Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

10:16 PM, Monday February 22nd 2021

Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids Ilia Mill - Album on Imgur

Imgur: https://imgur.com/gallery/JAxDQKL

Discover the magic of the internet at Imgur, a community powered enterta...

Hi everyone! I finished my insects. Any comments are appreciated:)

0 users agree
9:47 AM, Tuesday February 23rd 2021

To start, your organic forms with contour lines are coming along fairly well. There is certainly room for improvement here - for example, you appear to be roughing in ellipses before drawing your contour curves, and this leads you to "trace" those contour curves a little bit, making them more stiff as you follow the line on the page, rather than thinking about how they're to flow smoothly over the surface of the sausage form. The alignment and fitting of each contour line inside of the sausage's silhouette can also be improved. That said, the sausage forms themselves stick pretty closely to the characteristics of simple sausages, and that is quite important.

Moving onto your insect constructions, there's a lot of good that I'm seeing, specifically in the demonstration of your grasp of the relationships between the 3D forms you use to build up each of these results. You're showing a good grasp of how every element you introduce into the scene is a solid, three dimensional form, and you do a good job of defining how they relate to one another in space, resulting in a complex composite object that still maintains the solidity of each of its individual parts.

I do however have three main issues to call out. Two are fairly important, and the other is a little more minor.

  • Let's start big. It's very clear that you're kind of misusing the tool requirements here. Now I'm sure you are using fineliners rather than ballpoint pens, but you're definitely taking advantage of the fact that you can make those pens draw fainter, scratchier lines than their naturally rich, dark stroke. This can of course be achieved by drawing at a lower angle, or simply using a pen that's kind of... dying. But just because you can doesn't mean you should. Every mark you draw for this course should be done so to be solid and black. Don't put down any "exploratory" marks as you have done for this scorpion - every single mark should be committed to the page, establishing a solid form that you're introducing into the world. Once placed, you can't modify the form's silhouette, or attempt to ignore the fact that such a mark was placed. You are clearly showing that you are capable of drawing this way, as you do so in many cases. Just be sure to do it for all of them in the future.

  • I noticed that you seem to have employed a lot of different strategies for capturing the legs of your insects. It's not uncommon for students to be aware of the sausage method as introduced here, but to decide that the legs they're looking at don't actually seem to look like a chain of sausages, so they use some other strategy. The key to keep in mind here is that the sausage method is not about capturing the legs precisely as they are - it is about laying in a base structure or armature that captures both the solidity and the gestural flow of a limb in equal measure, where the majority of other techniques lean too far to one side, either looking solid and stiff or gestural but flat. Once in place, we can then build on top of this base structure with more additional forms as shown here, here, this ant leg, and even here in the context of a dog's leg (because this technique is still to be used throughout the next lesson as well). Just make sure you start out with the sausages, precisely as the steps are laid out in that diagram - don't throw the technique out just because it doesn't immediately look like what you're trying to construct.

  • The other issue is just about detail. When adding detail, don't worry about capturing anything to do with local colour or patterning. Treat everything like it's made up of the same flat white colour, and focus your areas of solid black on capturing cast shadows only. In doing so, you're effectively reserving certain visual tools for specific elements, and communicating that much more clearly with the viewer. Given our use of fineliners, which restrict us to solid black and solid white, we don't have a lot of tools to work with, and must instead learn to focus on conveying the most important information. You'll find that the information that is most important isn't so much about the kind of information we can only perceive with our eyes - instead, focus on capturing the information that can be felt with our hands. Physical texture, and physical construction.

So! With those points called out, I can happily say that I am very pleased with your results overall. I'll go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
7:43 PM, Tuesday February 23rd 2021

Thank you uncomfotable! There are some insects that i have made before your criti? about my plants. In your previous criti? you also pointed to the problem of "dying" pen. So after your last comment i changed my strategy of drawing lines. Now i think, that i get that idea of confident lines.

Also, I will pay more attention to the limbs sausage method for the next lesson as well as to my process of adding details.

7:19 PM, Thursday February 25th 2021

Remember that back in Lesson 0, I mention that you should not be moving onto the next lesson until you receive your critique on the previous one. Or more accurately, your submission should not consist of anything you've done prior to getting the prerequisite critiqued. That way mistakes I point out in previous lessons don't need to be repeated unless you actually did forget or misunderstand.

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 Brom

The Art of Brom

Here we're getting into the subjective - Gerald Brom is one of my favourite artists (and a pretty fantastic novelist!). That said, if I recommended art books just for the beautiful images contained therein, my list of recommendations would be miles long.

The reason this book is close to my heart is because of its introduction, where Brom goes explains in detail just how he went from being an army brat to one of the most highly respected dark fantasy artists in the world today. I believe that one's work is flavoured by their life's experiences, and discovering the roots from which other artists hail can help give one perspective on their own beginnings, and perhaps their eventual destination as well.

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