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7:29 PM, Saturday April 18th 2020

You're actually doing a pretty good job, and I'm very pleased how certain elements are coming along - specifically the construction of your sausage forms in the legs, especially in the wasp. Right now there are just a few issues that stand out to me:

  • The stronger two of the three constructions here are all from a complete side view. This calls into question whether having a full side view simplifies things a lot more for you. I'd definitely like to see you explore angles that show the insect from more of a 3/4 view - so somewhere in between a front and side view, more like the ant. These can definitely be much more difficult to tackle.

  • I noticed that along the abdomen, you're pretty consistently struggling with drawing the contour lines correctly, such that they wrap around the form in a believable manner. Some are better than others - the wasp specifically is the weakest, and the fly and ant are better but there's still room for improvement with this. Specifically what I mention in these notes about "overshooting your curves" would be a helpful approach to use here in order to push yourself to hook those curves around a bit better.

  • Some aspects of your constructions are definitely still a little more simplistic in terms of how far you break down your construction. The legs, for instance, focus on just the most basic level of construction, but there is a lot of smaller forms and bits of nuance that are currently being ignored. I had another student recently for whom I pointed out a similar problem, which you can see here. When it comes to building up additional masses along the legs, you can employ techniques like this.

So! While you're absolutely on the right track, I'd like to see just a few more drawings to really cement things.

Next Steps:

First, I'd like to see one page of organic forms with contour curves.

Then, do another 3 insect drawings. Continue to focus entirely on construction, but really break that construction down as far as it will go - capture as much of the form-based nuance and the subtle elements as you can, in successive phases of construction. Start simple, and keep building things up wherever necessary.

Also, make sure the reference images you choose have the animal in a 3/4 view - not a complete side view or a complete front view.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:22 PM, Wednesday April 22nd 2020

Alrighty, thank you for your second round of comprehensive comments.

3/4 view wasp, bee, horse-fly: https://imgur.com/a/SyyR1Pl

As warmups I did some pages of "armoured sausages", I think I'm slowly starting to wrap my head around wrapping (but the failure monster is definitely still hungry).

10:47 PM, Wednesday April 22nd 2020

None of these are actually 3/4 views. By 3/4 view I mean where they're halfway between seen from the side and seen from the front. All of these have been fully side views (although the honey bee is starting to get into 3/4 territory, but still mostly side).

It seems to be more difficult than I expected to find a wasp that isn't featured in a side view, which is unfortunate. I did find this, which is getting into 3/4 territory, and is good enough for our purposes.

All that said, I think your first drawing, the one of the wasp, is actually very well done. The thorax is a bit big, proportionally speaking, but the segmentation on the abdomen is well done, the head construction's coming along well, and you've done a pretty good job of constructing the legs.

Your honey bee's also looking pretty good (although again the proportions throw things off a little), and the horse-fly's legs are a bit off but still generally pretty good.

All things considered, these are good enough, so I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
8:33 AM, Thursday April 23rd 2020

The image of the European white wasp you linked is actually the reference image for my drawing, which tells me I'm not quite there when it comes to conveying the perspective of my reference. I'll move onto the next section, as you say (it deals with the same problems, right?), but I'll keep this in mind.

Thank you again for taking the time to correct additional attempts! I wouldn't have been able to see these mistakes myself.

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