Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals

9:27 AM, Sunday September 27th 2020

Drawabox Lesson 5 - Triveil - Album on Imgur

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/M7yb95i.jpg

Post with 19 views. Drawabox Lesson 5 - Triveil

Couple notes:

  • Not a fan of the heads I did, I'll do more while waiting for your feedback (and maybe add them at the end)

  • I tried to apply what you said last time, that I tended to use the original shapes as just guidelines but not as real forms that I keep, but I don't feel super confident about it, sometimes I added forms on both sides of the original form, and it feels like I'm disregarding the original form. This is notable for the legs, I don't know if I added too much form on some of them as the original sausage is completely hidden sometimes.

  • Side-note about last time: I only used one pen, but I wasn't using the recommended one, as I didn't have any left, and I didn't want to break lockdown or order non-vital stuff, and I thought it was close enough. But indeed, I didn't realize it could go much thinner than the .5 you recommended, this time I exclusively used those.

  • Actual question I should have asked before lesson 3 tbh, when you say "do X pages of Y", I feel like I'm phoning it in by doing only one Y per page, but on the other hand it's better to work big, and you did say not to do more than the required pages, so for the future homework, is it best to stick to one subject per page, as big as possible (missed the mark on that a couple times here), or do 2-3 subjects per page? or maybe one big and fill the rest of the page with smaller ones?

Thanks in general for your feedback, I cannot even begin to express how good it is and how much my whole way of thinking about how I draw changes every time.

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3:38 AM, Tuesday September 29th 2020

Starting just to answer that question at the end, there's nothing wrong with just doing one drawing to a page. The way that I generally explain it these days is that your focus on that first drawing is providing it with as much room as it requires, without artificial constraints or limitations. Perhaps this'll take up the whole page, perhaps it won't. Once you're done that drawing, you can assess how much page you have left - if there's room enough for another, then go ahead and add it, otherwise don't worry about it. So it's not a hard "just draw 1 per page", but more a matter of priorities. You want to make full use of the page one way or the other.

Starting with your organic intersections, your second page is notably better than the first. In both you're capturing a strong sense of solidity to the forms, but what's missing in the first - at least for some of them - is a believable sense of weight. That sausage you've got towards the upper left is arcing on its own, rather than slumping down under its weight (and the weight of the one above it), and this serves to contradict the illusion of gravity. The one to the right that seems to be standing upright does much the same. In this regard your second page is considerably better, with much stronger examples of gravity in how most of these interact with one another.

Moving onto your animal constructions, for the most part I'm actually very pleased with your results. It's not perfect, and I have some suggestions to offer, but as a whole you're aware of the tools at your disposal and you are attempting to leverage them in the places where they fit best. You're treating things as 3D forms, and overall you're showing an amount of awareness of each of those forms as being three dimensional that carries over into the entirety of your construction.

The main issue that I'm seeing comes down to precisely how you're draw those additional masses. You're using them in all the right places, but they're not quite integrating with the structure beneath them, so in many cases it feels like the could fall off the body as it moves around. If we think about what musculature looks like - all the meat of a body - it's all a bunch of separate pieces that cling firmly to one another, and they are structurally designed to fit together like pieces of a puzzle. They wrap around the various parts of the body, and they feel as though they're purpose-made to suit each other.

The first issue here is that you rely very heavily on contour lines - specifically the contour lines that sit on the surface of a single form. This serves to make your individual masses look 3D, but they do so in isolation. When a student focuses too much on these contour lines as their tool-of-choice, they end up paying less attention to how they draw the mass in the first place (specifically its silhouette), knowing that the real work will happen when they add the contour lines. But this is not so.

In fact, this diagram used to show contour lines on the masses themselves, but I removed them specifically for this reason: they're not necessary. The main focus here is how we actually draw the additional mass's silhouette, how we wrap it around the structures beneath it to really mould it in. I go into detail about this in these additional notes here.

This applies not only to the big masses you add along the torso, but also those on the legs. I've pointed these out on one of your foxes, though the rest of it was really quite well done. I would however recommend that you get in the habit of making the eyesockets somewhat bigger, so you have more room to push the size of the eyeballs too. A common mistake is to make the eyes really cramped and small.

To be honest, this is really my only concern. As a whole I think you're doing a great job, and a telltale sign of that is the fact that your hybrid came out great. Now, given that the whole understanding of how to apply these additional masses is so important as a building block of organic constructions, it is something I want to make sure you can apply as well as possible - so there will be revisions, but not too much.

Before I mark this lesson as complete, I'd like to see two more pages of animal drawings, focusing on what I laid out above. Don't get into any detail/texture, and additionally I'd like you to try and work without any contour lines that sit along the surface of a single form. Those that define the relationship between multiple forms (like form intersections, or like those we use at the joints between sausages in our legs) are totally fine, and are still encouraged.

Next Steps:

Please submit two more pages of animal drawings, as explained at the end of the critique.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
3:31 PM, Thursday October 1st 2020

Revisions: https://imgur.com/a/9zx8VTB

I don't know why I focused so much on contour lines, but yeah it looks much more 3D now.

As for making the forms "fit together like pieces of a puzzle", I get the idea, but I'm not quite sure how to do it; I tried pushing the forms a bit further onto each other (tho I didn't go far enough imo), but I feel I'm missing something else to make the form feel tailor made for the job.

Again, thanks for the reviews, they are super insightful.

9:14 PM, Thursday October 1st 2020

This is definitely much, much better. While you may feel uncertain about the whole puzzle thing, from what I'm seeing in your head constructions you're definitely grasping it pretty well. In terms of the rest of the body, it's really just a matter of ensuring that when you're drawing one mass, you're thinking of all the others that are already present along the body, and sometimes pushing yourself to actually extend things out so the different masses touch and wrap around one another even more.

For example, with the wolf's big driver shoulder muscles, if we wanted to put a mass just above there along its spine, we'd droop it down and have it "grip" the shoulder muscle below while wrapping around the other masses around it.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
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