Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals
4:45 PM, Monday May 11th 2020
Has there been an increase in people submitting for critique since quarantine began?
Thanks again.
Indeed there has been a significant increase - we're all pretty overwhelmed with the submissions and are doing our best to keep on top of them.
So, I'll jump right into the critique. Starting with your organic intersections, these are quite solidly done. You've done a good job of capturing how these forms interact with one another in 3D space, and have presented a strong illusion of how gravity causes them to slump and sag over one another.
I think that your animal constructs start off with some definite weaknesses, but you do show a good deal of growth over the set. The first major issue that jumps out at me is with your puffin drawing, where you've very clearly roughed in the initial masses very roughly and lightly ,and then go on to treat them more as a sort of suggestion rather than respecting them as the solid forms that they are. The thing about constructional drawing is that every single form you add to your drawing is solid and tangible, and therefore it must be respected as such. All forms are built on top of the existing structure, and clear relationships must be defined between them. For this reason, attempting to lay down a rough underdrawing and then draw your "true lines" overtop doesn't work - everything is part of the drawing, and to set up any kind of a dichotomy or separation will result in contradictions in your drawing. Those contradictions ultimately would serve to undermine the viewer's suspension of disbelief.
Now, this is something you definitely get better at - as you move into the gazelle, I think you show considerably more respect for ever form you draw, as well as take greater care in establishing the relationships between those forms in 3D space. I'm especially pleased with how you approach adding additional forms to the construction of the legs and the head - those are pretty tight spaces, but all things considered I can see you trying to still wrap their curvatures around the underlying structure.
Now, this is something that is a little hit and miss depending on the drawing. Your horses are definitely showing a good deal of strength as well, though they aren't quite as well done as the gazelle, with a number of those "additional" forms along the legs feeling much flatter and less integrated into the existing structure, as I've shown here.
In your fox's back leg, you've got an example of extending the form's silhouette in 2D space rather than actually attaching an additional 3D form, which can flatten things out.
Lastly, this one (I think it's a tiger?) has a lot of those additional masses without any clear relationship defined as to how they wrap around and integrate with the existing structure. I really like the construction of the head, as it conveys a much more solid grasp of how everything exists in three dimensions there, but the body is showing a lot of shortcomings that I know you're capable of doing correctly.
All in all, I think you're bouncing back and forth between the right way of doing things and the wrong ways, and it likely comes down - at least in large part - to focus and paying attention to exactly what you're doing with every mark you put down. As such, I think you'll be able to continue progressing on your own if you keep the points I've raised in mind, so I'll be marking this lesson as complete.
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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