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7:25 PM, Friday August 19th 2022

Unfortunately it seems that you may not have understood what I had explained in regards to avoiding altering the silhouettes of your forms. I will try explaining this again.

Take a look at this diagram. As shown here, in red, you started by defining a ball form for the thorax. This can be perceived as a shape (an ellipse on the page) or as a form (a ball in an imaginary 3D space) depending on how you choose to perceive it.

Then you put down the mark I highlighted in blue, where you cut across the ellipse to effectively alter its shape, cutting it into two pieces - a piece above the blue line that was being cut away, and the piece below the blue line that remained. In doing so, and as demonstrated in this diagram I shared previously, you're eliminating the possibility of us understanding what's been drawn as a 3D form. By cutting the potential ball form's silhouette into two flat shapes, there's no way for us to understand it as though it exists in three dimensions. We are left with only the information we need to understand it as a flat, two dimensional shape.

Now in your response, you were pretty confident that you understood what I was saying. It's not abnormal or uncommon for language barriers to create such misunderstandings, but I did notice that while you attempted an ant for one of your revisions, you do not appear to have referred to the ant head demo I provided previously.

This issue is also not the only one present - while you have made a greater effort to define the joints between the sausage segments with a contour line, you did continue to apply the sausage method incorrectly by drawing ellipses/stretched spheres instead of sausage shapes, as noted as something to avoid on the bottom left of the sausage method diagram.

So, it is possible that you simply didn't give yourself enough time to go through my feedback in order to absorb everything that was shared. It is often necessary to read through that feedback multiple times, as it can be quite dense. Taking notes to help remind you what to pay attention to in between readthroughs can help.

Going back to the important point about ensuring that we're always operating in 3D space, you have to actively try to think of the things you're drawing as though they're solid and tangible - like you're actually introducing chunks of marble into a real 3D world, and everything you draw is adding to it. While the fact that we're drawing on a piece of paper gives us a lot of freedom to put whatever marks we want down, most of those marks are going to break the illusion that we're trying to create.

As mentioned in my last feedback, though perhaps it was not clear enough: Do not try to work subtractively. That means, do not try to cut away pieces of the forms you've drawn. Only work additively for now. I would also encourage you, as I did already, to look at the lobster and shrimp demonstrations from the informal demos page.

As to your question, there's no need to imbalance your warmups. These insect constructions are themselves yet more exercises that give us opportunities to think about how we're combining solid, three dimensional forms together.

Next Steps:

I'd like you to try the same revisions again - but before you tackle those 5 additional pages of insect constructions, I'd like you to also draw along with the lobster and shrimp demos from the informal demos page.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:15 AM, Wednesday October 19th 2022

Okay, so i did shrimp demo and lobster that i skipped previously (don't know why :x) and there's result.

https://imgur.com/a/fqlGlmP

Thank you :)

4:48 PM, Wednesday October 19th 2022

I did mean for you to include those shrimp/lobster drawings with your work, but your work is moving in the right direction. There are a few things I want you to keep in mind going forwards however:

  • Don't fill dark areas in with black - reserve filled areas of black for cast shadows only. Treat the object as though it has no local/surface colour at all, focus only on capturing 3D information.

  • Your legs are still an issue that you're going to want to focus more on - you tend to draw ellipses instead of sausages, you neglect to draw contour lines at the joints as instructed, and sometimes place them elsewhere along the lengths, both of which are specifically addressed in the sausage method diagram. Here on your wasp I've noted some cases where you used ellipses instead of sausages, and even some places where you were cutting into those silhouettes.

  • When adding masses to your drawings, you do still have room to improve in terms of how those silhouettes are designed - right now you're relying entirely on outward curves, which causes them to appear very blobby. The inward curves/sharp corners are required to establish how a form wraps around another. In effect, it's not a matter of "avoid complexity because complexity is bad" - but rather, there are places where complexity is necessary, and places where complexity has no reason to be.

Rather than continuing to address those issues here, I do think that you're generally doing well enough to move on, so you'll be able to continue working on them there, and we'll look at the issues again at that point. As you continue to work through the next one, I recommend you review the feedback you've received thus far for Lesson 4, and keep working on applying it as well as you can.

Next Steps:

Move onto Lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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