7:03 PM, Sunday April 3rd 2022
Hello MechaCatfish!! I’ll be handling the critique for your homework.
Organic Intersections
-Starting with the organic intersections, I can see that you have a good grasp of how these forms wrap around each other, but I have some recommendations. First, try to keep your sausages simple, avoid any elongated sausage and don't let them wiggle, as this makes it harder to work with them. Secondly, avoid drawing a big sausage and adding a lot of smaller ones on top of it. You want them to be roughly of the same size. Lastly, I think you are pushing the cast shadows far enough, remember that they act like contour curves and they should wrap around the surface they are falling on.
Animals
-The first thing I want to call out is that you seem to be focusing more on how many drawings you want to fit in a single page, keep in mind that by limiting the space available to you, you are also limiting your ability to work and think about the spatial problems that you have to solve in order to build a believable construction. The best approach is to give each drawing as much room as you can, only when that drawing is done you should assess if there is room for another one, if there is not enough space then it is perfectly fine to have only one drawing on the page.
-I can see that you are blocking your major masses (cranium, ribcage, pelvis), but you have the tendency to draw your lines very faintly, and you add a lot of lineweight to those that you want to commit. This may not seem like a big deal but it reinforces the mindset that we are just working with a set of lines rather than actual 3D forms that exist in space and have its own volume
Instead, whenever we want to add additional mass we should do so by introducing forms that are fully enclosed and have their own volume. 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 herealso take a look at this demo which better shows my point. Some other concrete examples of this process are exemplified in the informal demos, which I highly encourage you to check out.
-Now I want to talk about leg construction, I can see that you are sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, keep in mind that this method is not about capturing the shape of the legs as they are, instead it is about laying down a very basic structure which captures both the flow and solidity of the limbs, once that structure is in place we can start to add the additional masses, yo can see this process exemplified here and on this demo of an ant leg.
-Lastly, let’s talk about head construction. You should be aware that heads are very planar even if they don’t look that way, the eye socket is better off as a pentagonal shape pointing downward, this will provide us with a wedge to fit the muzzle and a flat plane in which the eyebrow will rest. You should also keep in mind that the eye sockets and the eyeball should be BIG enough to give you room to work with. This process is exemplified in this informal demo and this example of how to apply construction to a camel’s head.
Okay you still have some things to keep working on, so I’ll have you do some additional homework. Good luck.
Next Steps:
Please do the following
-Draw along the rat demo
-4 more animal constructions(no detail for these ones)