9:43 PM, Monday July 18th 2022
Starting with your organic intersections, your work here is generally quite well done. You're drawing the forms such that they slump and sag over one another in a believable fashion, such that they're all under the influence of gravity.
Continuing onto your animal constructions, there are many areas in which you're moving in the right direction, along with a number of points I want to draw to your attention, in order to ensure that you're getting as much out of these exercises as you reasonably can.
Firstly, I've made some notes on this page of bears.
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In red, I noted a couple spots where you cut into the silhouettes of your existing forms. This isn't something you did often, but as it is a point I raised in my critique of your Lesson 4 work - that is, the importance of treating all of our forms as though they are three dimensional, and avoiding altering their silhouettes.
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In blue, I noted places where you extended existing silhouettes (same as the previous point), as well as a spot in the belly where you did try to add an additional mass, but where you allowed that silhouette to be cut off where other forms blocked it from view. Just be sure to draw each form in its entirety, even when blocked from view.
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In purple, I noted the absence of additional masses there, and the tendency in other drawings to add them in a sort of one-off manner, as though they were used for capturing "special" elements. Instead, I find it to be more effective these days to actually see it as an inevitability - that the sausages will only establish the underlying armature, and that additional masses will usually be necessary, and so we should always be looking more closely at that reference afterwards to identify where we can build up that more nuanced structure. Also, be sure to consider not just the masses that impact the silhouette, but also those that fit in between, as they help us to understand how the different pieces fit together. And of course, don't forget to add contour lines at the joints between the sausage forms. You're somewhat inconsistent in this.
Now, continuing on, I did want to go a little more into depth into how you're approaching designing those additional masses. I noticed that one of the things you have a strong tendency towards is making your masses, every aspect of them, kind of rounded and blobby. You tend to avoid sharp corners, and instead make them all a little more gradual. This unfortunately limits how effectively we can convey the way in which those masses wrap around the existing structure.
One thing that helps with the shape here is to think about how the mass would behave when existing first in the void of empty space, on its own. It all comes down to the silhouette of the mass - here, with nothing else to touch it, our mass would exist like a soft ball of meat or clay, made up only of outward curves. A simple circle for a silhouette.
Then, as it presses against an existing structure, the silhouette starts to get more complex. It forms inward curves wherever it makes contact, responding directly to the forms that are present. The silhouette is never random, of course - always changing in response to clear, defined structure. You can see this demonstrated in this diagram. You can also see this in practice here, though I have seen you employing this concept in some drawings. Once again, it's really more of a matter of you understanding how to do it properly, but not always doing so consistently.
When it comes to your feet, I have some advice on how you can tackle the construction of the base foot structure, and then the toes. As shown here on another student's work, we can use boxy forms - that is, forms whose corners are defined in such a way that they imply the distinction between the different planes within its silhouette, without necessarily having to define those edges themselves - to lay down a structured that reads as being solid and three dimensional. Then we can use similarly boxy forms to attach toes.
Continuing on, I wanted to discuss head construction a little. Lesson 5 has a lot of different strategies for constructing heads, between the various demos. Given how the course has developed, and how I'm finding new, more effective ways for students to tackle certain problems. So not all the approaches shown are equal, but they do have their uses. As it stands, as explained at the top of the tiger demo page (here), the current approach that is the most generally useful, as well as the most meaningful in terms of these drawings all being exercises in spatial reasoning, is what you'll find here on the informal demos page.
There are a few key points to this approach:
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The specific shape of the eyesockets - the specific pentagonal shape allows for a nice wedge in which the muzzle can fit in between the sockets, as well as a flat edge across which we can lay the forehead area.
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This approach focuses heavily on everything fitting together - no arbitrary gaps or floating elements. This allows us to ensure all of the different pieces feel grounded against one another, like a three dimensional puzzle.
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We have to be mindful of how the marks we make are cuts along the curving surface of the cranial ball - working in individual strokes like this (rather than, say, drawing the eyesocket with an ellipse) helps a lot in reinforcing this idea of engaging with a 3D structure.
Try your best to employ this method when doing constructional drawing exercises using animals in the future, as closely as you can. It should feel fairly similar to how you're approaching head construction now, though this puts one in a precarious position - because when an approach is similar enough to how we're doing things already, it becomes very easy to overlook the things that make it different.
Furthermore, sometimes it seems like it's not a good fit for certain heads, but with a bit of finagling it can still apply pretty well. To demonstrate this for another student, I found the most banana-headed rhinoceros I could, and threw together this demo.
The last point I wanted to call out is about how you're actually making use of the space on the pages themselves. There are two things that we must give each of our drawings throughout this course in order to get the most out of them. Those two things are space and time.
Right now you are certainly including multiple drawings per page, but there does tend to be a lot of blank space, and the drawings you do place within it tend to be quite a bit smaller than they otherwise could be. In artificially limiting how much space you give a given drawing, you're limiting your brain's capacity for spatial reasoning, while also making it harder to engage your whole arm while drawing. The best approach to use here is to ensure that the first drawing on a given page is given as much room as it requires. Only when that drawing is done should we assess whether there is enough room for another. If there is, we should certainly add it, and reassess once again. If there isn't, it's perfectly okay to have just one drawing on a given page as long as it is making full use of the space available to it.
And that about covers it. I'm going to assign some revisions below so you can demonstrate your understanding of the points that I've called out.
Next Steps:
Please submit 4 additional pages of animal constructions.
For each of these, I'd like you to note down the dates on which you worked on each given construction, along with a rough estimate of how long each session took. You are welcome and encouraged to spread your work on a given construction across as many days as are necessary, but refrain from working on more than one construction on a given day. Meaning, if you end up putting the finishing touches on one, do not pick up the next until the following day.