View Full Submission View Parent Comment
4:20 PM, Saturday May 23rd 2020

Looks like when submitting your revisions before, you replied to your own reply, so I did not get notified of it. I'd only get notified if you replied to my own message, as you've done here.

I'll answer your questions before getting into your work.

in terms of what addtional masses to draw around the forms, in the example of the dog leg you gave me, was it the actual muscle structure of the dog leg? it seemed a little random but i havent looked at dog leg anatomy or anything. i tried to look at the muscles i could see on the leg but its a little hard to look and draw that at the same time for me

It ultimately doesn't matter what causes the forms we see along the animal's body - they might be muscle, might be really poofy fur, might be a bony protrusion, etc. At the end of the day, it's all just forms to us, and so we have two priorities - making sure those forms feel like they integrate with the existing structure, like they're not just going to fall off, and making them feel solid.

So, if you see a form that isn't present in your own drawing, then you'd tack on an additional form to capture it, even if it's something small and subtle.

line confidence is something we work on in the course, when i draw an ellipse i usually go through the ghosting motion and then draw the ellipse but it tends to come out messy/scratchy looking cause im going quite fast. line confidence is about being able to do something within a single stroke & so i try to do it fast and not hesitating much, but again, it tends to mess up my ellipses more often so ive been trying to go slow but thats not exactly what youre suppose to do? is it just about finding the right speed to ghost?

Honestly, your ellipses look fine to me. There are a couple places where you didn't draw through them (you still should be drawing through each and every ellipse you draw for these lessons without exception). As for the use of the ghosting method, the whole process is designed to split the process of markmaking into these individual steps, each with their own responsibilities, so that when we actually do execute the stroke, we can do so without fear, guilt or hesitation. So even if you end up making a mistake, if it came out smooth and evenly shaped (due to being drawn confidently) then you executed it correctly. It was the planning/preparation and the way that was approached that is to blame. I explain this further in this response to another student.

Also, remember - making a line accurate is a matter of practice. Making a line smooth is a matter of how you approach it. It's much easier to approach things confidently to create smooth strokes, and to improve your accuracy with practice.

So, getting to your revision work, I feel that overall you've done a pretty good job, with a few small issues:

  • Your dog is actually very well done along its head/torso/etc. I especially like the head construction. The legs are.. okay, but I think you got a little too caught up in drawing the edges of individual muscles, and didn't actually construct each one as a separate, individual form. Basically you have a lot of those "muscle" forms suddenly stopping when they're overlapped by another, so most of them aren't constructed in full. Remember that drawing through forms is important because it helps us understand how they sit in 3D space and relate to one another.

  • The same issue occurs in the camel, where I feel it's a little easier to point out: take a look at this. Ignore the bit about the legs for now, and take a look at the hump on the camel's back. Notice how I drew in some red lines that were missing, to ensure that hump was drawn as a complete, enclosed form? You need to be doing that for every form you add to your construction. Even better would be to do this - wrap the new mass around the previous one. Every mass we add basically becomes a part of the underlying structure, so every one we add thereafter would have to figure out how it's going to relate to this existing form.

  • The most important thing you need to think about when adding additional masses is how they wrap around the given structure. Looking now at the leg portion of the camel redline notes, pay special attention to how I'm really exaggerating how each and every additional mass I've added to my simple sausage structure wraps around it. I'm not just pasting simple shapes on top, I'm really thinking about how they hook around. You've been doing this better when looking at the forms along the torso, but when the forms get smaller, you tend to slip back into flatter shapes.

  • Also, don't leave those little empty strips between them. You can either leave much larger less consistent gaps (so those forms are independent of one another and not so clearly related), or you have them tightly bound to one another, as you can see in my example.

  • One last thing - your dog drawing was really clearly the result of a lot of careful observation of your reference, combined with effective construction. Your camel and rhino however appear to have had less time invested in studying your reference, and more reliance on working from memory. This results in decent construction, but where the forms don't necessarily reflect the object you're drawing as well as it could. It also results in issues with proportions and the positioning of elements like legs. Definitely make sure you're still putting most of your time into observing and studying your reference, looking back at it in order to find the next piece of information you'd like to carry over.

ANYWAY, all in all you've shown a good deal of growth and I think you're moving in the right direction. You've got room for improvement, of course, but I think you should be able to tackle that with further study/practice of this subject on your own. I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

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.
2:53 AM, Wednesday May 27th 2020

Thanks so much for the feedback!

I tried to practice wrapping forms around another and also drawing through them more i have no clue if its better or not though haha

https://imgur.com/a/K0Qg8Lm

im a little confused on how exactly to "think about how the forms wrap around each other". from my understanding so far they are suppose to squish and take up space with one another?

but its hard to actually put that concept to pen and paper and draw it? sorry i dont know how to explain it very well aside from i dont know how exactly to wrap forms around and it just looks very off.

also yeah i agree about not looking enough at the camel/rhino drawings. they were a lot more complicated than drawing dogs in my opinion and i think i just got overwhlemed/confused with all the intricate details (especially with the planes of the rhino heads) and i had a difficult time just trying to figure out what to draw from where and got lazy, but i guess its just about looking/studying a lot harder and really breaking things down?

3:11 AM, Wednesday May 27th 2020

The forms you're working with are way too complex, with way too many ripples/waves. You want to keep things as simple as possible, as every addition of complexity makes things feel less solid and three dimensional.

So when dealing with a camel's hump, you're looking at something more like this: https://i.imgur.com/Xq3XNHN.png

1:21 PM, Wednesday May 27th 2020

okay i see what you mean thanks! i need to keep things as simple as possible, would it be an ok idea to practice these a bit more or just move on and come back at a later time? I still feel really uneasy about how I approached my forms on the previous redos but i know its not great to dwell on a task for too long

View more comments in this thread
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.
How to Draw by Scott Robertson

How to Draw by Scott Robertson

When it comes to technical drawing, there's no one better than Scott Robertson. I regularly use this book as a reference when eyeballing my perspective just won't cut it anymore. Need to figure out exactly how to rotate an object in 3D space? How to project a shape in perspective? Look no further.

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