When drawing something like an antenna on a small scale, making the same type of line really close to a previous line is very difficult. It's so unforgiving because no matter how many times I ghost my marks, I easily end up failing to give the right thickness to the antennas.
Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, these are for the most part coming along pretty well - you're staying fairly close to the characteristics of simple sausages, and your contour curves are fitting snugly within the silhouette of each sausage. I am however definitely picking up on a fair bit of general hesitation/stiffness in your linework that is undermining some of these positives. Be sure to always prioritize executing your marks with confidence. This inevitably can hinder the accuracy of our strokes, but being sure to use the ghosting method and execute the marks from our shoulder can generally help offset that issue - and of course, practice will take care of the rest.
Before I move forward, I do want to mention that I think going forward, if it's possible, taking photos of your work might be preferable to using your scanner. Your scanner's settings are currently really blasting up the contrast, which eliminates some of the nuance of your linework and can also make the drawings a lot harder to parse visually. This normally isn't a problem (I'm quite used to looking at forests of construction lines), but when the scanner artificially ramps up the contrast, it can definitely interfere. Camera phone photos honestly are perfectly fine, especially when the photos are taken using natural light coming in through a window.
Now, moving onto your insect constructions, your work here is for the most part very well done. I do have a few suggestions and adjustments to offer to how you approach certain things, but overall I'm seeing a lot of work being done strictly in 3D space. That is to say, you're putting a lot of effort into figuring out how these forms all relate to one another in 3D space, and your constructions generally come out quite solidly as a result.
To start- there are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time. Right now it appears that you are thinking ahead to how many drawings you'd like to fit on a given page. It certainly is admirable, as you clearly want to get more practice in, but in artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.
Continuing on, the point I raised before about thinking in 3D space, and continually working in 3D space, is very important - and it's something you do most of the time, but there are definitely some cases where you'll jump back into 2D space to put down a quick mark or take another quick shortcut, and unfortunately these things do have a negative impact on what we get out of these exercises. Each drawing here is of course just an exercise - they're little spatial puzzles that we're having our brains solve. We know what we want to work towards, but we have to figure out a feasible path to get there, and every step of the way we have to force our brain to perceive this flat piece of paper as a window looking out into a 3D world.
Because we're drawing on a flat piece of paper, we have a lot of freedom to make whatever marks we choose - it just so happens that the majority of those marks will contradict the illusion you're trying to create and remind the viewer that they're just looking at a series of lines on a flat piece of paper. In order to avoid this and stick only to the marks that reinforce the illusion we're creating, we can force ourselves to adhere to certain rules as we build up our constructions. Rules that respect the solidity of our construction.
For example - once you've put a form down on the page, do not attempt to alter its silhouette. Its silhouette is just a shape on the page which represents the form we're drawing, but its connection to that form is entirely based on its current shape. If you change that shape, you won't alter the form it represents - you'll just break the connection, leaving yourself with a flat shape. We can see this most easily in this example of what happens when we cut back into the silhouette of a form.
You don't do these things too often, but they do come up. If you take a look at this page, I've highlighted in red a few places where you cut into the silhouettes of existing forms in the manner explained in that previous diagram. In blue, I've marked out areas where you've added flat shapes to your construction, effectively extending out the existing silhouettes rather than actually adding more 3D information.
Instead, whenever we want to build upon our construction or change something, we can do so by introducing new 3D forms to the structure, and by establishing how those forms either connect or relate to what's already present in our 3D scene. We can do this either by defining the intersection between them with contour lines (like in lesson 2's form intersections exercise), or by wrapping the silhouette of the new form around the existing structure as shown here.
You can see this in practice in this beetle horn demo, as well as in this ant head demo. You can also see this in action in the shrimp and lobster demos from the informal demos page. This is all part of accepting that everything we draw is 3D, and therefore needs to be treated as such in order for the viewer to believe in that lie.
This kind of thing comes up in the use of the sausage method when constructing our legs as well. This is definitely an approach I've focused on more and more as the course has progressed and evolved, so you'll definitely see me breaking these rules in earlier demos. For example, in the wasp demo we do apply an approach that builds upon the existing structure in a way that does continue to work in 3D space - but it can be done better.
Instead, the approach shown here and here is superior simply because the silhouette of the masses we add makes more overall contact with the existing structure, allowing it to define a stronger relationship in 3D space. You can see this in action here in this ant leg demo, as well as in this dog leg demo (since this will continue to be very relevant throughout the next lesson).
So! Be sure to keep those points in mind - but as I said before, you are definitely doing a great job at most of this already. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you can continue to refine your approach as you work on animals.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto lesson 5.
After digesting this information, I have a couple of questions referring to your examples.
