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8:43 AM, Monday November 2nd 2020

I do agree that using sausages for the construction of the legs is extremely useful, however I caught myself using cylinders instead. I think it was because of the scale and the type of insects that I'm drawing: most of them have relatively long legs with few sections, and so using sausages was quite difficult as it's way harder to "freehand" them to be of a consistent width and at the same time quite long.

3 additional drawings can be found here.

For the second drawing, how should I have constructed the thorax's bottom part that is mostly "fur"?

With the third drawing, I kind of went a lot into the detail to try to replicate the segmentations of the bottom part of the abdomen, which when now I look at, looks quite flat. I guess more shadows could have given it a better 3D look?

7:09 PM, Monday November 2nd 2020

In regards to the point you were making about using cylinders instead of the sausage method, it comes down to this - using sausages may be harder, and therefore will yield a weaker immediate result. That is no reason not to use them, however. We're not focusing on creating drawings that come out looking good - each drawing is an exercise to help develop the skills being used. Sidestepping an important technique because it is harder to use in this context simply avoids getting practice with it in that context, and will continually cause you to avoid it in the future. At its core, the sausage method is still preferable because of how it allows us to capture the kind of gestural flow that basic cylinders do not.

In regards to the second drawing and the question about fur, when it comes to construction, we don't worry about what the texture of a form may be - only the fact that these masses exist in the first place. So yes, you should be capturing any and all major forms using construction. I quite like how you handled the abdomen in this one, building up that structure to feel solid and believable.

There is a major issue that I want to point out in the third drawing however. Here you drew a ball for the head, and then went on to ignore it entirely, drawing a new more complex head structure on top of it. As discussed in the original critique (when talking about not modifying the silhouette of a form), cutting across your silhouette like this is also going to undermine the solidity of your construction. Always build things up steadily, one form at a time, and once you've introduced a form into the world (like the initial ball form you started with), you have to work forwards from it. You cannot choose to ignore it, or to use it as some kind of loose suggestion. Everything you add to the scene must be treated as a solid element upon which the rest is built.

The one other thing I wanted to mention was that as a whole, throughout these revisions your line quality appears quite scratchy. I'm seeing some hesitant lines, some areas where you're going back over lines needlessly, and so on. I'm unsure of whether this is because you're not applying the ghosting method to each of your marks to keep them confident and consistent, if you're falling back to bad habits, or if your pens are just giving you more trouble as they run out of ink. Be sure to keep an eye on this, and figure out what is happening. You may want to reflect on the mark making techniques from lesson 1.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete, so you can continue to work on this in the next one.

Next Steps:

Move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
10:52 AM, Wednesday November 4th 2020

Not that this is an excuse, but the problem with my line quality is that I struggle with estimating where certain construction lines should go in the first place (for example in the third drawing, the lines going along the thorax and abdomen). Committing too much to these crucial lines on which I build on top afterwards is kind of scary and can screw up the drawing. Would you recommend me to instead accept the result of the first try and continue?

3:29 PM, Wednesday November 4th 2020

This is normal, but ultimately you do need to commit to every mark you draw. It may be wrong, and it may lead you down a path that strays from your reference image, but that is completely fine. Commit to the marks you've drawn and the forms you're constructing and keep pushing forwards. Even if your result looks different from the reference, as long as it looks solid and believable, it's still a victory. We lose that believability and solidity when we hedge and hesitate.

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Sakura Pigma Microns

A lot of my students use these. The last time I used them was when I was in high school, and at the time I felt that they dried out pretty quickly, though I may have simply been mishandling them. As with all pens, make sure you're capping them when they're not in use, and try not to apply too much pressure. You really only need to be touching the page, not mashing your pen into it.

In terms of line weight, the sizes are pretty weird. 08 corresponds to 0.5mm, which is what I recommend for the drawabox lessons, whereas 05 corresponds to 0.45mm, which is pretty close and can also be used.

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