9:13 PM, Saturday March 14th 2020
Starting with your organic intersections, you're doing a pretty good job with these. The key strength that stands out is that your shadows wrap really nicely around the surfaces upon which they're cast. This suggests that you've got a good grasp of how they exist in 3D space.
Moving onto your animal constructions, the first thing that jumps out at me is a matter of proportion and observation. Constructing animals is by its very nature, complicated. It can be quite a challenge, and therefore when we think to draw any particular animal, our brain can very quickly become somewhat overwhelmed by all the things involved. There are so many things to manage all at once, and our brain can only accomplish so much all at once.
One major aspect of the process that ends up getting left by the wayside is the time investment into actually observing and studying your reference - and more importantly, doing so frequently, instead of attempting to rely on our limited capacity for remembering. To put it simply, because you're not looking back at your reference to refresh your memory often enough, you're ending up with proportions that are seriously deviating from reality.
Now, issues with proportions are totally normal - Drawabox focuses primarily on construction, and refining your grasp of proportion largely comes with practice. That said, continually looking back at your reference and only looking away for long enough to put down one mark or one form with very specific properties informed by what you saw in the reference, is a matter of process and methodology. So, looking at cases like this cat where the relationship between the head, the torso, and the length of the limbs are so exaggerated, this is definitely something that can be at least improved upon by shifting where your time is being invested.
So critique point 1: observe your reference more carefully, more consistently and more frequently. Don't rely on your memory.
Next, let's look at how you applied construction. I can very clearly see that you tried to apply the principles of construction throughout the drawings, and you did demonstrate in a number of places an overall respect for how different forms interact with one another in space. The only drawing where I felt that was really lacking was near the beginning, with this bird. Specifically, how you simply extended the silhouette of the torso up into a neck, and swallowing up the cranium. There's no clear connection where the neck fuses to the torso, and the neck itself doesn't really exist as its own form.
You definitely got better at that throughout the lesson, but I think you had a tendency of making your constructions a lot more complicated than they needed to be. It's not that this was inherently wrong, because in many cases the relationships between the forms are established, it's just that if you look at my demonstrations (like this donkey), every added form serves a clear purpose, whereas in yours it seems like you're attaching new forms more willy-nilly.
There are of course more specific issues that I'll address as well:
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You seem to construct your legs in a variety of ways, from some tubes with bends in them, to a loose approximation of the sausage method that misses certain important elements. The sausage method should be used to construct the legs for all of your animals (that means every sausage being simple, two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width, AND that the joints between them must be reinforced with a single contour line with no other contour lines along the length). The key is that we're building a base structure or armature. The leg itself doesn't have to be a bunch of skinny sausages - wherever necessary we can go back and add bulk to those sections. This is best done by wrapping new additional masses to those forms (being aware of how they actually wrap around the existing structure, rather than simply enveloping a sausage form in a larger form as you did for this squirrel).
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When adding additional masses, remember that each mass itself has its own volume and thickness. Along this deer's back, you drew it in such a way that it smoothed itself to match the profile of the existing structure. I demonstrated this here for another student - notice how the bottom example has a clear pinch that shows how the additional mass is adding its own volume to the construction.
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While this is present in both your deer, notice how the front leg here just jutts out of the bottom of the body? There's no suggestion of a shoulder muscle, and while you've at least drawn the beginnings of a circle to imply the muscles at the hip, there's no actual bulk added there. Additional masses can, and should be used to imply the presence of different muscle groups that you may see in your reference images.
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Looking at this bird again, when drawing the texture of its feathers, you've drawn and outlined each and every feather individually. I strongly recommend you go back through the new texture section in lesson 2. While the elements covered there were present when you'd have gone through that section last, I've rewritten it and recorded more video material to help explain the importance of drawing cast shadows, not outlines, in order to imply textural forms rather than forcing ourselves to have to draw each and every one.
Now I've listed a lot here for you to tackle, so for now I'll leave it at that.
Next Steps:
First, I'd like you to draw a long with the donkey construction demo to better understand how to approach construction in a way that is more structured and planned. I think you tended to approach construction more haphazardly simply because of the overwhelming nature of the task - we tend to fall back to what we know, and while you have developed some strong spatial reasoning skills, the underpinnings on how to break an object down into its core forms is not yet there. When you feel overwhelmed by a particular drawing, instead of drawing what your instincts tell you comes next, take a step back and take stock of the whole problem. Stepping back, and even stepping away for a moment, can help give you a different perspective.
Then, I'd like to see 5 more animal drawings, focusing entirely on construction with no texture whatsoever.