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6:52 PM, Monday April 12th 2021

So there are a few concerns I have with this revision, which I've marked out directly on the drawing.

  • There are a lot of signs of general sloppiness in areas of the linework - a lot of places where there should only be one line, I can clearly see multiple that overlap slightly, but diverge and wobble as well. There's no good reason for there to be multiple lines - for example along the edges of the additional mass on the cat's back.

  • On the back legs, you didn't really pay enough attention to your reference when placing your additional masses, and didn't consider how the silhouettes of some of those masses ought to wrap around the structure. The front leg was definitely better, although you kind of "smoothed" them out a bit too much, so make sure you're maintaining some of their volume instead of just mushing them into the same structure. You want the additional masses to have some individual impact on the leg's silhouette.

  • Don't just draw toes by adding lines on the original foot form. Construct them as their own forms, especially in a case like this cat where the toes are very distinct.

  • When drawing the head, starting with a smaller cranial ball can help avoid situations where things get a little more "smushed". The cranial ball here wasn't so big that it couldn't be dealt with, but it was definitely on the larger side and may have made things harder.

  • The structure laid out in the informal demo I shared previously should be followed more closely to lay down the basic structure. Here you seem not to have followed the same kind of eye socket shape, and you focused a lot more on adding more complex masses instead of just laying down the basic structure.

Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, your reference image is really low resolution, and that can make things a lot harder to distinguish and identify. Always work with high resolution images wherever possible.

I'd like you to take another swing at this, taking care to address all the points I've raised here.

Next Steps:

One more animal construction.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
10:04 PM, Thursday April 15th 2021
edited at 10:10 PM, Apr 15th 2021

https://imgur.com/a/VbNQFIx

Added two images from progress additionaly

edited at 10:10 PM, Apr 15th 2021
11:52 PM, Thursday April 15th 2021

This is definitely much more in the right direction. You're building up your additional masses pretty well, although with more practice designing the smaller ones on the legs (crafting the silhouettes with inward curves responding to existing parts of the underlying structure) you'll be able to improve them even further. That'll just be a matter of more mileage though.

For the sausage structures themselves, I think while in the end you eventually get to the kind of solid structure we're after, you start off pretty timid. The components of the base structure don't really convey the kind of solidity we're looking for. Compare that to this tracing of the structure I see preset in your reference image, which carries a lot more solid structure with clear intersections between the segments. Also note that even though they're not really visible, you can basically trust that all quadrupedal animals are going to have big shoulder/hip masses that help drive their ability to move around. Blocking them in will give you more structure to play with.

I'm pretty happy with how you've approached your head construction. I'd probably work a bit more with straighter lines for the eye socket, but aside from that you're building a nice, solid puzzle of pieces that all wedge into one another.

All in all, you're headed in the right direction. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

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

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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