Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals

7:59 PM, Sunday January 2nd 2022

drawaboxlesson5 - Google Drive

drawaboxlesson5 - Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VJUS-IGc4VRXd9ar_KDk7GWiS0zH2sn2?usp=sharing

Hi, i am done the lesson 5

1.I had complications with identifying the basic forms, especially of the head, I try to connect the basic forms so that they are related to each other but it is difficult for me because of the muscles of the animal's face

2.about the texture , this time i try to put enough amount of texture on the drawing

thanks.

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11:05 PM, Monday January 3rd 2022

Starting with your organic intersections, you appear to have misread the instructions and done the wrong exercise. This was the one that was assigned and linked in the assignment section.

Continuing onto your animal constructions, I'm going to break this down into a few different categories, and address each one in turn.

Core construction

This is largely being handled pretty well, except for one point - I'm noticing that you appear to be drawing your earlier marks a lot more faintly than the later ones, and generally increasing the thickness of your linework as you progress. Always try to keep the line thickness roughly consistent throughout the construction. You can add line weight, but this is better left until after the construction is finished - at that point you can add additional weight in key, specific, localized areas to help clarify how different forms overlap one another (such as in this example of two overlapping leaves).

Additionally, be sure to always respect each form you draw as though it is a solid element in 3D space, and avoid cutting back into or altering those forms' silhouettes once they've been drawn. I did notice some areas - like on this bear where you altered your silhouettes, although you didn't do this too often throughout the rest of your work. Just watch out for cases where you let your guard down, as well as cases where you stop using the ghosting method for each stroke.

Leg construction

This is an area that definitely improves, although you are still somewhat inconsistent in how strictly you're following the specific requirements of the sausage method. For example, on page 14 you forget to define the joints between the segments with contour lines, and on page 13 as well as the earlier ones with your wolves (5 and 6) you regularly place contour lines in the midsections of your forms - something the sausage method diagram specifically says to avoid.

In general, you do have a tendency to use more individual contour lines (specifically the kind that we introduce in the organic forms with contour lines exercise, which sit on the surface of a single form) than are actually necessary or helpful. There are certainly specific cases where we might want to throw on an additional contour line to make something feel more solid, but it's actually not that common - and there are specific cases, like the additional forms we build upon our structures, where it is very much the wrong choice.

Contour lines help make a structure feel more three dimensional in isolation, but with additional masses, what we really want is to define the relationships between different forms (so the opposite of isolation) - this can be achieved either through the kind of contour lines that define intersections between forms (a very useful sort introduced in the form intersections exercise), or more commonly when one form wraps around another, through the specific design of the new additional form's silhouette.

Unfortunately, when we get used to slapping contour lines in the middle of a form, we tend to view it as a way to "fix" a mass that doesn't feel solid enough, and in so doing, we actually distract ourselves from solving the actual issue - which is in the form's silhouette.

Additional masses

As suggested in the previous point, there is definitely room for improvement in how you design the silhouettes of your additional masses. It varies - there are cases where you handle them pretty well, like how you wrap them around your camel's torso, showing a lot of attention to how all the different forms relate to one another. There are cases however - especially along the legs - where you'll slap more arbitrary blobs down, or not necessarily take the full design of a given silhouette into consideration, as shown here.

I can also see, in the camel's legs, a tendency to add random corners to your forms' silhouettes, as seen here. Corners are a form of complexity, as are inward curves. They can only occur in response to contact or pressure from another structure - so when we wrap around something, or when something presses against our form, as explained here.

Head construction

This is an area where I don't really have any pressing concerns. You're applying the principles from this explanation fairly well, focusing on defining the relationships between the different sections of the head, and keeping them wedged together in a solid fashion.

Detail

Overall, you handled textural detail fairly well, but there was one instance - the elephant in page 16 - where I felt a bit of a reminder might help. Where in most of your detailed drawings you kept the detail to a minimum, focusing only on what you felt was necessary to get the point across, here you seem to have done the opposite. It feels more like you were looking for reasons to put more ink down - your goal shifted back towards general, arbitrary decoration (as we discussed in my critique of your Lesson 4 work), and so the amount you actually laid down seemed similarly arbitrary.

Remember - less is more. Always aim to get across the information you wish to convey with as little ink, and as few actual shadow shapes as possible. This will help you avoid being superfluous and decorative, and instead focus on what information you're providing to the viewer.

Conclusion

All in all, while there are a number of things for you to keep working on, I think your work is pretty well done. I think you should be well equipped to continue working on the points I've raised without further intervention, so I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:44 AM, Sunday January 9th 2022

Hello, thanks for the answer, I was making these two drawings of animals trying to correct my past mistakes and follow the advice that you indicated to me.

?https://imgur.com/a/xV4iUVo

I'm sorry about the first exercises , I had done it only that I confused the images, anyway I uploaded them to drive corrected

3:20 PM, Monday January 10th 2022

Looks like you're doing a better job of applying most of the concepts. Just a few things to keep an eye on:

  • Your eye socket shapes are close, but not quite matching the informal head construction demo, so take a closer look at that.

  • When constructing feet, you can start the main section of the foot with a boxy form, then add the toes themselves as their own separate boxy forms, rather than just trying to wing it from there. You can see what I mean here on another student's work.

Also, keep in mind for the future that if your work's been marked as complete, then you generally should not be submitting further work for review, and giving feedback takes time. If we decide that a student requires further revisions, then we do allow those to be included in the cost of the original critique, but that is left to our judgment rather than the student's.

The critiques we offer, out of necessity, must follow a fairly strict guidelines to ensure that we can keep up with our workload.

9:06 PM, Monday January 10th 2022
edited at 9:11 PM, Jan 10th 2022

Thank you very much, I understand, I just wanted to check myself if I had understood the points of the feedback, I will continue with the challenge of the cylinders.

edited at 9:11 PM, Jan 10th 2022
11:37 PM, Monday January 17th 2022

hello again, I'm doing the challenge of the cylinders. and I have some doubts about it

1.The cylinder axis lines have to be arbitrary? because you told me something similar for the box challenge.

  1. Do I have to add any thickness to the cylinder?

3.Is there a problem if some cylinder angles look similar? because I have to draw many cylinders it is possible that some angles will be repeated.

I'm sorry, I accidentally sent this text as a report before

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