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7:32 PM, Friday August 5th 2022

There's no requirement to have to do the work every day, so no need to worry about that. That said, looking at the amount of time you've noted down for each of these, I think you may be underestimating just how much time is required. This time generally gets split up into a variety of tasks:

  • Observing your reference (this is done constantly, between each mark you put down, so that each mark is based on specific information from your reference rather than just what you recall - since memory is unreliable)

  • Identifying where the marks you're going to make need to go - the why behind that, in terms of asking yourself what the purpose of the mark is, what it's meant to achieve, and how you can best achieve that. This is what the planning phase of the ghosting method is for

  • Ghosting through the motion of each mark

And that's just what we're doing when we're actually drawing, not including going back over the information from the lesson and any past feedback (but of course I left that out because that wouldn't have been included in your time estimates). Ultimately the execution/ghosting of each mark is looking good in your work, but to varying degrees I think there are cases where you're not giving yourself nearly enough time to observe some of your references (or cases where you may observe it for a while, then forget to do so for a while). There are also definitely some pretty good examples of observation (the frog has issues but as a whole I think you've clearly paid attention to how you're building it up, step by step), but it's somewhat mixed across the set.

More importantly however, given that there are quite a few points in my past feedback that you're not applying correctly here, that's not an issue of its own - but when we're talking about individual drawings that only take 15-20 minutes each (and some even less), that's a big red flag that suggests that you're simply not giving yourself the time to consider how different elements should be approached. For example:

  • The design of your additional masses - you are definitely factoring in some aspect to how they wrap around one another, but you're frequently adding arbitrary sharp corners which simply have no reason to exist. As I explained before, when our mass is floating in isolation, it is effectively a ball made up only of outward curves. It's contact with other structures that results in specific complexity, in the form of inward curves and sharp corners. You however frequently place such complexity at arbitrary points, without any specific structure that the mass is pressing up against. Here I've identified a handful of such arbitrary corners (some sharper like on the frog, others a little more rounded, but still enough of a rapid change of trajectory to be considered complex). I also demonstrated on the bear how you had a gap between the mass at the shoulder (which is its own structure) and the mass along its back - that gap should not be there, because you only get that inward curve from pressing the two together tightly.

  • You're still prone to straying from aspects of the sausage method - mainly in the adherence to the characteristics of simple sausages. For example, here on your bear's foreleg you went with an ellipse instead of a sausage. There are also a couple places where you forget to define the joints with a contour line - although you do hold to that more often than not.

  • Your adherence to the head construction approach I pointed you to. You mentioned yourself that you were unsure of what you were missing/not doing correctly, but the main one is in the "key points" I listed in point form before. Your eye socket shapes are often drawn as octagons (8 sided), but as noted in my past feedback, the approach specifically uses pentagons (6 sided), with the point facing downwards. This allows for a wedge between the eye sockets in which the muzzle can fit, and a flat surface across the top for the forehead. Speaking of which, you appear to also neglect to define the forehead area in the manner shown in the demonstration.

As a whole, you're simply not giving yourself nearly enough time to apply the feedback you've received - which is a pity given that your work actually demonstrates a lot of skill and comfort with drawing. You just need to make sure that you're actually giving yourself every opportunity to take the information provided to you and to apply it.

For comparison, a single animal construction can easily take a student an hour and more. There are plenty of cases where students need to spread their work on a single animal construction across multiple days. Now, to be completely fair I'm pretty impressed on what you've been able to achieve in these very limited periods of time (the seal being done in 8 minutes is surprising - I would have expected it to look vastly more rushed).

All the same, it is still your responsibility to give yourself as much time as you require to do your best, and you have fallen far short of that. You may have done surprisingly well within those limited time spans, you also could definitely have done far better had you given yourself much more. But in not doing so, you ultimately shifted the burden of time onto me to re-explain things that may not have otherwise required it.

I'd like you to tackle the same revisions again, with the same restrictions. I can fully see that you have every capacity to knock this out of the park.

Next Steps:

Please complete the same revisions again.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
6:51 AM, Sunday September 11th 2022

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gtPV3sFFYQuhf0sOHW2NLscbXIEEh2cD?usp=sharing

Good day! I finally finished the 2nd revision, I find it really hard to reach the 1 hour point, after 30 min I find myself staring at it because there is nothing else to add... maybe adding more details and texture could have helped me reach the 1 hour mark, alhough I wanted to keep it as clean as possible because ti makes it hard to understand the forms which is why i keep less details as possible.

for the twisted horns, I wasnt sure how to make a construction for it without adding the outline, and ended up adding a guide for it, causing for me to cut in instead of add forms.

5:08 PM, Monday September 12th 2022

What matters most is that you're actively attempting to avoid the temptation to rush. So it matters less that you're not hitting a specific duration - we're more interested in the fact that you are indeed trying to push yourself to give every task more time.

Now there are some points I'm going to call out for you to work on - which I've marked out here on this page, but you can address these on your own. The most notable of these is that you still have a tendency to use outward curves in places where your masses' silhouettes need to have inward curves to capture how the mass wraps around the existing structure.

That said, as a whole I'm pleased with your progress, and will be marking 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.
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