I just can't see how I made them 2D, and the more I think about it, the more it confuses me.Would it have made it any easier to read the ant's thorax if I added another mark in there? The thorax had two forms on its back. If I made any other mark, it would have looked like there was a third form on there... It would easily get confusing with how cluttered some of these drawings become.
The upper blue portion of the ant's head is supposed to be kind of behind its [original flat shape]'s silhouette, so maybe a mark connecting the eye with the other one in the back would have helped make it feel more three-dimensional? If I had made an ellipse on the [original flat shape]'s silhouette to connect it with the farthest bump, it would have broken the illusion of there being a second one in front of it, based on our point of view.
I either purposefully extended the [original flat shape]'s silhouette with the lower blue part (which is unnecessary for this much length) or it's just part of the same mark used to draw the silhouette in the first place.
As for the red portion of the treehopper next to the ant, I can see that a better way to handle this region would have been with adding the head's plane instead of subtracting it.
I simply made the head's edge thicker than the silhouette to distinguish it because the plane that I had cut is facing away from us at this angle, but this doesn't seem to work as well as I thought it would. It's VERY difficult for me to see how this is a problem or how it could be solved. In your demonstration of Correct vs Incorrect Subtractive Construction, you have highlighted the opposite plane of the lower form in hatching, which you forbid to use in any circumstance. So...
What is the correct way of doing here? If I absolutely had to subtractively construct this part, should I make the contour lines curve around the back plane of the head?
The important point you may be missing here is that our goal here is not to reproduce the reference image at any cost. As I mentioned in my initial critique, each of these drawings is just an exercise - an opportunity to have our brain attempt to think in three dimensional space, even as the marks we put down exist on the flat surface of a two dimensional page.
So, when you ask "What is the correct way of doing here? If I absolutely had to subtractively construct this part, should I make..." the issue is that within the context of this course, approaching these constructions additively is part of the exercise.
There are absolutely ways to work subtractively while continuing to work in 3D space (as shown in this diagram - you'd take your existing 3D form and split it into separate parts by defining the separation with a contour line that wraps around the 3D structure), but again - for the purposes of this course, it's not really important right now.
In Lessons 4 and 5, we're just getting used to the idea of all the forms we add to our constructions actually existing strictly in 3D space, and we avoid jumping back and forth between 2D and 3D because of the goals of this course. In Peter Han's Dynamic Sketching - the course this one was built upon - he definitely jumps back and forth between forms and shapes freely, and achieves a lot of really fantastic results, but when I was taking that course many years ago, I definitely noticed that some students (those who had stronger spatial reasoning skills) managed to apply what Peter was teaching just fine, and others (those who didn't have as much experience manipulating 3D forms in their heads) basically just fell flat.
So as I developed Drawabox over the years, I shifted more towards focusing completely on building spatial reasoning skills, and thus I push students more towards working in this manner. Always remember - it's never about specific cases like the ones you listed in your response (which is why I'm responding more generally, rather than addressing each one). It's about the underlying purpose of what we're doing, and how it's meant to develop your skills well beyond the resulting drawing. The drawing itself, once finished, doesn't actually matter.
One thing I should mention though is that if something's actually already flat - like a leaf, a petal, or an insect's wing - then modifying its silhouette is fine. It's just when those forms actually have volume to them (which is the majority of what we deal with here) that we want to ensure the volume is maintained throughout, so we can continue to understand what we're working with as it exists in three dimensions.
I get that this can definitely be confusing, but keep pushing forward. It's entirely normal to see these issues in Lesson 4 (and to be fair, these "rules" are things I haven't fully incorporated into the lesson material proper yet, and am currently only sharing in critique - it'll be added when my overhaul of the course material/videos reaches this far). I still mark the lesson as complete because you will have ample opportunities in the next one to try to apply these principles. If you continue running into issues there, we'll deal with them then.
Ah, I see. I thought that you were telling me that I misunderstood the forms in the examples. So this is why you don't ask students to include their references along with the exercises...because the end result does not matter as you say, but rather the approach—and so, one that initially focuses on additive construction has proven to be more efficient at developping spatial reasoning in your experience, at least for people who struggle with it at first.
I personally can't say for sure how much I understand 3D space, which is why I am here to begin with, and the farther I go, the more I begin to see where you're coming from.
I still think that sometimes, I do need to be presented with something more specific in order to grasp the general ideas and concepts of the lessons.
Thanks again for your time, Irshad.
This is a remarkable little pen. Technically speaking, any brush pen of reasonable quality will do, but I'm especially fond of this one. It's incredibly difficult to draw with (especially at first) due to how much your stroke varies based on how much pressure you apply, and how you use it - but at the same time despite this frustration, it's also incredibly fun.
Moreover, due to the challenge of its use, it teaches you a lot about the nuances of one's stroke. These are the kinds of skills that one can carry over to standard felt tip pens, as well as to digital media. Really great for doodling and just enjoying yourself.
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