Check Out NMA    Learn More About our Partnership
Close and Enjoy Drawabox Ad-free
View Full Submission View Parent Comment
0 users agree
6:46 PM, Tuesday November 15th 2022

Hey , i was writing a critique for your submission over the week , but i see Elodin has already done one.

The points are largely the same, but these were written slightly differently so i thought they might still be of use to you.

I think Elodin's critique is on point.

Hello Co-lord44! I'll do my best to critique your work.

  • ORGANIC INTERSECTIONS

--"Starting with your organic intersections , I can see you've drawn these while paying attention to how they wrap around on top of each other , and made sure they felt like a solid structure that wouldn't fall over if we were to advance forward in time."

--(Elodin has noted how squishy some of your sausages were ,but i still think the second page went far better in that regard)--

A note about the shadows , i do quickly want to mention this point; this lesson is quite far from lesson 2, but it's very important in showing how these forms relate with each other.

Be sure to push the cast shadows just a little further , in simpler words ,also try to make a cast shadow follow the contour lines of any other sausages / ground under .

As shown here, i've gone over your work with a couple of examples ; your shadow shapes are good here as you can see , it's just a matter of them sticking to the sausages too much.

  • ANIMAL CONSTRUCTIONS

Moving onto the main part , overall you're doing very good , although there's some things i feel i should point out before you move on.

The first and major point i want to mention is the legs , more specifically their shape.

In drawabox specifically , it's best to use sausages as your base shape, and then add additional masses later on in a constructive manner, in order to end up with your end result as shown here, in another student's work.

Try to make said sausages curve ever so slightly, as it makes it easier to draw and more flowy

-- (you can see this best in Elodin's first point in their Notes) --

I wanted to mention a point about texture, as you seemed to be using it far too much in this fox, but it seems you may have realized that on your own , as your later constructions seem to be improving in that regard.

--you were going to be asked revisions here , which were also gonna be 2 as Elodin said, i was going to add an organic intersection page too , but since it's a page that you can practice in warmups , and you've already shown improvement on your second page, i think you would be fine without it--

As said , i suggest following Elodin's critique , I hope this helps either way, and good luck!

You can definetly do it ,keep it up.

Next Steps:

Same as Elodin

  • 2 Pages of animal constructions
When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
5:05 AM, Monday November 21st 2022

My revisions are in the reply above from Elodin

8:10 PM, Tuesday November 29th 2022

Hello Colord44, apologies for the delay , i'll give a look to your revisions until Elodin does..

Starting with the angus bull, it's great to see that you've used the sausage method on its legs , wrapping forms on it afterwards, just be careful not to cut off any forms as you've done here on its' back leg, but otherwise your sausages are looking good.

Most of the forms also wrap around pretty well, however there seem to be a few that don't seem to interact with each other quite as much as they should , or end up being cut off, the biggest example of this being the sagging forms on the front , which get cut off by the head.

Don't be afraid to be bold and draw through your forms, it won't look pretty , but as these are just exercises it is a great way to improve your spatial reasoning.

There's also a couple of cases where lines were drawn as if on 2d space like this one on the front leg.

To explain this , we have to make a distinction between actions in 2d and 3d space, i'll try to explain in a similar way as what uncomfortable usually would in official critiques.

Actions in 2d space , where you put down marks down without considering the relationships between the forms they're meant to represent and the forms that are already present in the scene.

Actions in 3d space, where we're relating everything we draw to what is already on the page , drawing it as if there's actually a three dimensional object already there in the scene.

Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we want, but plenty of those marks can can contradict the illusion of solidity that we're trying to achieve and remind the viewer that they're looking at a series of lines on a piece of paper.

To avoid this ,we can adhere to specific rules in our constructions, rules which respect the solidity of our constructions.

One of said rules is , once you've put something down on the page, don't try to alter its sillhouette.

Its' sillhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but it's connection to it is based on that shape. If you change that, you won't change the form it represents , you will just break the illusion of 3D and get a flat shape. We can see this best in this diagram of what happens when we cut back in the sillhouette of a form, although admittedly most of the lines i'm referring to in your case are extending a form instead, but both cases are marks in 2d space.

This is not much of an issue here, as i can only see it on a couple of places and it's very minor on the bull, but it can be seen a little more prominently in your cow , especially its underside, where you added a few lines instead of building forms on top of each other.

I do think you're doing pretty good, it's just a matter of building things up slowly , take care to draw through everything and make forms interact more with each other.

I'd like you to do one more animal construction , take as much time as you need with it.

Good luck , i'm sure you can do this, as most mistakes you did aren't happening consistently it's probably just a matter of absorbing the information.

So i just updated the page before sending this and saw elodin's review, it's probably far easier to understand as it's a video, Either way i hope this i helpful to you.

Next Steps:

1 Animal Constructions

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
5:37 PM, Monday December 5th 2022

Here is the animal construciton rivision: https://imgur.com/a/iOW1lRr

View more comments in this thread
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Staedtler Pigment Liners

Staedtler Pigment Liners

These are what I use when doing these exercises. They usually run somewhere in the middle of the price/quality range, and are often sold in sets of different line weights - remember that for the Drawabox lessons, we only really use the 0.5s, so try and find sets that sell only one size.

Alternatively, if at all possible, going to an art supply store and buying the pens in person is often better because they'll generally sell them individually and allow you to test them out before you buy (to weed out any duds).

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.