11:04 PM, Monday August 17th 2020
Starting with your organic intersections, while these are mostly going in the right direction, there are a few issues that stood out to me.
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Firstly, the second page overall feels much more solidly laid out than the first. In the first page, towards the upper right you've got a grouping of sausage forms that don't really feel in any way stable in how they're sitting atop this pile. It's important that with every form you add to the pile, you're thinking about how it's actually going to sit atop it without falling off. We're conveying an illusion of physics - specifically gravity - so always think about that when your forms are drawn.
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When drawing your cast shadows, make sure you think about which part of a form is in front of another, and which is behind it. For the right-most form on the first page, you've got shadows being cast by both sides of it, when the left side should definitely be behind the bottom most sausage. This breaks the illusion quite a bit.
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Your second page is better, as I mentioned, and generally feels more stable, though I'm unsure of what the strange, complex silhouette/shape along the far left side is intended to be. It certainly doesn't appear to adhere to the instructions for the exercise, though.
Moving onto your animal constructions, I think you have shown a good deal of improvement over the set, but there are a number of issues I still want to address, and I think there is still a lot of room left for improvement.
The first thing that jumped out at me was a tendency that came up early on in the set: looking at pages such as this one and this one, it's very clear that you're very interested in getting into detail and texture with these drawings, and that a significant part of your focus is immediately taken up by that particular goal. I can't stress this enough - every single drawing you do for Drawabox is an exercise. At no point are we concerned with creating a pretty detailed drawing that we can use to impress our friends and family and pin to our fridge. It's a very common misunderstanding students have, and more than that even when students grasp this in earlier lessons, they often have a tendency to forget when getting into this lesson. I suppose animals are just an enjoyable thing to draw, and so our priorities suddenly change.
Looking specifically at the page of birds I linked shows a particular issue - here you're very clearly breaking your drawing into two distinct phases: an underdrawing, and then a "clean-up pass". The clean-up pass is where you basically go in to replace most of the existing linework with a darker stroke. That concept of "replacing" those lines is an important mistake - constructional drawing is all about building on top of the structure you've already added to the world. We don't redraw entire forms, we merely add them on top of one another. So the way in which you've constructed the feathers with these two birds is very much moving in the wrong direction.
I won't dwell on that much further though, because you do visibly improve upon this as you move through the homework. I'm still convinced that you are at least partially distracted by the need to delve into detail and to draw impressive things, and as a result much more time and effort could ostensibly be invested into the actual construction, in following the steps laid out by the various demonstrations and the instructions. It's very normal to see students getting caught up in drawing detailed things, and so even while they're working through the underlying construction part of their cognitive capacity will still be dedicated to figuring out how they're going to work in all that detail, leaving them with far less with which to sort out the important spatial problems.
Moving on, another concern I have comes down to how you're handling the 'additional masses'. While I am very pleased that you are trying to use them in building up the complexity of your constructions, as it stands right now your additional masses tend to read more as flat shapes being pasted on top of the existing drawing, rather than solid 3D forms being wrapped around the existing 3D structure.
Here's some notes I just wrote up for you, which go into the particular mechanics of making those additional forms actually feel three dimensional, rather than like a series of 2D shapes you've pasted on top of your drawing. And here's a quick analysis of areas where some of the kinds of issues I noted occur in your drawing.
Related to this, I do want to talk a bit about your use of the sausage method when constructing your legs. Firstly, you're doing a decent job of drawing the sausages themselves in most cases, but you regularly forget to reinforce the joint between them with a contour line, as explained in the middle of the diagram. Furthermore, it seems to me like when it comes to drawing the legs you end up relying a lot more on memory rather than actually studying the reference to get a more nuanced, complex idea of all the little forms and elements included in that structure. As you can see here, there's a lot of individual components you can find in something as mundane as a dog's leg. A lot of this of course goes back to being able to use those additional forms correctly, of course.
Now, in regards to much of this I do feel like you're showing some progress as you move into the deer and other later drawings, but there is still a lot of room for improvement. As one last thing I'm going to touch upon how you approach head constructions - specifically the fact that you have a tendency to have the eye sockets and muzzle floating more loosely and separately from one another, rather than fitting them together snugly like pieces of a 3D puzzle. A shown in this tapir head demo and this moose head demo, it's important that you think about all of these components as fitting together tightly. Consider that the eye socket doesn't just float loosely on its own - it's buttressed on all sides by the muzzle, the brow ridge, the cheekbone, etc. They're not elements pasted onto the head - they are each of them a solid chunk, and together they make up the head as a whole.
Now, I've given you a number of things to review. As such, I'm going to assign a handful of additional pages below to demonstrate your understanding of these principles. I want you to adhere to one thing though - don't get into any texture/detail. Push the construction as far as you reasonably can by building up forms, wrapping them around one another and really selling the idea that each component is three dimensional, but don't get into things like fur, and such. You'll find the revisions assigned below.
Next Steps:
I'd like you to do 5 additional pages of animal drawings, with no texture or detail as mentioned above. Take care to implement the points I've mentioned above, especially making better use of those additional masses to have them read as 3D forms rather than as simple flat shapes on a flat page. The key to that is controlling the silhouette of that form as you draw it.