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1:42 AM, Saturday September 24th 2022

Hello I’ll be handling the critique for your lesson 5 homework.

Organic Forms

-Starting with the organic forms they are moving in the right direction you have kept them simple and easy to work which is the best strategy to produce good results, it seems that you are also pushing the cast shadows far enough whenever you have the opportunity. I don’t really have any suggestions here so I’ll just move on to the next section

Animals

-At a glance I can tell that you are doing a great job using the construction method to build these animals in a way that feels solid and natural. I do see many areas where you can improve.

You are off to a great start when it comes to the use of additional masses, using them a great deal the main issue is that you can definitely push them further like layering them on top of each other and more importantly adding the inner masses. RIght now you are focusing mainly on the masses that directly impact the silhouette without any consideration for the inner masses. There's value in exploring these inner masses - like a missing puzzle piece that helps hold together the ones that create bumps along the silhouette's edge. By thinking about them in this way you will start to push the value of these exercises further.

-You can also look for opportunities to push these masses against other forms like the shoulder and legs muscles, you can see an example in the work of this student https://imgur.com/B7ysP7X , you can see that the masses are being pushed against other forms, this give us the opportunity to use sharp curves and corners to imply the presence of these bumps.

-Another important thing is leg construction, you are already moving in the right direction as you have successfully drawn their legs in a way that captures both their flow and solidity. While I think that your use of additional masses is quite timid and you tend to add them on certain areas ,like the parts where the sausages connect in order to make them feel more consistent, for all the reasons I explained above.

The main thing here is that you are approaching the feet by drawing mere flat shapes or their silhouette. The best approach is to lay down a boxy form that captures all of the different existing planes and then add any further details following the planes of that structure. The example for this is in the diagram I linked to you above, so check it again if you missed that part.

-Now the last point I want to address is head construction. I can see that you are drawing the eye sockets with flat lines in order to capture the different planes of the skull, which is correct. There are many approaches but the best one right now is the one shown in the informal demos section, the main thing about this approach is the specific shape of the eye sockets, which is a pentagon pointing downwards, this gives us a wedge to fit the muzzle into and a flat top for the forehead and the brow ridge, just keep in mind to draw big eye sockets to fit in big eyeballs and then you can actually add masses that wrap around these eyeballs for the eyelids.

Any further details can be drawn following the planes of the muzzle, here you can see an example with the camel head and the rhino head demos respectively, https://imgur.com/f6TMEk8 , https://imgur.com/fUIEAu0 , while you may think that they are too complex and to be frank, they are, the trick really comes down to breaking everything down into simpler forms and making a lot of smaller moves rather than trying to capture a lot of things at the same time. It is important to notice that in this method we are not leaving any gaps and everything is closely packed together in a way that makes it feel more solid.

And that covers everything I have to say. You're doing very well as a whole and working more on observation would help take a strong construction and produce even more believable constructions. I'll be marking this as complete but be sure to look over the points I've raised moving forward.

Next Steps:

250 Cylinder Challenge

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2:11 PM, Saturday September 24th 2022

Thanks a bunch for taking the time to give me a detailed critique. I found it very helpful and I will make sure to incorporate everything you mentioned in my work next time.

Thanks again for the help!

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