Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

3:51 AM, Tuesday July 20th 2021

Drawabox Lesson 4 - Album on Imgur

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

Post with 17 views. Drawabox Lesson 4

References for the insect images here: https://imgur.com/a/W1If6Hh (For some reason I accidentally downloaded a low-res version of the dragonfly image, it's in the wikipedia article for dragonfly if you're interested in the high res version).

Well, this was a lot harder than the previous lesson for sure (bet I will be saying this for every lesson). I feel like I made a ton of mistakes, but also improved quite a bit. Thank you in advance for the critique!

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2:10 AM, Wednesday July 21st 2021

Starting with your organic forms with contour curves, you've definitely done a good job of sticking to the characteristics of simple sausages, as noted in the instructions. One thing I'm a little on the fence about however, is whether you understand entirely how the degree of your contour curves should be shifting as you slide along the length of the form.

For the most part, your contour lines do suggest that you probably understand how these should behave, but I'm not 100% sure. From what I can see, you are shifting them wider as you move away from the viewer (as explained in the Lesson 1 ellipses video), but the shift is subtle enough for it to be unintentional. The more I think about it though, the more the pattern is definitely there throughout your two pages of this exercise.... but in case you're not sure what I'm talking about, check out the video I just linked.

Moving onto your insect constructions, overall I think you've done a really great job. What stands out most is how you've put a lot of thought into how to build up all of the complexity through the addition of new, separate, fully enclosed and complete forms. It's clear that you've built up each insect in a step by step manner, working from simple to complex, and maintaining the solidity inherent to simpler structures all the way through the process.

Taking it further, you've done a pretty good job in applying the sausage method when constructing all your legs. When they get particularly skinny, you do struggle somewhat to maintain those characteristics of simple sausages, but I can see that you're aiming for it. The only thing here I'd recommend is that when you get to the little feet bits of the leg (these), it's best to start those out as a long sausage section as well, then build up those little structures on top as shown here in this ant leg.

While you held to the correct principles throughout the lesson, I definitely feel that you continued to improve and grow as you pushed on through, with your cicada demonstrationg a particularly notable degree of solidity. The only thing here that I'd warn against is cutting into the silhouettes of the forms of those earlier structures as you did here. As I demonstrate in this diagram, cutting into the silhouette of a form can cause things to feel more flat. Now, to be completely fair I suspect you didn't mean to do that, and that since the ellipse you drew for that initial abdominal mass was a little on the loose side, you opted to pick the inner stroke to define the edge of your form. In this case, you should always pick the outer perimeter of the form, ensuring that the resulting marks always exist inside of anything wrapping around the given form.

Aside from that, your work here is fantastic. As such, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. Keep it up!

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:14 AM, Wednesday July 21st 2021

Thank you very much! Contour lines and ellipses are definitely the things I'm struggling with most right now, will focus on practicing them in warmups a bit more so that they get better.

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