Lesson 4: Applying Construction to Insects and Arachnids

5:43 AM, Wednesday April 29th 2020

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Thank god I'm done with this subject. Hopefully.

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2:04 AM, Thursday April 30th 2020

Starting with your organic forms with contour lines, there are two key issues that I want to point out. First off, the part of the instructions focusing on maintaining simple sausage forms isn't being adhered to entirely here., You've got a few that are matching the two equally sized spheres connected by a tube of consistent width definition, but you've also got a number that have entirely inconsistent ends, some of which that are more stretched. Additionally, you're drawing the contour curves with a pretty consistent degree throughout, instead of demonstrating how the orientation of each cross-section changes relative to the viewer as shown here (by having the degree grow wider/narrower as we sample different points along the form's length). This mistake tends to make the sausages feel ever so slightly stiff, as our brains understand that something's wrong but can't quite figure out what.

Now, your actual work on the insect constructions is conversely largely well done! There are a few issues I'd like to point out, but for the most part you're doing a good job of building out each individual creature using solid, three dimensional forms, and establishing a strong illusion that each little creepy bastard is real enough to jump off the page. My skin is crawling slightly as I write this critique.

The issues I wanted to address however are as follows:

  • To start, this one's a major issue but not actually something that comes up too frequently: looking at your dragonfly's abdomen (the "tail" like section), we can see how you laid down a long shape, and then slapped a bunch of smaller shapes on top. None of these read as three dimensional forms, largely because there's no actual respect for the fact that the initial structure was three dimensional, as you added the subsequent pieces. Construction is all about building on top of existing 3D forms and establishing clear relationships between them - meaning, you put down a simple structure (your long abdomen mass) and then you wrap further segmentation along it, establishing their relationship in 3D space in how those additional forms' silhouettes actually hook around the underlying structure. I demonstrate how you should approach it here.

  • In the link above I also point out how you have a similar issue where you don't respect the initial masses as being solid and 3D, which is why you're able to draw on top of them without considering the curvature of their surface and how a new form would wrap around it.

  • When constructing your legs, adhere closely to the sausage technique - this will apply when drawing animals as well. The idea here is that not every leg looks like a chain of "simple" sausages, but that's not really what we're after. We're building an underlying structure, or an armature, which appears both solid and flows gesturally at the same time. Once this is in place, we can build up forms on top to add bulk where it's necessary as shown here.

  • The last issue is simply that you have a tendency to mix form shading and cast shadows. As discussed back in Lesson 2, while cast shadows are encouraged (that's where one form blocks a light source and projects a shadow onto an entirely different surface), form shading is not to be included in these drawings at all. That is, where the surface of a form gets lighter or darker depending on how it is oriented towards or away from the light source.

So! While these points I've raised are important and absolutely need to be understood, I'm still pretty confident with your results. As such, I'm going to go ahead and mark this lesson as complete.

Next Steps:

Feel free to move onto lesson 5.

This critique marks this lesson as complete.
3:09 PM, Thursday April 30th 2020

Thank you for the review!

I actually had a feeling something was very wrong with that dragonfly tail thing, couldn't quite fidure out where i was making the mistake. Thank you for showing!

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