Lesson 5: Applying Construction to Animals
4:52 AM, Tuesday June 1st 2021
Please review my homework.
Thanks in advance!
Starting witht your organic intersections - great work. You've stuck to simple sausages, maintaining their solidity, and have done an excellent job of establishing how they interact with one another in 3D space with a clear sense of weight and gravity to the pile.
Continuing onto your animal constructions, to be quite honest you're doing a great job. There are a few small shortcomings that I will address, but as a whole I'm very pleased with your overall results. You're demonstrating a clear grasp of how your forms interact with one another in 3D space (doing a great job of wrapping the additional masses around their existing structures in a believable fashion), and you're employing strong observational skills to ensure that the elements you construct are accurate - without falling into the trap of directly drawing what you see (without the necessary processing of how it all exists in 3D space).
I've got a ton of critiques to get through today (In the last day and a half I've had like 18 submissions), so I'm not going to sit and gush over how well you're done - so let's jump right into the couple of issues I noticed:
First and foremost, your leg constructions are generally well done, but there are some issues that come up on occasion. For example, if we take a look at this fox, there are two problems I can see:
You're not adhering as closely to the sausage method as you should be - though you are clearly trying to keep it in mind, you are missing it in two ways. Firstly, and most notably, you're not defining the joints between the sausage forms with contour lines. This is an important step (which you do adhere to in other drawings) which helps make the sausage structure feel solid and three dimensional. It makes the difference between flat shapes and solid forms. Secondly, You're not sticking as closely to simple sausage forms as you should be. Remember that sausage forms, as explained in the diagram, should be two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width. That means avoiding any pinching/swelling through the midsection, and keeping the ends circular.
The other issue is that you've tried to cut back into the silhouette of those sausage forms (especially on the back legs). This is something I raised back in my critique of your lesson 4 work, and it's incredibly important. If you interact with your construction as though it's just a series of lines and shapes on a flat page, then that is how the viewer will see it as well. It's critical that you interact with it as though it is a series of solid forms - and therefore you can only make alterations to it using further 3D forms. As you progressed through the lesson, this is something I saw less and less, with you working more with concrete, solid forms and additive construction - but make sure you don't slip back into working in this manner in the future - at least as far as when you're doing constructional drawing exercises.
The other point I wanted to address was how you handle certain aspects of head construction. You seem to jump around between various strategies for head construction, and in some cases you end up making choices that aren't ideal. For example - there are cases where your eye socket and muzzle ends up floating more loosely and independently of one another (they may touch gently but don't feel wedged together in a way that makes the head itself feel solid). For example, this bear. Instead, I want you to make sure that you read through this demonstration/explanation and apply it wherever you can. It focuses on two things: ensuring that you fit all the various facial components together like a 3D puzzle, so they ground one another, and working with specific cuts that divide the smooth surfces of the cranial ball into separate planes. So for example, where in the bear you drew the eye socket as an ellipse, it should have been a series of individual cuts. The particular pentagonal shape present in the demonstration is especially useful, because it allows for a wedge for the muzzle to fit into, and a flat surface upon which the brow ridge can rest. Be sure to apply that approach in the future.
With that, I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete. I definitely want you to put some effort into adjusting your approach as I've explained here, but you are indeed moving in the right direction as a whole, and are achieving some pretty good results. So keep up the great work!
Next Steps:
Feel free to move onto the 250 cylinder challenge, which is a prerequisite for lesson 6.
Thanks for the critique.
And I think you've touched on the two points I feel were my weakest in my drawings. I'll keep in mind what you mentioned about sticking more closely to simple sausage forms and remembering to draw the joints between them (honestly I just forgot in some drawings, oopps xD).
Also sometimes I felt like I drew the sausage forms too big or somehow didn't match the reference as closely as I wanted so I kinda gave in and tried cutting into it (which I shouldn't have >_
I'd been drawing as a hobby for a solid 10 years at least before I finally had the concept of composition explained to me by a friend.
Unlike the spatial reasoning we delve into here, where it's all about understanding the relationships between things in three dimensions, composition is all about understanding what you're drawing as it exists in two dimensions. It's about the silhouettes that are used to represent objects, without concern for what those objects are. It's all just shapes, how those shapes balance against one another, and how their arrangement encourages the viewer's eye to follow a specific path. When it comes to illustration, composition is extremely important, and coming to understand it fundamentally changed how I approached my own work.
Marcos Mateu-Mestre's Framed Ink is among the best books out there on explaining composition, and how to think through the way in which you lay out your work.
Illustration is, at its core, storytelling, and understanding composition will arm you with the tools you'll need to tell stories that occur across a span of time, within the confines of a single frame.
This website uses cookies. You can read more about what we do with them, read our privacy policy.