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11:15 AM, Friday June 18th 2021

Here's the additional two pages of animals that I have attempted to work with your critique in mind: https://imgur.com/a/phrlnmA

I had to stop myself multiple times from the temptation to modify the silhouettes to attempt to "fix" them (which ironically worsens them) as you mentioned in your critique, and with enough practice and reminding, every time I attempted to do it out of reflex, I caught myself and stopped it in time. It's sort of grown on me already, and I now just add additional forms instead. So as far as I'm aware, there shouldn't be any "fixed" silhouettes in the additional animals.

That aside, I made some pretty significant errors in two cases:

First, the armadillo's shell. I'm not sure if it's visible, but I very quickly almost fell into the trap of simply drawing the silhouette instead of the shape, just like the tail of the bird from this very lesson that i submitted earlier in which you also pointed out how I had no structure on. Eventually, I went with a pseudo-sausage shape with more blocky and pointy edges with a few contour lines that read the shape of the shell well enough. I feel like there could have been a better approach, though. Perhaps a normal sausage shape with organic forms that would shape the shell as a whole? But wouldn't that retract from the hard, blocky reading from the shell? I'm sure you might have some advice there, and I'd love to hear it.

Secondly, this one isn't so important in the bigger picture, but it's still something that can be improved upon; the crododile's left hand (from his perspective) became so line-busy that I couldn't really read my own shapes and construction after I finished the head, and so I opted out on applying more lines knowing it'd just make a mess out of the head construction and possibly break it. The obvious solution is to simply draw it bigger, and that's what i'm going to do next time. That said, I'm curious, do you have any advice on how to lessen the line business in an area of a construction where you know it's going to have a lot of lines?

Lastly, just to mention it, I figured I'd take some more exotic animals like the armadillo and crocodile that weren't too similar in their construction since I feel I'd learn more from it. "Luckily", they were definitely harder, and I made more mistakes as a results. That's why I really hope I have to make another re-do of the homework since it'd be so beneficial, but it's really up to you to decide. I'm ready to advance to the next lesson or get some more animal practice in either way.

9:12 PM, Friday June 18th 2021

So at first glance, your work is actually really well done, with only a few issues - although upon a closer inspection, those issues actually suggest that you're not 100% understanding what constitutes proper additive construction (where we add a new, complete form onto the existing structure to build upon it) and what is for the most part still just modifying the silhouette of a given form.

Here I've made some notes for you to take a look at. Here, I point out a few things:

  • When you add the hump onto the armadillo's back, you're not introducing a new, separate form - you're just taking that edge along its back and raising it up higher. That is very much, directly modifying the silhouette of that form.

  • When constructing legs, you do something that is very similar to modifying a form's silhouette - you're engulfing the structures in new silhouettes, completely swallowing them up. Because this does not introduce a new 3D structure with clearly defined relationships with the existing structure (meaning, there's no understanding of how the new stuff is holding onto the existing stuff, at best one is floating inside the other), you are for all intents and purposes just replacing one silhouette with another. In effect, this is the same as modifying the silhouette. I've included there an example of what it looks like to actually build up new structures along the sausages, though there were examples provided that are effectively the same in my critique of your lesson 4 work - specifically the ant leg demo and the dog leg demo.

  • Your head construction is coming along pretty well. Just be more mindful of the specific shape of your eye sockets (those used in the informal head demo are designed specifically to create a "wedge" shape for the muzzle to fit into, and a nice flat top across which the brow ridge can sit.

  • The tail on your armadillo's approach created a very stiff impression. Building up an underlying structure as you did with the red panda, then building additional masses on top of it, would definitely be preferable. You can see something similar in this dragonfly example.

  • Line weight is a bit of an issue here, in that you're using it in a very arbitrary fashion, and seemingly at a variety of stages of your work. Firstly, remember that line weight is a tool with a specific purpose - to clarify the overlaps between forms in specific, localized areas. You can see an example of this here - note how the line weight is only added in the areas where the way in which one leaf is layered on top of the other needs to be made clearer for the viewer. Applying it more liberally can often decrease how much we actually think about its use, and how strategically we apply it. Additionally, line weight should be added towards the end of a construction - prior to that, it's best to draw all your marks so they're roughly even in thickness. This will help you keep from adding weight only to find later on that it results in a misleading impression for the viewer.

In a lot of ways, you are moving in the right direction, and your use of additional masses (where you construct them as complete forms, establishing how they wrap around or intersect with the existing structure) is getting much better - you just need to take more care in applying that in all areas where you build upon your construction, as right now it seems there are instances where you slip up without realizing it.

I'm going to ask for a couple more pages of animal constructions. For each page, do just one drawing, and draw big, being sure to take full advantage of all the room available to you. This generally helps us to push our spatial reasoning skills as far as they can go, whereas working smaller can cause us to get a little more clumsy.

Next Steps:

Two more pages of animal drawings.

When finished, reply to this critique with your revisions.
10:36 AM, Friday June 25th 2021

Here's the additional two new animals.

I still have a tendency to really, really want to edit silhouettes. It's probably going to take some time for me to get used to, but I am getting increasingly more aware of when I do it. But honestly, a few more animals to reinforce getting rid of the habit would still benefit me.

https://imgur.com/a/J65MCps

4:02 PM, Friday June 25th 2021

These are looking much better, and I can see that you're in much greater control of the decisions you make throughout the process. I think they've definitely improved enough to consider this lesson complete.

One minor side note - when you add links to your posts, the plain-text label goes between the square brackets, and the URL goes in between the parentheses, like this: [my link](https://drawabox.com). You can also just drop the URL in as-is without any brackets/parentheses, and it'll convert itself into a usable link. The way you've been adding links thus far has made them unclickable. Not a big deal, just had to copy-paste them into a new browser window, but I figured you might want to know.

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.
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