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7:16 PM, Friday April 17th 2020

There is definitely progress here, especially in how I can see signs that you're thinking more about how forms wrap around one another. There are however signs that you're being somewhat sloppy when it comes to the actual execution of your lines, which suggests to me that you have it in you to do far better.

I've put some notes on top of your moose. As you can see, there are a number of issues that come from sloppiness, for instance:

  • You're not employing the sausage method entirely correctly. You're close, but you're sometimes drawing stretched ellipses instead of sausages, sometimes the ends of your sausages are of different sizes, and pretty much across the board the contour curves you add at the joints don't wrap around the forms properly. Refer back to these notes from the contour line exercise from lesson 2.

  • You have a tendency to square off one end of your additional masses, instead of continuing to round them off. Remember that these masses are like water balloons that you're piling up over one another. They don't get sharp corners.

  • With the legs especially, you're vastly oversimplifying things. Rather, you're putting down a basic sausage chain, but not much more. Moose legs have plenty more going on with them form-wise, but you're largely overlooking it. Remember that once you've got your sausage structure in place, you can add further masses to it as shown here.

Now your constructions are getting better in a big way, but there are a lot of places where I think you're just allowing yourself not to put in 100% of what you can into each and every stroke. Remember that you should be applying the ghosting method to every line, taking the time to think about the specific job every mark is meant to accomplish before preparing and executing with confidence.

I suspect that if you're tackling all of these drawings in a single sitting, that you may be focusing on getting all of them done during a set period, rationing your time between them. So, to that end, I'm going to ask for one more drawing - draw another moose, and invest as much time into each and every mark, each and every component, as you can. Furthermore, keep looking back at your reference - construction starts out simple, and breaks down into greater levels of complexity. You understand this, based on the bulk of your torso and head, but you need to be able to break down that complexity across the entire body, legs included.

Next Steps:

One more drawing of a moose. Antlers not required.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
11:14 PM, Monday April 20th 2020

https://imgur.com/a/LX8SlcQ

Here it is! I re-read all your feedbacks, practiced my sausages, practiced my organic forms, and went for another go at the moose. I did the antlers anyways, for fun. Took my time with it like you said. You're right, those last three I did all in one sitting. Which is normally not what I do! Normally only did one or two drawings an evening, so it was funny that you picked up on that.

One thing I struggle with is that I find it hard to maintain the overall perspective of the picture in mind when I am rotating the paper to draw a line or ellipses or whatever. i.e. I want to ghost some ellipses on a sausage to get the feel of the shape before I add some more form to that. But in rotating the page, I kind of lose in my mind's eye the overall effect I am going for and it becomes more "line" and less "form", if that makes sense. Any advice?

3:35 PM, Tuesday April 21st 2020
edited at 3:38 PM, Apr 21st 2020

For the issue that you get when rotating the page, I'd recommend looking at the image upright, maybe putting down a couple very small landmarks so you know where the mark you're going to put down is meant to go (like the points when ghosting a straight line - just make sure they're going to get swallowed up by your mark), rotating the page to find a comfortable angle of approach, executing the stroke, then setting it upright once again. That way your planning phases are always in the same, upright orientation, and the rest are just putting down a specific stroke you've already identified.

Looking at your latest moose drawing, you're doing a better job with the sausage method, and I can see a little more put towards thinking about how your forms wrap around one another, but there are still some issues present from last time.

Before I point those out though, I did want to mention two things - you don't seem to be drawing through all of your ellipses (ribcage/pelvis masses, for example), and I mentioned when assigning this revision that you did not need to draw the antlers, but you appear to have missed that instruction.

So, a few things stand out to me in this construction. It certain is getting better and your constructions have many elements that convey an amount of solidity, but the issues listed below do need to be addressed:

  • In your last one, I pointed out the big hump over the shoulders along the spine having a very squared-off bottom edge. The same mass in your newer drawing does have rounder corners, but that bottom is still a pretty straight, flat line that entirely ignores any other masses - like the shoulder muscle - and doesn't actually integrate with it or wrap around it. It just behaves like the rest of the moose's body is smooth rather than made up of other muscle masses that need to be considered.

  • Your head construction's coming along well, but I think that we really need to stress just how every added form and element really needs to think about how it wraps around the parts that already exist. To better convey this, I put together this gif of a moose head construction for you.

  • Also, as a side note, I know my older head-construction demo (which needs to be redone at some point) doesn't do this, but I've found more recently that making a point of having the eye socket, muzzle, cheekbone, brow ridge, etc. all buttress against one another (like a 3D puzzle where they all fit together) is a better approach. You'll see how in the gif above, I have the muzzle fit right up against the eye socket.

  • Here's another head demo I did for another student.

Now as I've mentioned, you do have room for improvement, and while you've shown growth in how you handle forms wrapping around one another, there is a ways to go, I am going to mark this lesson as complete. I think having you repeatedly tackle the same task is going to be less effective than having you move forward and look at construction from a different lens.

Next Steps:

Move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
edited at 3:38 PM, Apr 21st 2020
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