in this course, are exercises.

For your first question about mistakes becoming compounded across the construction, despite making every effort to observe carefully and ghost your marks, this is totally normal, and not a huge concern for this lesson. We treat the reference as a source of information, which we use to help us decide what forms to draw, and where to place them, but if the resulting construction doesn’t match up with the reference perfectly in some ways, that’s okay. What matters most is thinking through the spatial reasoning puzzle provided, whether we’re building a sunflower, or a flamingo, or a car, and building up the construction as though is it a tangible 3D object, despite working on a flat piece of paper. We will cover more precise construction methods in lesson 6 and 7, starting to divide things evenly in 3D space, mirroring them, and eventually constructing vehicles in proportion.

For your second question, these exercises are not necessarily meant to be used as foundations for finished drawings, and you’re right, they are overly laborious for the results they yield. Think of them more like doing pushups or dribbling a ball, rather than competing in basketball. They’re here to help you build skills, the core fundamentals, not to produce pleasing drawings. Now, can these constructions come out looking good? Absolutely. Just remember that whether they come out looking good or not is irrelevant in terms of what you learn from them. By practising constructions throughout lessons 3-7, we tackle so many spatial reasoning puzzles that we hammer this “thinking in 3D” down into the student’s subconscious, so that when they’re drawing more freely outside of the course they can leverage the skills they have developed, putting down marks that fall in line with the feeling that the subject is 3D, without necessarily fully constructing every form in such a strict and tedious manner. These construction methods aren’t the only way to draw, or even the “right” way to draw, they’re exercises, just like tables of ellipses or the 250 box challenge.

It might help if you think of the construction methods as learning how to use a hammer, or a wrench. The tool might not be what you want to use for a job, but understanding how to use it gives you the choice of applying it if you think it is appropriate for what you’re trying to achieve.

You’ve done really well with these pages, and I’ll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Feel free to move onto the 250 Cylinder Challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.