Hi Abeanberry! These are amazing constructions you got! You demonstrate incredible spatial awareness; however, I see you go often over old lines, use subtractive constructions, hatching, and use some 2D detail for your constructional drawings, which makes you lose some possible use and reinforcement of 3D forms.
Organic Forms with Contour Lines
simplicity: your forms are mostly simple with very confident lines, which is good
contour curves: I see you try to change your degrees but at times you forget – try to be more intentional with the contour curve degrees in the future, also pay attention to making them fit in the form, rather than letting them “dangle” (see https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/floating)
contour axis alignment: mostly good, I see that you are trying to follow this axis, but you sometimes use misaligned contour curves (be careful!) https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/alignment (the contours are just the visible part of these ellipses)
4 Pages: Pure Constructions
Your constructions are very good, I see you really know how to use a various amount of 3D forms as well as the sausage forms from the previous exercise.
You can still benefit from using line weight to bring forms forward – occasionally you thicken some indents and outlines, but leave the legs with thinner lines, which flattens your image slightly (e.g. the drawing of Carter).
I see you tried to reuse the branches exercise for the antennae(?) and legs but have a lot of dangling and very shallow ellipses/contour curves (see previous exercise for floating ellipses and https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/5/shallow).
You also tend to go over your old lines a lot - the goal here is not to “search for” a good line as is in many non-Drawabox drawing constructions, but to use what you already drew for your final construction. Because you’re not doing this, you show a lot of subtractive constructions which should be avoided in Drawabox as well as highly frayed and messy lines. In general, this is a personal choice, some drawing styles explicitly require this, but not on Drawabox. Jarvis is a bit closer to what we are trying to do here than other constructions. The issue is, if ypu use multiple lines, the viewer will somehow average these lines and see something which isn’t there - and if you ever do very fine lineart where precision is crucial, you will never be able to find that right line (it’s a very interesting exercise). The idea is to practice deciding on only one line so you can tell why it’s wrong, which is more important than a pretty picture. Over time, you will see that this line becomes more and more accurate, and as a result you will speed up, and make them more fun. If you go over your lines you will in a sense ruin this feedback loop. Leave just one line just as you did in Organic Forms with Contours for Drawabox constructions.
you also seem to approach some detail as 2D shapes and outlines. Try to focus on the detail as 3D objects as well, e.g. the spikes on Elphius could be little cones instead of “V”s (which as 2D shapes flatten the image).
6 Pages: Detailed
In general you use excessive hatching here, except for Chadifier from Chesapcake – here you used hatching in a way which is a bit more consistent with Drawabox – it represents cast shadows (but in general hatching is not used here, as most of yours was used for form shadows https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/2/formshading, and cast shadows are drawn as pure black).
Your contour curves are also better on Chadifier and Larry. This is the kind of thing you should be aiming for.
Again, I see a lot of subtractive construction especially with the claws (Larry and Jenna, Nalinya’s body). Similar issues persist from the pure constructions.
You also thickened some forms and left the others with Azipan – ypu could have used this thickness to reinforce perspective here, thicker in the foreground, thinner in the background. You also thickened contours, which you should avoid (they are constructional things, not actual stripes or objects in real life, so they are omitted to make the outlines, and form shapes more prominent).
Likewise, where you used hatching, you actually missed a great opportunity to use cast shadows and additional forms (Jenna) or texture shading (Larry) – this texture shading is a lot like those dissections from exercise 2 (https://drawabox.com/lesson/2/dissections) – replace the hatching by a texture. This will make your drawing even more believable.
Summary
Overall these drawings are very good – it seems you are already quite proficient, or even an art student, but you did not follow the rules of Drawabox. I know, because I did things like this myself, and later, after I mostly ignored this kind of advice, I realized why it is so important to follow these seemingly arbitrary rules – they make the drawing as true and as precise as possible. Mistakes and shortcomings are immediately obvious, which can be uncomfortable, but which is the best way to see where and how you can improve, which I believe is your main goal as a Drawabox student.
Focus on following the “Drawabox style” with cast shadows, perspective influenced line weight, and texture “form shading”. Do not go over old lines, and use additive constructions.
Images with examples: https://imgur.com/a/oohJlFl
Next Steps:
Pick two more crustaceans or similar animals to draw with these principles in mind. Also follow the rules of the contour curves exercise when you use sausage forms for the legs – there is a reason why we had to do that one – align the contour curves to the axis and don’t let them float.
Once again, try to avoid hatching and repeated lines.
The end result should resemble the "style" of the demos. I provided a lobster construction in case you are afraid to look there because of the insects, and another student's attempt at texturing a lobster to give you an idea for what sort of thing you could do with the texture with the image examples above.
Rapid Viz is a book after mine own heart, and exists very much in the same spirit of the concepts that inspired Drawabox. It's all about getting your ideas down on the page, doing so quickly and clearly, so as to communicate them to others. These skills are not only critical in design, but also in the myriad of technical and STEM fields that can really benefit from having someone who can facilitate getting one person's idea across to another.
Where Drawabox focuses on developing underlying spatial thinking skills to help facilitate that kind of communication, Rapid Viz's quick and dirty approach can help students loosen up and really move past the irrelevant matters of being "perfect" or "correct", and focus instead on getting your ideas from your brain, onto the page, and into someone else's brain as efficiently as possible.
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