Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals

5:00 AM, Wednesday May 27th 2020

Imgur: The magic of the Internet

Direct Link: https://i.imgur.com/Yora8Kh.jpg

Post with 25 views.

0 users agree
5:17 PM, Wednesday May 27th 2020

Starting with your organic intersections, your first page is admittedly seems to be a bit of a struggle. You're certainly thinking about how forms wrap around one another, but it certainly comes out feeling quite flat in places. Your second page definitely shows considerable improvement over this however, with the particular construction of each individual form feeling more intentionally planned in terms of how they exist in 3D space and how they interact with one another. If you haven't been keeping up with this exercise as part of your regular warmups (as you're meant to be picking two or three exercises from the lessons you've completed at the start of a sitting and doing them for 10-15 minutes), make sure you do so.

Your actual animal constructions throughout this lesson are actually fairly well done - to a point. You're following many principles of the lessons quite well, and you show increasing comfort with manipulation and combination of your forks to build up greater complexity in your constructions, although I think you have a tendency to stop a little too soon. That is to say, you leave your constructions fairly simple, when there's plenty more room for developing the subtler, more nuanced forms that are present along a given animal's body.

The short of it is that you're headed in the right direction, but you need to push yourself to go a little farther. So! Let's go over some different issues I've seen and how you can improve upon them.

Firstly, I noticed in your earliest drawing that you weren't drawing each and every form in its entirety, and instead were allowing some of them to stop where they were overlapped by another. As shown here, everything you add to your construction is itself a solid, three dimensional form, and we want to both draw them in their entirety and define their intersections with other forms in order to fully understand how they sit in space and how they relate to the forms around them.

Secondly, with the pups on this page you've got their torsos shaped with some pinching through their midsection. That sort of pinching (where the ends are larger and the midsection gets narrower) can serve to undermine the solidity of the form, so wherever possible try to construct a more even sausage form with a continuous width through its length, as shown here.

I also did notice that a lot of your drawings here were pretty small. Your brain's going to want more room to think through spatial problems, so drawing larger and making full use of the space available to you on the page will help as you sort through all these spatial relationships.

For the pup on the left side, you did employ the additional masses along its back quite well - it wraps around pretty nicely.

As we skip down through your drawings, when looking at your animals' head constructions, it does seem like you're somewhat more haphazard about which steps you choose to apply. Always try to think of these things as fitting a sort of formula - even if the different pieces and ingredients a different, they're being combined in a similar order. The key thing about the head is that it is like a three dimensional puzzle, with individual, solid pieces that fit together. You've got the muzzle, the cheekbone, the brow ridge, etc. and all of these pieces buttress the eye socket.

You can see demonstrations of this on the informal demos page - specifically the moose head demo and the tapir head demo. Notice how many individual forms I'm building onto there - it's not just a matter of putting down a couple simple forms and mushing them together.

The same can be said all over the body - where you are using a few additional forms here and there, there is much more that can be achieved. If you look at demos such as the puma, you're basically going through the first six steps of building out the body, and maybe the first couple of constructing the head, but then you stop there. There's a lot more to be done. Even to start, you can see a few additional forms you could explore along your hybrid's body.

Similarly, when it comes to the legs, you can see this comparison of a dead-simple basic sausage structure, and then all the additional forms that can be built up on top of it.

So! I've laid out a number of things you can explore, and I think I'm going to ask for a few additional pages below to help you demonstrate that you understand these concepts.

Next Steps:

I'd like you to do 4 more pages of animal drawings. No texture, but really dig into all that can be done by building up more forms to capture the subtler elements of their bodies. Also, remember to draw bigger - giving yourself more room can help you sort through the spatial problems involved, and they can make areas like the animal heads easier to deal with.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
5:00 AM, Friday May 29th 2020
edited at 5:14 AM, May 29th 2020

https://imgur.com/a/TptDSOs

thank you for the critique

edited at 5:14 AM, May 29th 2020
6:30 PM, Friday May 29th 2020

This is definitely a good move in the right direction, so I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I did have a few things that you should continue to keep in mind as you move forwards however, and I've marked them out here:

  • Still need to work on taking full advantage of the space available to you on the page. Drawing smaller means your animal's heads are ending up quite cramped, which in turn causes you to construct the forms of the face a little more sloppily.

  • Your torso sausage should usually sag downwards (as shown here). If the animal is actively arching their back, then you can reverse it, but it's always better to sag it downwards then build up the forms along the spine rather than the inverse.

  • Always define the connections/intersections between your forms

  • Draw all your forms in their entirety, don't let a form stop where it is overlapped by another.

All in all though, you're doing well, and are showing more attention to the more subtle elements of your reference image, so as I said, you can consider this lesson complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something I've used myself. If you're interested, here is a full list.
The Art of Blizzard Entertainment

The Art of Blizzard Entertainment

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.

This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.