Congrats on finishing Lesson 4! I'm ThatOneMushroomGuy and today I will be providing your homework with some critique. I hope that it proves helpful to you in your art journey.
Organic Forms with contours
To start off I'd like to point out something that isn't quite a mistake, but nonetheless can be harmful to your improvement: Grinding a single sausage rotation. There's at least three most important ones, and you should be aware of them.
Here is a diagram that shows the different sausage rotations.
You're doing a good job of keeping most of your sausages the desired shape. But sometimes they still end up misshapen, with their ends pointy or elongated. Since you seem to be doing well already, just keep in mind the characteristics of simple sausages and continue practicing until they become more consistent.
When it comes to your contours they're kept nicely within the form's bounds, but they suffer by hardly having any variation, which ends up flattening the sausage. Remember that the degree of each circular cross-section gets wider as it moves away from the viewer as shown here
Along with the resources linked below, you can also check out the video on ellipses on the Drawabox youtube channel https://youtu.be/tHJ3rzk6kno to refresh your memory on the topic.
Photos by user 'Slate' on the Drawabox discord server, showing the degree of change in ellipses' degrees on a cylindrical form.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/368871256067670027/426350263884972032/IMG_5773.JPG
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/368871256067670027/426351743190695937/IMG_5775.JPG
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/368871256067670027/426351973990662144/IMG_5774.JPG
Insect Constructions
For your Insect Constructions I'm afraid that you'd made quite a few fundamental mistakes, which ended up being present and harmful to most of your homework pages. I will start by talking about the fact that you don't follow construction principles such as starting with simple forms and then building on top of them.
Insect 10 and 8 for example, have hardly any construction on their heads, when you can see here in this demo that it's possible to breakdown insect heads ( in this case, an ant's ) into much simpler forms and then build on top of them.
For Insect 7 the claws are not drawn as forms, https://drawabox.com/lesson/4/7/claw here is a demo that shows how claws can be constructed. On Insect 8, their entire body seems to be made of shapes instead of forms. For Insect 9 the thorax which could be a circle, was not drawn, neither was the abdomen drawn as a shape first, it seems you jumped to a complex body shape too soon instead of separating it in simple forms first. The same is true for the ant.
In Insect 1, the ladybug, after constructing the initial forms for the abdomen you proceed to undermine them by cutting into them. Always work additionally on your constructions, because when we don't we end up with a flat shape instead of a solid form.
The other mistake is seen on the legs of your insects, as you can see in this demo https://d15v304a6xpq4b.cloudfront.net/lesson_images/a20182ab.jpg legs on Drawabox must be constructed using the sausage method. But in your insect constructions you use elongated ovals or complex, bulging forms instead. The former takes away the gesture of the insect's legs and stiffens them, while the latter is detrimental to your construction as, since it's easier to lose control of the leg's volume and form, it hurts the leg's solidity and makes it look flat.
For example on Insect 4 the first segment of the right front leg is significantly thicker than the left leg's equivalent segment. And the back leg feels like a flat shape on a piece of paper instead of a solid form because of the way it was drawn, and especially since the rest of the leg is so thin it contributes to the lack of illusion that the shapes are 3D forms.
The only insect that doesn't suffer from this is the Wasp Demo, as you seem to have followed the instructions there.
Instead of attempting complexity right off the bat, we can use the sausage leg method and then build on top of our initial construction as shown here:
You also struggle with adding segmentation to your drawings, here is a demo showing how it can be done: https://drawabox.com/lesson/4/7/layeredsegmentation
Lastly, I wish to point out that filling in your back legs completely makes it difficult to analyze if you employed the construction methods correctly, it also creates a point of detail and distracts the viewer by directing their attention to that point, when their focus should be on the head and main body.
From the Black Widow demo:
"You'll also notice that for the back legs, I added some very simple, straight hatching. Straight hatching on a rounded object is usually a no-no, because it'll flatten your form out completely. In this case, that's what I want. It's a design choice to help push those legs back in terms of importance. I want the viewer's eye to glaze over those details in favour of the legs closer to them."
https://drawabox.com/lesson/4/5/step4
Final Thoughts
It is my opinion that, since so many fundamentals weren't followed, you're not ready for Lesson 5 and it's in your best interest to read over the entirety of Lesson 4 again and watch the demos.
Once that is done, please reply with
1 page of the informal lobster demo
1 page of the informal shrimp demo
4 pages of your own insect constructions.
Next Steps:
1 Page of the Informal Lobster Demo.
1 Page of the Informal Shrimp Demo.
4 pages of your own insect Constructions.
Thanks for the crit. Here are my revisions. Let me know if I need to do it again.
Thank you for sending me your revisions, they look much better. I'll be marking this lesson as complete.
Just a couple of points:
Since it's only been a day since I've asked for your revisions and you already replied, I assume you must have finished it all very quickly. Our brains actually absorb information much better when it's spaced out throughout several days, if you look to improve, doing your pages over several days instead of in one go will make sure you retain much more of the lesson content in the long run.
When drawing circular and elliptical shapes, don't forget to ghost them two times.
Lineweight goes a long way! Don't forget to use it to separate your forms and help distinguish them from each other.
Next Steps:
Move on to Lesson 5.
While I have a massive library of non-instructional art books I've collected over the years, there's only a handful that are actually important to me. This is one of them - so much so that I jammed my copy into my overstuffed backpack when flying back from my parents' house just so I could have it at my apartment. My back's been sore for a week.
The reason I hold this book in such high esteem is because of how it puts the relatively new field of game art into perspective, showing how concept art really just started off as crude sketches intended to communicate ideas to storytellers, designers and 3D modelers. How all of this focus on beautiful illustrations is really secondary to the core of a concept artist's job. A real eye-opener.
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