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8:09 PM, Monday October 3rd 2022
Starting with your organic intersections, you've laid these out quite well in such a way that they slump and sag over one another in a believable fashion, and you've shown good consideration to the placement of your cast shadows, such that they wrap around the surfaces beneath them. I am a little unsure as to why your cast shadows suddenly fade out the way they do, but I assume it's an issue with your scanner. If you run into any issues where your scanner doesn't capture your images accurately, it really is best to use a phone camera (ideally with daylight coming in through the windows).
Continuing onto your animal constructions, this critique's going to fall into two main categories. Firstly, there are a number of points from my previous feedback that you have not fully addressed here, so I'll call that out again, and then I've got some advice on how you're approaching a few things.
As to what wasn't addressed from my previous feedback, I've called them out here. In effect, you are still taking a fair bit of leeway in allowing yourself to work on your constructions in 2D space - that is, altering the silhouettes of your forms both by cutting into them in places and extending off them in others. You are certainly also trying to make use of additional masses in many cases, but there are little places where you're allowing yourself to take shortcuts that you should. In addition to this, you also appear to in some of these constructions continue to either use the sausage method more loosely than you should, or you forget to employ it entirely. To both of these issues, I strongly recommend that you go back over the feedback you received from Lesson 4, as this is a good sign that you perhaps did not give yourself enough of an opportunity to apply and absorb the feedback I'd provided there, and that perhaps your approach for assimilating that information needs adjustment. That is to say, perhaps you need to go back over past feedback more frequently perhaps you need to take notes so you can have summaries of the major issues open beside you as you work through the next lesson, or whatever other strategy works for you.
Towards the top I also commented on your tendency to use filled areas of solid black around the eyes in some of your constructions. Try to reserve your filled areas of solid black for cast shadows only - meaning, new shapes that you have designed with consideration to the relationship between the form casting it and the surface receiving it, as opposed to filling things in arbitrarily. This of course was not something I'd addressed with you previously, but since I was calling out concerns on that page, I slipped it in as well.
Now, the first piece of advice I wanted to offer is to do with how you're approaching using the additional masses to build upon your constructions. While you took shortcuts in a number of places, altering those silhouettes to refine their shapes, you still did build up the bulk of your structures with new, completely self-enclosed forms, which is good to see. The way in which you're doing this however can be improved.
One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette.
Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram.
Looking at your use of additional masses, you are definitely giving some consideration to the design of their silhouettes, although I noticed a tendency towards using a lot of "soft" corners - that is, corners where the change of trajectory occurs over a span, gradually, rather than all at once at a singular sharp point. Here's what I mean.
In order to capture the impression that the mass actually wraps around the existing structure, we benefit greatly from using a sharper corner - both to lead into an inward curve, but also to give the impression that the mass hooks back around along the other side of the existing structure to wrap around it on that side, similarly to how we have to hook our contour lines around.
Replacing those soft corners with sharp ones as shown here creates a much stronger impression of how those masses actually exist in 3D space. Also note how I've used a lot more additional masses - being sure to use them where you may have taken some of those shortcuts, bridging across from one mass to another with a partial 2D shape. I also broke that longer mass along the animal's back into several forms, because as per the rule that inward curves can only occur due to contact/pressure from another form, having an inward curve along the top edge where nothing is pressing in on it wouldn't be permitted. We can still achieve this however by breaking the mass up into separate pieces and piling them atop one another.
Looking at your use of additional masses along your animals' legs, I did notice that you tend to focus these on capturing specific bumps that break the silhouette of the leg structure. While this is a good starting point, it helps immensely to block out the "inbetween" forms as well, as these dictate the manner in which all of the masses will fit together. The more pieces we have fitting together, the more grounded and solid the overall structure will appear, as shown here on another student's work.
And as a side note, here are some notes that should help you with approaching your animals' feet.
The last thing I wanted to call out is to do with head construction. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. Given how the course has developed, and how I'm finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems. So not all the approaches shown are equal, but they do have their uses. As it stands, as explained at the top of the tiger demo page (here), the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning, is what you'll find here on the informal demos page.
There are a few key points to this approach:
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The specific shape of the eyesockets - the specific pentagonal shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.
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This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together - no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.
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We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball - working in individual strokes like this (rather than, say, drawing the eyesocket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.
Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. Sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but with a bit of finagling it can still apply pretty well. To demonstrate this for another student, I found the most banana-headed rhinoceros I could, and threw together this demo.
So! Unfortunately while I did skip revisions from the last lesson in favour of allowing you to demonstrate your understanding of those points in your work here, we are going to need some revisions at this point to ensure that you do understand the concepts I've shared with you. You'll find them assigned below.
Next Steps:
Please submit 4 additional pages of animal constructions. For each of these, I'd like you to write the dates of the sessions you spent working on it, along with a rough estimate of how much time as spent on each session.
6:33 PM, Saturday October 8th 2022
7:27 PM, Monday October 10th 2022
I'm definitely seeing a ton of consideration being put towards the manner in which your additional masses are being designed. There are just two things I want to draw to your attention:
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In my original critique I addressed the tendency to focus the additional masses you added to your animals' legs on just capturing the individual major bumps that would break the legs' silhouette, and noted that you should also be factoring in the masses that fit in between there. I suspect this may have gotten a little lost amongst the rest of the information, so be sure to review the section of the feedback where I discussed this.
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For the protrusions coming out of the axolotl's head, you've got those little wavy structures coming off them - here you've jumped into that wavy detail too soon, without laying down the structure necessary to support it (and also capturing them with a single continuous zigzagging stroke breaks this principle of markmaking from Lesson 1). I'd recommend reviewing the Lesson 3 notes on edge detail in leaves, as this circumstance is a very similar problem to what we encountered with leaves.
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.
Wescott Grid Ruler
Every now and then I'll get someone asking me about which ruler I use in my videos. It's this Wescott grid ruler that I picked up ages ago. While having a transparent grid is useful for figuring out spacing and perpendicularity, it ultimately not something that you can't achieve with any old ruler (or a piece of paper you've folded into a hard edge). Might require a little more attention, a little more focus, but you don't need a fancy tool for this.
But hey, if you want one, who am I to stop you?